Multicultural Citizenship

Multicultural citizenship is the idea that ethnic, racial, gender, and other minoritized groups can maintain significant aspects of their community cultures and values and yet freely participate in the national civic culture and community. This entry describes how the concept of universal citizenship prohibits minoritized groups from fully participating in the civic community of the nation-state and explains why the concept of multicultural citizenship, as defined by scholars such as Will Kymlicka and Iris M. Young, was constructed to make the limitations of universal [Page 1519]citizenship explicit and to describe how it denies rights to groups that are marginalized because of their racial, ethnic, cultural, and gender characteristics.

Although the concepts of universal human rights and universal citizenship were originally invoked to make societies less hierarchical, the limitations of this approach have become apparent to critics of the ideal of universal citizenship. They have argued that this ideal helps to exclude minorities from the public realm and makes it difficult to appreciate why they should sometimes be treated differently. As a corrective, theorists of multicultural citizenship (also called differentiated citizenship) show how this form of citizenship can function so as to include cultural minorities in the public domain and to show how equal treatment can justify differential treatment. Like many ideas, the idea of multicultural citizenship remains contested, but it enables social scientists and educators to recognize that minorities with formal citizenship rights can still be outsiders whose flourishing legitimately requires differential treatment. This entry explores the meaning of multicultural citizenship, first examining Iris Marion Young's analysis of universal citizenship and then identifying issues related to the concepts of inclusive citizenship and differential treatment. The entry then explores the implications of these concepts for public policy.

The postwar human rights and civil rights movements made many conscious of how minority citizens were entitled to different and better treatment. Citizenries were changing, but different conceptions of citizenship were also gaining salience. Libertarian ideas of citizenship challenged whether social rights to health care and benefits should be added to legal and political rights. Republican conceptions of active citizenship became more significant as fears grew that citizens were becoming more passive, and focused on interest group politics that detract from the common good.

The concept of multicultural citizenship emerged as mass immigration made citizenries more culturally diverse. In this space where citizenries were changing and different ideas of citizenship were gaining prominence, theorists developed notions of multicultural citizenship that normally have three components; different theorists focus different amounts of attention on each. The first component explains why the ideal of “universal citizenship” to which many appeal excludes minority citizens and cannot address their need to be treated not only the same as, but also differently from, other citizens. The second component explains how such inclusion should be conceptualized and justified, and the third does the same for differential treatment.