Page 85 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

80 Jürgen Habermas

Habermas has really done no more than to try to point our heads in
what for him is the right direction: his intention is not to elide the
scale and complexity of the tasks facing the democratic project in
the twenty-fi rst century.
A second and related virtue of the constitutional patriotism
perspective is the scope it offers for thinking beyond the troubled
discourse of multiculturalism. It certainly does not answer the
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challenges of cultural pluralism, immigration, or indigenous
minorities per se. But it does usefully gesture towards the ideals
of building political cultures which, rather than treating cultural
diversity simply as a challenge to be accommodated or kept in check,
treats it instead as the very lifeblood of a democratic ethos. Habermas’s
antipathy towards the discourse of multiculturalism (by which
he actually means a rather brittle and narrow, yet institutionally

powerful version of it), is motivated firstly by a critique of essentialism

which treats citizens’ identities as fixed and reducible to just a few
markers (religion, mother tongue, ancestry etc.) and which remains
awkwardly silent on the question of citizens who develop a critical
stance towards aspects of their ‘own’ heritage. As Cronin and de
Greiff put it in their introduction to the English translation of The
Inclusion of the Other:

Because respect for the integrity of individuals … requires respect for the
contexts in which they form and sustain their identities, Habermas is led to
defend policies that supporters of multiculturalism also endorse, such as
multicultural education, governmental support for the cultural activities of
minority groups, and the like. 72

Habermas accepts the notion of collective rights but, unlike
communitarians such as Charles Taylor, he does not accept either
their primacy over individual rights (they must be ‘co-original’) or
the notion of a collective right to cultural ‘survival’:

[T]he individual remains the bearer of ‘rights to cultural membership’, in
Will Kymlica’s phrase. But as the dialectic of legal and factual equality
plays itself out, it gives rise to extensive guarantees of status, rights to self-
administration, infrastructural benefits, subsidies, and so on. In arguing for
such guarantees, endangered indigenous cultures can advance special moral
reasons arising from the history of a country that has been appropriated by
the majority culture … [But] in the last analysis, the protection of forms of
life and traditions in which identities are formed is supposed to foster the

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