Liberal principles tell us that individuals have certain claims which their government must

respect, such as individual freedom of conscience.

The attitude of liberals toward imposing liberalism has changed over the years. In the
international context, liberals have become increasingly skeptical about using force to compel
foreign states to obey liberal principles. Many nineteenth-century liberals, including John Stuart
Mill, thought that liberal states were justified in colonizing foreign countries in order to teach them
liberal principles. Contemporary liberals, however, have generally abandoned this doctrine as both
imprudent and illegitimate, and sought instead to promote liberal values through education,
persuasion, and financial incentives.
In some liberal countries (e.g. Britain), there is a strong tradition of respecting individual
rights, but there is no constitutional bill of rights, and no basis for courts to overturn parliamentary
decisions which violate individual rights. (The same was true in Canada until 1982.) In other
countries, there is judicial review, but it is decentralizedthat is, political subunits have their own
systems of judicial review, but there is no single constitutional bill of rights, and no single court, to
which all levels of government are answerable. Indeed, this was true in the United States for a
considerable period of time.
Many of the reasons why we should be reluctant to impose liberalism on other countries are
also reasons to be skeptical of imposing liberalism on national minorities within a country. Both
foreign states and national minorities form distinct political communities, with their own claims to
self-government. Attempts to impose liberal principles by force are often perceived, in both cases, as
a form of aggression or paternalistic colonialism. And, as a result, these attempts often backfire.
The plight of many former colonies in Africa shows that liberal institutions are likely to be unstable
and transient when they have arisen as a result of external imposition, rather than internal political
reform. In the end, liberal institutions can only really work if liberal beliefs have been internalized by
the members of the self-governing society, be it an independent country or a national minority.
There are, of course, important differences between foreign states and national minorities. Yet
in both cases, there is relatively little scope for legitimate coercive interference. Relations between
majority and minority nations in a multination state should be determined by peaceful
negotiation, not force. This means searching for some basis of agreement. The most secure basis
would be agreement on fundamental principles. But if two national groups do not share basic
principles, and cannot be persuaded to adopt the other's principles, they will have to rely on some
other basis of accommodation.
Moreover, there is an important difference between coercively imposing liberalism and
offering various incentives for liberal reforms. Again, this is clear in the international context.
For example, the desire of former Communist countries to enter the EC has provided leverage
for Western democracies to push for liberal reforms in Eastern Europe. Membership in the EC is
a powerful, but non-coercive, incentive for liberal reform. Of course there are limits to the
appropriate forms of pressure.
Finally, liberals can push for the development and strengthening of international mechanisms for
protecting human rights. Many national minorities would endorse a system in which the decisions of
self-governing national minorities are reviewed in the first instance by their own courts, and then by
an international court. Federal courts, dominated by the majority nation, would have little or no authority
to review and overturn these decisions.
These international mechanisms could arise at the regional as well as global level. For example,
European countries have agreed to establish their own multilateral human rights tribunals. Perhaps
the American government and Indian tribes could agree to establish a similar bilateral human rights
tribunal, on which both sides are fairly represented.
This is not to say that federal intervention to protect liberal rights is never justified. Obviously
intervention is justified in the case of gross and systematic violation of human rights, such as slavery
or genocide or mass torture and expulsions, just as these are grounds for intervening in foreign
countries. The exact point at which intervention in the internal affairs of a national minority is
warranted is unclear, just as it is in the international context

Cases involving newly arriving immigrant groups are very different. In these cases, it is more
legitimate to compel respect for liberal principles.

It is important not to prejudge the illiberal nature of a particular minority culture. The liberality

of a culture is a matter of degree.

Even when minority leaders express a hostility to liberalism, it is important to remember the
political context. These leaders may simply be responding to the fact that liberals have been
resisting the minority's claims for self-government, or other external protections.
If we examine the way that minority cultures actually treat their members, in terms of
respect for civil liberties and tolerance of dissent, they are often just as liberal as the majority
culture.
Liberals need to think more deeply about how to promote the liberalization of societal
cultures, and about the role of coercive and non-coercive third-party intervention in that process.
Dismissing the idea of self-government for national minorities will not make that problem go away.