Nation-Building and Minority Rights: Comparing West and East
Author(s)
Kymlicka, Will
Abstract
Until quite recently, the area of ethnocultural relations has been surprisingly neglected by Western political theorists. For most of this century, ethnicity was viewed by political theorists as a marginal phenomenon that would gradually disappear with modernisation, and hence was not an important topic for forward-looking political theorists. As a result, even into the mid-1980s, there were very few political philosophers working in the area. The question of the rights of ethnocultural groups, however, has moved to the forefront of Western political theory in the last few years. The aim in this article is to describe this emerging literature on the normative principles for managing ethnocultural diversity in a liberal democracy, and to consider whether it has any applicability to ethnic conflict in Eastern and Central Europe. The goal is not to propose the unrealistic transplanting of institutions and policies from the West to the East, but rather to outline some of the interesting recent work done by Western political theorists, and to see whether any of it is relevant to selected cases of ethnic politics in ECE, including those analysed in the Ethnobarometer annual report.
