Cultural Rights Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Defining Cultural Rights

Cultural rights as identified in the International Bill of Rights (Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR 1948], the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR 1966], and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESC 1966]) appear as a discrete category of human rights, separate from political, civil, economic, and social rights. Cultural rights in international law include the right to education; the right to “take part in cultural life;” the right to “enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications;” the right to “benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production of which he [the person] is the author;” and the freedom to pursue “scientific research and creative activity” (UDHR, Articles 26 and 27; ICESC, Articles 13, 14 and 15).

Together these rights in effect point to an expansive notion of culture. Elsa Stamatopoulou, chief of the United Nation’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and extensive advocate for cultural rights, identified three different meanings of the word culture as applied by international law in her 2004 article “Why Cultural Rights Now?” They are:

Culture in its material sense, as product, as the accumulated material heritage of mankind, either as a whole or part of particular human groups, including but not limited to monuments and artifacts;
Culture as process of artistic or scientific creation, that is, the emphasis being placed on the process and on the creator(s) of culture; and
Culture in its anthropological sense, that is, culture as a way of life or, in UNESCO’s words, the “set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group”; it encompasses “in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs.”

Global Perspectives On Cultural Rights

In the arena of global human rights, political and civil rights are often referred to as the first-generation rights while economic, social, and cultural rights are referred to as the second-generation rights. This sequencing of rights has understandably led to endless debate over whether these rights can and should be ranked by way of priority. Yet regardless of where one stands on the issue, the reality is that cultural rights were a much neglected category of rights until the 1990s, especially as they pertain to culture in both the material and the anthropological senses of the word.

The change appeared to be closely associated with the dynamics of global politics since the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. The reign of free market economy has triggered an unprecedented scale of movement among people in search of economic opportunities and improved livelihood, while some are simply dislocated by development. In addition, with the end of the cold war, multifarious identity-based conflicts, often of ethnic origin, have emerged to replace the previous wars of polarized ideologies. Given the enormous changes that took place in the last two decades and the speed with which reindustrialized societies and nonmarket economies are being displaced, it is no wonder that cultural rights have quickly emerged as a category of human rights that need much rethinking.

Politics Of Cultural Rights

Since the global debate over cultural rights evolved in the 1990s, one of the most contested issues is whether cultural rights are rights of groups or individuals. The issue is challenging for two reasons: (1) human rights are typically conceived of as individual rights, as they are first and foremost meant to affirm and protect the dignity of individuals qua individuals, especially against entities such as the state; and (2) in both its material and anthropological senses, culture is associated with a collectivity whose members appear to have something in common.

The tension thus generated is particularly challenging to liberalism, given its endorsement of the sanctity of the individual on the one hand, and the premium that it places on pluralism on the other. In the context of the contemporary Western world, this tension is articulated through the characterization of cultural rights as minority rights and they are typically associated with immigrants from the non-Western world. The political dynamics between the white majority and the nonwhite minorities is called the politics of multiculturalism, in which cultural differences are to be accommodated rather than obliterated.

Among the most influential theorists of multiculturalism is the Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka. His distinctive contribution lies in reconciling the tension between cultural rights and individualism in liberalism by identifying cultural membership as a “primary good” in the Rawlsian sense, that is, a good that is essential to individuals in pursuit of a good life. At stake is Kymlicka’s view that as individuals exercise their freedom to make choices that are deemed by them to be worthy of pursuit, they do not make their choices in a vacuum. Rather, in his 1989 book Liberalism, Community, and Culture, Kymlicka says they require “a context of choice,” which he calls “culture”. Thus considered, cultural membership plays a crucial role in the attainment of self-respect, which no good life can dispense with. Kymlicka’s theory of minority rights maintains that if the preservation of group identity can foster the context within which individuals make choices, then in the end group rights are by no means antithetical to liberalism. Although these special rights are rights that individuals have qua members of a group, they are meant to enhance, rather than suppress, individual autonomy. Specifically, in the context of a multiethnic state, minority rights support the claim to self-government by national minorities while immigrants are entitled to what Kymlicka refers to as “polyethnic rights.” In Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Kymlicka states that the latter are “group-specific measures” that enable ethnic groups and religious minorities to “express their cultural particularity and pride” but with the intent “to promote integration into the larger society, not self-government.”

Another controversial issue is whether the formulation of cultural rights as human rights is in effect an oxymoron. Human rights are by definition universalistic, whereas cultural rights are most often used to affirm differences. Culture understood as a way of life implies that there is more than one way to live a life. The right to participate in cultural life can therefore be interpreted to mean the right to be different to the point where differences can no longer be adjudicated by some common standard. In other words, cultural rights can lead to both cultural essentialism and cultural relativism, rendering human rights ineffective as global normative standards. This confrontation between universalistic human rights on the one hand, and particularistic cultures on the other, seems to be fuelling a new polarity that has emerged since the 1990s. Instead of the previous ideological divide between liberal democracy and communism, we now have a comparably uncompromising cultural divide between the West and the non-Western world.

Bibliography:

Appiah, K. Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Bauer, Joanne R., and Daniel A. Bell, eds. The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Benhabib, Seyla. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Jones, Peter. “Human Rights, Group Rights, and Peoples’ Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (1999): 80–107.
Okin, Susan M. Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Tully, James. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.