7 Multiculturalization of Societies:

The State and Human Rights Issues

Irne Bellier

Twentieth-century developed societies are part of a world that is generally

considered to be characterized by a range of mobilities, with such societies
frequently attempting to define themselves as open to a range of flows. In
the case of the European Union project, attempts to build up an economic
system based on a knowledge society facilitated by the present regulations
on tariffs, taxes and visas are not simple measures contributing unprob-
lematically to member states national growth: they are unequally distributed
over the regions and sometimes counter-oriented. Indeed, in all the countries,
internal socio-economic inequality contributes to an uneven access to and
relationship with knowledge, an inequality that challenges the very notion
of open societies. However, even with this unequal context, multicultural-
ization remains a process which attempts to open societies to a world society
(Habermas 2001). If we accept the concept of a world society, it assumes no
territorial borders of the sort that define the nation-states sovereignty,
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national identity and culture. Hence the question is not so much to qualify
multiculturalism but to see how it develops and how the different cultures and
languages manage to co-exist in one society and to share political and
economic resources. We must consider the question of political organization
and that of the orientation and mandate of these institutions at the same time.
In that respect Europe is an interesting place to think about
multiculturalism, simply because its political project is based upon unity and
diversity but also because at the same time there is no possible way to dispute
the existence or the centrality of national cultures: this existence is mentioned
in Article 14 2 of the draft treaty establishing a constitution, which states
that any discrimination on grounds of nationality shall be prohibited. Europe
is multinational, multilingual, multicultural by definition and, at the
discursive, legal and institutional level, all national cultures and individuals

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 Multiculturalization of Societies

are allowed equal rights. Under the EUs remit therefore, dominant cultures
are shifting positions from absolute domination within the national context to
relative equality on the European stage. Does this mean that European
individuals and peoples, entitled to enjoy similar rights, are de facto equal when
it comes to the consideration their cultures, languages and practices deserve?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the end of the Cold War, the EU decided
to enlarge itself by incorporating the members of the European family that
socialist regimes had prevented from developing Western-style liberal
democracies. This prompted a turn in the domain of human rights policies
and legal frameworks. A number of declarations, conventions and charters
have been signed by the members of the Council of Europe (CoE), the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the
General Assembly of the United Nations to consider the issue of minority
peoples rights in a new way, with the intention of contributing to the
pacification of a world whose numerous conflicts can be related to the
unsatisfactory resolution of minorities issues. In this chapter, after briefly
considering the issue of cultural pluralism or of multiculturalism, I examine
the particular situation of two categories of peoples that, after having been
marginalized, have been involved in attempts to improve their respective
positions in social and political structures, assessing the problems their
situation and mobilization causes to the state. The minority issue that I
introduce centres on a case study of the Roma people in Slovakia, as well as
the indigenous peoples issue whose particular relevance is under discussion
in the frame of the European co-operation to development policies.

Cultural Pluralism or Multiculturalism?

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Social and cultural differences are continuously constructed and

deconstructed in the social body, hence the basis for de-essentializing cultures,
considering that they are not always seen as closed systems saturated by
meanings (Bonte et Izard 1991) but rather as stages where competitive modes
of interpretations reign (Geertz 1973). This perspective cannot be reduced
to the debate between unity and diversity, an up-to-date motto through
which federal structures such as the EU but interestingly also India,
Indonesia and South Africa defines their political structures. Nor can it be
reduced to a view that opposes holism to relativism the way universalism is
opposed to cultural singularity. In theory, developed societies do not rely on
one or the other version as exclusive positions, but rather on the combination
of views in particular places of state and society. Therefore we do not have to
think in terms of unity or diversity, universalism or relativism any more, but

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 Institutional Forms of Discrimination

rather in terms of the mechanisms that allow diversity to be part of unity and
the values of universalism to be fully compatible with the expression of cultural
singularities. We must also look at how the ideological discourse on liberalism
that seems to spread over the world as a discourse on freedom, grounded on
universalism, masks the various mechanisms for imposing new forms of social
and individual controls that shape the present constellation of powers (Bayart
2004). New trends in political domination generate new forms of contestation
whether we think, in Europe, about the discourses underpinning the so called
alter-globalization movement, or about the religious discourse of the
fundamentalist type that aims at destroying the other (that other being
alternatively the person belonging to another religion, or the system based on
a democratic distribution of powers).
If we follow Benedict Andersons analysis of imagined communities
(1986), the present context leads us to try to understand what multicultural
perspectives, associated with the flux of peoples and the circulation of images
and imaginaries, could mean for nation-states that are, historically at least,
constructed around common views of a homogeneous nation (Arendt 1951).
How do states adapt the legal and political structures to take account of
emergent diversity? Do they attempt to capture the shifting mosaic of people
through bureaucratic tools such as surveys, polls, statistics and so on? How
do dominant and subaltern cultures co-exist and in which areas of social
interaction and political action? How is the cultural pluralism that constitutes
social diversity reflected in, for example, schools, justice and the police (three
institutions which are of particular relevance for social cohesion)? Clearly all
societies and cultures are not similarly open to the rest of the world; there
are significant differences of perceptions as to what diversity means, and it is
necessary not to reduce the question to the debate between included and
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excluded social groups, since there are serious discrepancies among nationals
and migrants according to their geographical origins, gender and socio-
economic status. Differences of integration constructed by several modalities
and varying according to historical periods are reproduced over the years,
only partly generating complete integration for some people who in most cases
disappear as culturally different from the majority or dominant society.
In France, for instance, integration is understood through the constitutional
principle of citizens equality, a model that does not contemplate the actual
inequalities of status existing between the different groups as collective
entities, as long as individuals are entitled with the same formal rights. In real
life, there are de facto differences between nationals born within the nation,
naturalized French nationals who had to apply for French citizenship, and
first/second/third-generation migrants who may or may not have adopted

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 Multiculturalization of Societies

French nationality, even though all of these people are given the possibility to
identify with the unitary model of the Republic although it must be said that
this requires a lengthy process. This model corresponds to a process of
assimilation that leads to the progressive disappearance of cultural differences
as group differences, at the same time allowing state structures to combat the
discrimination produced by society against individuals.
But the Republican model is regularly confronted with demands emanating
from fragments of the nation (Chatterjee 1993) to be recognized and
guaranteed the exercise of a cultural difference. Some of these are acceptable
within agreed boundaries: for instance, relating to religious and spiritual
practices, the 1905 French Law on the Separation of Church and State,
among other things, distinguishes the public sphere (where strict neutrality is
the rule) from the private domain where the freedom of cultural practices is
respected (including religion). Other claims, for instance those conveyed by
regional autonomists, are rejected when they pertain to the contested domain
of political autonomy and self-determination. Some progress has been made
since the 1970s concerning the cultural and linguistic rights of regional
minorities such as the Basques, the Corsicans and the Alsatians, whose
languages were admitted in schools, while a double linguistic regime was
accepted in public advertisement (road signs for instance) together with an
emphasis on all kinds of regional products and know-how that helps to
develop tourism in these regions.
Modern, post-modern or post-colonial societies have been characterized by
internal heterogeneity for a very long time but it is only quite recently that they
have started to face new forms of diversity such as undocumented migrants
joining social demonstrations in the streets to get residence and work permits
and citizenship rights, or community leaders pleading in the court of justice
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for their linguistic rights or traditions to be respected, or indigenous peoples

representatives fighting at UN level for the definition of collective rights.
Dominant societies and nation-states are confronted with a growing pressure
emanating both from within the national territory and from outside. Migrants
and minority peoples may find solutions to some of their problems within the
legal framework of the European charter for the protection of regional and
minority languages (1992), the European frame convention for the protection
of national minorities (1995), the United Nations declaration of the rights of
persons belonging to national, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities or on
the elimination of racism and discrimination (1992), or through a number of
declarations and instruments developed by the OSCE and NATO in the
1990s. But indigenous peoples, who have been particularly marginalized by
the development of states and national societies, remain unsatisfied by these

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