Abstract
The place of ethnic minority movements in Iran has always been a contested issue in the social media and public discourse, though there is very little theoretical research that aims to combine the normative demands for liberal democracy on the one hand and minority ethnic groups’ rights on the other. Addressing this shortcoming in the literature, this chapter considers whether the theory of minority rights developed by the Canadian theorist of multiculturalism Will Kymlicka can be exportable to the Iranian context. If a society has a state-sponsored official language and culture through which both economy and state function, Kymlicka argues, this advantages those people who belong to the majority language (in Iran, Persians) and disadvantages minorities, who lack such nation-building tools. Focusing on Kymlicka’s distinction between multinational and polyethnic rights in a pluralistic society, the chapter argues that what Kymlicka refers to as ‘polyethnic rights’ provides a reasonable basis to defend a pro-integration model of ethnocultural justice to accommodate ethnic diversity in Iran.
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Notes
- 1.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1971).
- 2.
On the relevance of liberal political theory to Iran as a post-Islamist society, see Meysam Badamchi, Post-Islamist Political Theory: Iranian Intellectuals and Political Liberalism in Dialogue (Cham: Springer, 2017).
- 3.
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 346.
- 4.
Ibid., 346.
- 5.
Ibid., 347.
- 6.
Ibid., 348. See also Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 7.
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 349.
- 8.
Will Kymlicka, ‘The Sources of Nationalism: Commentary on Taylor’, in The Morality of Nationalism, ed. Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 59.
- 9.
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 348.
- 10.
Ibid., 350.
- 11.
Ibid. See also Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
- 12.
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 351–2, emphasis added. See also Will Kymlicka, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
- 13.
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 365.
- 14.
The major task facing liberal theories of multiculturalism, Kymlicka argues, is to better understand and articulate conditions of ethnocultural justice, and liberal theorists have done little work in this regard so far. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 365.
- 15.
Other categories that Kymlicka discusses in his theory of ethnocultural justice that are ignored in this chapter are ‘immigrants’, ‘isolationist ethnoreligious groups’, ‘metics’ and ‘racial caste groups’. While immigrants usually wish to integrate in the larger society, the theology of isolationist ethnoreligious groups—the clearest examples of them are Hutterites, the Amish and Hasidic Jews in Canada and the United States—requires them to avoid doing so. Such groups ‘are unconcerned about their marginalization from the larger society and polity, since they view its “worldly” institutions as corrupt, and seek to maintain the same traditional way of life they had in their original homeland’. In order to avoid contact with the modern world and maintain their traditional way of life, these groups seek exemption from various laws, such as military service or jury duty. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 352. The other two types of groups are metics and racial caste groups, especially African-Americans in the United States. The difference between these and the three former groups is that whereas national minorities, immigrants and ethnoreligious sects have been historically pressured to integrate (even if they wanted to remain apart), metics and African-Americans have been forcibly kept apart even if they wanted to integrate. See Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 355–62. See also Will Kymlicka, ‘Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe’, in Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe, ed. Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 37–47. The debate over whether there are correspondents for each of these new groups in Iran or other Middle Eastern societies is beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 16.
Rasmus Christian Elling, Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity after Khomeini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
- 17.
Drawing on John Rawls’s idea of reasonable stability as a virtue of well-ordered liberal-democratic systems in his Political Liberalism, it can be argued that achieving an ‘overlapping consensus’ regarding a conception of ethnocultural justice that endorses multinational federalism (like that of Kymlicka) would be hardly feasible or stable in Iran. In other words, given the circumstances of Iran, one could argue that multination federalism cannot be part of a stable overlapping consensus over a reasonable concept of ethnocultural justice. On Rawls’s idea of overlapping consensus see John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), especially Lecture IV. See also Badamchi. Post-Islamist Political Theory, especially chap. 2.
- 18.
Elling, Minorities in Iran, 26.
- 19.
Mohammad Reza Khubru Pak, cited in Ehsan Hushmand and Nahid Kuhshekaf, ‘Daramadi bar Bazandishi-ye Mafahim-e Qovm, Qovmiyyat va Aqvam-e Irani’, Siyasat-e Dakheli 1, no. 3 (2007): 211–62, 236.
- 20.
Mohammad Reza Khubru Pak, ‘Hefze Yeganegi Melli va Chandgunegiye Qomi’, Talash magazine, May 2008, 5–6, http://www.newsecularism.com/2008/0508-C/052508-Mohammad-Reza-Khubru-Pak.htm. See also Mohammad Reza Khubru Pak, Federalism dar Jahan-e Sevvom, 2 vols. (Tehran: Nashr-e Hazar, 1389 [2010]).
- 21.
Hamid Ahmadi, ‘Hoviyyat-e Melli-ye Iran: Vizhegiha va Avamel-e Puyai-ye An’, in Goftarhai darbare-ye Hoviyyat-e Melli dar Iran, ed. Davud Mir-Mohammadi (Tehran: Moasase-ye Motaleat-e Melli, 1383 [2004], 189–212), 194.
- 22.
Elling, Minorities in Iran, 137.
- 23.
Ibid. Similarly, in his recent work, the well-known Iranian nationalist philosopher Javad Tabatabai argues that Iran, unlike its neighbours, cannot be studied by appealing to Western theories of ethnicity. See Javad Tabatabai, ‘Karbord-e Oslub-e Tarikh-e Tahavvol-e Mafahim baraye Tadvin-e Tarikh-e Iran: Molahezei Nazari dabareye Iran’, Siyasatnameh 1, no. 1 (1394 [2016]): 47–9.
- 24.
Throughout this chapter, the term ethnonationalism refers to the discourse of the non-Persian ‘minority nationalisms’ whereas nationalism, if used without any adjective, refers to the followers of ‘dominant nationalism’ which is Persian-centric.
- 25.
See Hamid Ahmadi, Qovmiyyat va Govmgerai dar Iran: Afsane va Vaqeiyyat (Tehran: Nashr-e Ney, 1395 [2016]): 1–76; Elling, Minorities in Iran, 139.
- 26.
Elling, Minorities in Iran, 138–9. Also see the essays in Hamid Ahmadi, ed., Iran: Hoviyyat, Melliyyat, Qowmiyyat (Tehran: Moasase-ye tahqiqat va toseye olum-e ensani, 1383 [2004]). For a recent critical study on the sources of nationalism in modern Iran and the ideas of nationalist intellectuals such as Ahmadi, see Asghar Shirazi, Iraniyat, Melliyat, Qovmiyat (Tehran: Jahan-e Ketab, 1395 [2016]).
- 27.
Elling, Minorities in Iran, 155.
- 28.
Ibid., 158.
- 29.
Rogers Brubaker, cited in Elling, Minorities in Iran, 158.
- 30.
Elling, Minorities in Iran, 171–2.
- 31.
For a well-grounded non-nationalist critique of multination federalism in Iran, see Mohammadreza Nikfar, ‘Nasionalism, Federalism va Haqq-e Tain-e Sarnevesht; Barrasi Enteqadi’, Radiozamaneh, 13 Mordad 1396 [4 August 2017], https://www.radiozamaneh.com/352847.
- 32.
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 353.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid., 354.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Ibid.
- 40.
Ibid., 354–5.
- 41.
Ibid., 355.
- 42.
Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 27–33.
- 43.
Iris Marion Young, ‘A Multicultural Continuum: A Critique of Will Kymlicka’s Ethnic-Nation Dichotomy’, Constellations 4, no. 1 (1997): 51.
- 44.
Ibid., 53.
- 45.
For some critical studies on different dimensions of Kymlicka’s liberal multiculturalism, see Alan Patten, Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014); Robert E. Goodin, ‘Liberal Multiculturalism: Protective and Polyglot’, Political Theory 34, no. 3 (2006): 289–303; Sarah Song, ‘Multiculturalism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 24 September 2010, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/multiculturalism/; Andrea Cassatella, ‘Multicultural Justice: Will Kymlicka and Cultural Recognition’, Ratio Juris 19, no. 1 (2006): 80–100; Laurence Piper, ‘Do I Need Ethnic Culture to Be Free? A Critique of Will Kymlicka’s Liberal Nationalism’, South African Journal of Philosophy 21, no. 3 (2002) 180–9; Chandran Kukatha, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Thomas Konig, ‘The Hegemony of Multiculturalism: A Comment on Will Kymlicka’s Theory of Nationalism’, Politicka Misao 38, no. 5 (2001): 48–61; He Baogang, ‘Confucianism versus Liberalism over Minority Rights: A Critical Response to Will Kymlicka’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31, no. 1 (2004): 103–23; Brian Barry, review of Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, by Will Kymlicka, Ethics 107, no. 1 (1996): 153–5; Jeremy Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative’, in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93–119. See also the commentary essays in Kymlicka and Opalski, Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported?, which discuss whether Kymlicka’s theory is exportable to the Eastern European context or not. For some of Kymlicka’s answers to his critics, see, for example, Will Kymlicka, ‘Liberal Multiculturalism as a Political Theory of State-Minority Relations’, Political Theory (2017): 1–11; Will Kymlicka, ‘Reply and Conclusion’, in Kymlicka and Opalski, Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported?, 345–414. For an insightful discussion about the applicability of liberal multiculturalism to the Arab world, where the context and concerns have much in common with Iran, see Will Kymlicka and Eva Pföstl, ‘Introduction’, in Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–24.
- 46.
Elling, Minorities in Iran, 156.
- 47.
Ibid., 200.
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Badamchi, M. (2018). Ethnic Minorities and the Question of Liberal Multiculturalism in Iran. In: Barlow, R., Akbarzadeh, S. (eds) Human Rights and Agents of Change in Iran. Studies in Iranian Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8824-7_9
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