Multiculturalist critics of liberalism have condemned difference-blind liberal laws as generally insufficient for addressing contemporary questions of justice. A close empirical analysis of an actual political conflict shows that the tenets of difference-blind liberalism can indeed be marshaled to defend cultural difference. In this article, I challenge the common tendency of the liberal-multiculturalism to present difference-blind liberalism as the “sick man” of western political theory. The argument has five parts. I underscore in the first three sections some conceptual, methodological, and normative problems arising from liberal-multiculturalism itself. In the last two sections I analyze in detail two actual political conflicts over a public expression of difference–the headscarf affairs in France and in Turkey–which suggest that it is state-nationalism rather than difference-blind liberalism that underlies intolerance of cultural diversity.
