Group Rights and Individual Minority Rights in Immigrant Societies, Then and Now

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘Peoples’ may have their present and future collective needs realised in one of three ways. They may aspire to their own titular state, self-determination, where they predominate and act collectively; they may rely on the recognition and provision of collective minority rights (with some autonomy in a more or less territorially-defined multi-peopled space); or they may advocate for a regime of strong ‘liberal’, non-discriminatory individual rights for all in which (significantly weakened) collective identities are lodged in the private sphere.The second outcome, official minority rights within majority national self-determination, was a concomitant of the first or compensation for its serious imperfections, and became visible in the partially-successful minority rights treaties of interwar Europe. Importantly, it also had its day in the U.S., where populous minorities, mostly immigrant, facing discrimination, both as individuals and as groups, clamoured for group recognition and group rights, either within their ‘pales of settlement’ or throughout their countries. And it may be coming back --in light of the failures, inadequacies, and possible exhaustion of the first and third models. Is there now a conceivable progressive pluralist nationalism pluralist nationalism that combines recognition and redistribution, recognising that people are both apart and together?