Multicultural Nationalism: Civilizing Difference, Constituting Community (review)

Canada is blessed by a wealth of original scholarship in the politics of recognition. And so it’s not surprising that some commentators would suggest that there may be a distinctly Canadian way of interpreting such struggles. Gerald Kernerman’s Multicultural Nationalism is a case in point. His book identifies a Canadian ‘conversation’ about cultural diversity and promises to critically engage with participants of the ‘Canadian School’ of political theory. This is a welcome initiative, but Kernerman’s perspective is exceedingly polemical, and his insights are overshadowed by a somewhat unfair portrayal of the field.

Suggesting that Canadian intellectuals are obsessed with lingering questions about the country’s identity crisis, Kernerman argues that the essence of Canadian political theory is the search for a ‘unifying cement to bind Canadians together.’ He dismisses the conversation as ‘predictable,’ ‘scripted,’ ‘rehearsed,’ and defined by a ‘polarizing logic’ around ‘abstract concepts’ and ‘mutually exclusive understandings’ of identity. He criticizes the search for unity because it is sought by privileging and recognizing particular categories of identity while dismissing and excluding others. Ironically, the compulsive obsession with unity is ‘the bind that ties’ Canadians, and this is Kernerman’s central problematic – the very effort to achieve unity in spite of diversity generates competing nationalisms leaving Canadians less united, a paradox Kernerman calls ‘multicultural nationalism.’ This is a highly polemical argument, and to some extent it misrepresents the various and complex aspects of Canadian political theory, and the historical practices of cultural recognition. The caricature is most evident concerning Charles Taylor, who bears a significant brunt of criticism.

Taylor’s life’s work has been to promote an interpretive approach that avoids the reductionism of positivist methodologies, and the polarizing logic Kernerman describes. This approach entails understanding social practices and lived human experiences, not ‘abstract concepts.’ And it does not promote the logic of identity but its morality and history. The goal of Taylor’s approach is not to search for unity, but to retrieve how various aspects of the self are historically constituted, and to articulate the moral sources that shape modernity. So it is a mischaracterization to suggest that he is merely concerned with Canada or that he promotes a logic of nationalism.

Among Taylor’s central claims is that modernity is marked by an ‘extraordinary inarticulacy’ and self-imposed conspiracy of silence about moral frameworks with detrimental political consequences. Neutral liberalism, moral subjectivism, and the normal methods of social science have all conspired to discredit moral explanations and banish them to the margins of political debate. Taylor rejects this conspiracy, and defends the exiled, by promoting a dialogical approach that proceeds by way of a language of contrast, that seeks similarities but takes differences seriously, and that retrieves and compares the moral ideals that move people in one direction or another. The aim here is not just unity, but ‘continuing conversation’ and ongoing negotiation with others from whom we might have something to learn.

Taylor’s dialogical approach differs with what is perhaps the most disquieting aspect of Kernerman’s analysis – his response to Canadian struggles for recognition. Suggesting that the conversation itself is the primary reason for multicultural nationalism, his advice is ‘to disrupt,’ to ‘disengage,’ and ‘refuse . . . to participate.’ This is disquieting because Kernerman doesn’t see why such refusal may be a principal source of recognition politics, and how disrupting the conversation actually undermines genuine cross-cultural understanding. Moreover, Kernerman ignores the histories and practices of Canada’s various movements for cultural recognition, and overstates the significance of a conversation of political philosophers. He thereby appears to grossly trivialize the social and political struggles for cultural survival and constitutional recognition as merely ‘scripted’ by ‘intellectuals.’

In fact, Kernerman neglects the most significant aspects of Canadian political theory. Political theorists like Charles Taylor, James Tully, and Will Kymlicka recognize what Tully calls the ‘strange multiplicity’ of struggles for recognition of cultural diversity. Their nuanced understanding of sub-state and Aboriginal nationalism are particularly noteworthy. These commentators take...