The Rights Revolution Read online

  We have reason to be hopeful, and not just because places like Canada are rich and have capacities to conciliate conflict that are denied poorer societies. We are lucky too because, as colonial peoples, we were schooled in the life of liberty. Today, in our multi-ethnic, multicultural cities, we are trying to vindicate a new experiment in ethnic peace, and we have learned that the preconditions of order are simple: equal protection under the law, coupled with the capacity for different peoples to behave towards each other not as members of tribes or clans, but as citizens. We do not require very much in the way of shared values, or even shared lives. People should live where they want, and with whom they want. The key precondition is equality of rights; it all depends whether our differences can shelter under the protecting arch of a legitimate legal order.

  So the unity and coherence of a liberal society are not threatened because we come from a thousand different traditions, worship different gods, eat different foods, live in different sections of town, and speak different languages. What is required of us is recognition, empathy, and if possible, reconciliation. To use, once again, the words chosen by a wise French-Canadian judge when he delivered a judgment that brought long-delayed justice to fellow citizens of aboriginal origin, “Let’s face it, we’re all here to stay.”

  NOTES

  I: The Rights Revolution

  1. Tom Wicker, A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt (New York: Times Books, 1975).

  2. On New Zealand aboriginal claims law and traditions, see F. M. Brookfield, Waitangi and Indigenous Rights: Revolution Law and Legitimation (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999).

  3. Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Be a Sovereign People? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).

  4. “In the Matter of Section 53 of the Supreme Court Act (Reference Re Secession of Quebec), [1998],” S.C.R. 217. See also Diane F. Orentlicher, “Separation Anxiety: International Responses to Ethno-Separatist Claims,” Yale Journal of International Law 23, no. 1 (1998).

  5. J. P. Humphrey, Human Rights and the United Nations: A Great Adventure (New York: Transnational, 1984); see also Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

  6. John Packer, “Making International Law Matter in Preventing Ethnic Conflict: A Practitioner’s Perspective,” New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 32 (Spring 2000): 3, 715–24.

  7. I discussed the work of Louise Arbour in Kosovo in Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (Toronto: Penguin, 2000).

  8. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  9. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Russell, Constitutional Odyssey.

  10. Canada, “Equality Rights,” in The Charter of Rights and Freedoms: A Guide for Canadians (Ottawa: Publications Canada, 1984): “Subsection 1 does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups, including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”

  11. Kirk Makin, “Canadian Legal Wisdom a Hot Commodity Abroad,” Globe and Mail, 1 Sept. 2000.

  12. Richard Rorty, Truth and Moral Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11.

  13. Joel Bakan, Just Words: Constitutional Rights and Social Wrongs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 94–98.

  14. On the distinction between “external protections” for minorities and “internal restrictions” within minority groups, see Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 7.

  15. Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, “Liberalism and the Right to Culture,” Social Research 61, no. 3:491–510.

  16. Bakan, Just Words, introduction.

  17. “Judge Refuses to Ban Spanking of Children,” Globe and Mail, 6 July 2000; “Court Upholds Child Spanking,” National Post, 6 July 2000.

  18. Ronald Beiner, What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), ch. 4.

  19. I take these points further in my book Human Rights as Politics and as Idolatry: The Tanner Lectures in Human Values (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).

  20. On the idea of deliberation, see Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1997).

  II: Human Rights and Human Differences

  1. The locus classicus on rights as bourgeois ideology is to be found in Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1843). In the Canadian context, the best critique of the incapacity of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to focus on social and economic disadvantage is to be found in Bakan, Just Words, and in a different vein, in Michael Mandel, The Charter of Rights and the Legalization of Politics in Canada, 2d ed. (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1994).

  2. Bakan, Just Words.

  3. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  4. Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1797), ed. P. Manent (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1988), 87; see also Antonio Cassese, “Are Human Rights Truly Universal?” in The Politics of Human Rights, ed. Obrad Savic (London: Verso, 1999), 120–49. On de Maistre generally, see Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990).

  5. Jeremy Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies,” in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), 494–501.

  6. I have written extensively about the interaction between globalized media and human-rights consciousness. See, for example, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (Toronto: Penguin, 1998).

  7. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 124–27.

  8. On the ethics of immigration restriction, see Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983), 40–46; see also J. H. Carens, “Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,” Review of Politics 49(2): 251–273.

  9. Heather Pringle, “Alberta Barren,” Saturday Night (June 1997): 30–37; Muir v. Alberta, 305, 36, Alberta Law Reports 3d.: 305–73.

  10. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: W.W. Norton,1977), 34–45

  11. One exemplary examination of human equality in our culture is to be found in Shakespeare’s King Lear, especially the famous speech that begins, “Oh reason not the need,” at the end of act 1. Here the king defends the claim that to treat people with respect for their humanity is to treat them differently, each according to his need, for the raiment and retinue fit for a king. I examine this speech in detail in my book The Needs of Strangers (Toronto: Penguin, 1984).

  12. The most complete discussion of this point is to be found in Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Abacus, 1971, 1996).

  13. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1973), 300.

  14. On natural rights theories, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

  15. A. H. Robertson and J. G. Merrills, Human Rights in the World, 4th ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), chs. 4 and 5.

  16. Amnesty International, Rights for All: Country Report, USA (London: Amnesty International, 1998).

  17. For rights narcissism, see Michael Ignatieff, “Out of Order,” Index on Censorship 3:98; see also William Schabas, The Abolition of the Death Penalty in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  18. On Eleanor Roosevelt’s role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and on the evolution of American official attitudes towards international human r
ights, see Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

  19. I discussed the conflict between the right of intervention and rights of popular sovereignty in Human Rights as Politics and as Idolatry. See also the useful essays in Mortimer Sellers, ed., The New World Order: Sovereignty, Human Rights and the Self-Determination of Peoples (Washington, D.C.: Berg, 1996).

  20. This discussion of the criteria for just military intervention owes much to discussions of the International Commission on Kosovo, co-chaired by Richard Goldstone and Carl Tham, and to the work of commission members Martha Minow, Richard Falk, and Jacques Rupnik. The report is due to be submitted to the secretary-general of the United Nations in New York in October 2000.

  21. My own opinion on the morality and legality of the Kosovo intervention is to be found in Virtual War.

  III: The Pool Table or the Patchwork Quilt: Individual and Group Rights

  1. The entire discussion in this chapter is drawn from Tully, Strange Multiplicity.

  2. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1979).

  3. For one example of this historical tenacity, see Joseph Gos-nell, “Making History: Chief Gosnell’s Historic Speech to the British Columbia Legislature,” 2 Dec. 1998, on the Nis-ga’a Treaty. Available online at www.ntc.bc.ca. See also Augie Fleras and Jean Leonard Elliott, The “Nations Within”: Aboriginal-State Relations in Canada, the United States and New Zealand (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992). On aboriginal rights to self-determination, see Garth Nettheim, “’Peoples’ and ‘Populations’: Indigenous Peoples and the Rights of Peoples,” in The Rights of Peoples, ed. James Crawford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); also Patrick Thornberry, International Law and the Rights of Minorities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 331–75.

  4. Pierre E. Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968). See also Canada, Prime Minister’s Office, Federalism for the Future: A Statement of Policy by the Government of Canada (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1968).

  5. Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (Ottawa: Indian Affairs, 1969).

  6. “Dhaliwal Offers Fishing Deals to BC Natives to Avoid Litigation,” National Post, 8 Apr. 2000.

  7. The Musqueam band in Vancouver has been sued in Canadian federal court in a dispute with non-aboriginal homeowners over property taxes on Musqueam reserve lands. See Huyck et.al. versus Musqueam Indian Band Council, Federal Court, Vancouver, May 2000.

  8. Quebec, La Charte de la langue française, title 1, chapter 8, sections 72–85. Available online at www.olf.gouv.qc.ca.

  9. I am indebted to Will Kymlicka’s discussion of state neutrality in Multicultural Citizenship, 114–15.

  10. For a critique of multiculturalist politics in Canada, see Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994). On multiculturalism in the United States, see David Hollinger, Post-Ethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

  11. Marc Chevrier, “Laws and Language in Quebec: The Principles and Means of Quebec’s Language Policy” (Quebec: Ministry of International Relations, 1997). Available online at www.mri.gouv.qc.ca.

  12. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 163–72.

  13. Margalit and Halbertal, “Liberalism and the Right to Culture.”

  14. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). Also Eleazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

  15. Charles E. Hendry, Beyond Traplines: Does the Church Really Care? Towards an Assessment of the Work of the Anglican Church of Canada with Canada’s Native Peoples (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1998); “Money Could Run Out in 2001,” Anglican Journal 126, no. 6 (June 2000). See also, “Priests Ask Taxpayers to Cover Cost of Abuses,” Globe and Mail, 12 July 2000.

  16. I am indebted to the magisterial summary of these events in Russell, Constitutional Odyssey, chs. 7–10.

  17. For a narrative of the constitutional journey of Canada from a sovereigntist perspective, see www.premier.gouv.qc.ca/premier_ministre.

  18. Canada, “Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,” vol. 2 (Ottawa: Canada Communications Group, 1996), 163–244. See also Delgamuukw v. the Queen et al, Supreme Court of British Columbia, 0843 (1991).

  19. Canada, Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Aboriginal Self-Government: Federal Policy Guide. Available online at www.inac.gc.ca.

  20. Tom Flanagan, First Nations, Second Thoughts? (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), ch. 6.

  21. British Columbia Treaty Commission, Annual Report 2000. Available online at www.bctreaty.net.

  IV: Rights, Intimacy, and Family Life

  1. Mary McCarthy and Joanna Radbord, “Family Law for Same-Sex Couples: Chart(er)ing the Course,” Canadian Journal of Family Law 15, no. 101 (1998).

  2. Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Gutmann.

  3. Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

  4. Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: The Free Press, 1999). See also Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  5. George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1974, 1985)’ 69–90.

  6. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942).

  7. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic Books, 1977); see also Fukuyama, The Great Disruption.

  8. Nicholas Bala, “A Report from Canada’s Gender War Zone: Reforming the Child-Related Provisions of the Divorce Act,” Canadian Journal of Family Law 16, no. 2 (1999): 163–227.

  9. Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, 41-42, 84, 115.

  10. Winifred Holland, “Intimate Relationships in the New Millennium: The Assimilation of Marriage and Cohabitation,” Canadian Journal of Family Law 17, no. 1 (2000): 114–68.

  11. “Judge Refuses to Ban Spanking of Children,” Globe and Mail, 6 July 2000.

  12. Statistics Canada, Household Unpaid Work (Ottawa, 1995).

  13. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972); see also Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970).

  14. Fukuyama, The Great Disruption (New York: The Free Press, 1999).

  15. Teresa Foley, “Dobson v. Dobson: Tort Liability for Expectant Mothers,” Saskatchewan Law Review (1998): 61, 177; see also Sandra Rogers, “Case Comment and Note: Winnipeg Child and Family Services v. D.F.G: Juridical Interference with Pregnant Women in the Alleged Interest of the Fetus,” Alberta Law Review 36, no. 711 (1998).

  16. Statistics Canada, Divorces 1995 (Ottawa, 1995), table 8 at 20. See also Bala, “Canada’s Gender War Zone,” note 1.

  17. Bala, note 1.

  18. Bala, note 1.

  19. I first made these arguments in a lecture titled “Liberal Values, a Defence: The Keith Davey Lecture,” delivered at Victoria College, University of Toronto, 1996.

  20. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 167–72.

  V: Rights, Recognition, and Nationalism

  1. Richard Gwyn, Nationalism without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996), ch. 10.

  2. Al Etmanski, A Good Life (Burnaby, B.C.: Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network, 2000). I am indebted to Vancouver city councillor Sam Sullivan for discussing issues relating to the rights of the disabled with me.

  3. “Legal Lobster War Heats Up,” Globe and Mail, 18 Aug. 2000.

  4. “Uneasy Pe
ace Reigns over Burnt Church,” Globe and Mail, 16 Aug. 2000.

  5. Ovide Mercredi and Mary Ellen Turpel, In the Rapids: Navigating the Future of First Nations (Toronto: Viking, 1993).

  6. Flanagan, First Nations, Second Thoughts, ch. 2.

  7. Canada, Supreme Court, Delgamuukw: Decision on Aboriginal Title (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 1998), 13.

  8. For a discussion of these terms, see my book Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (Toronto: Penguin, 1993), introduction.

  9. Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  10. Pringle, “Alberta Barren,” 30–37; Graham Thomson, “Outrageous System Regarded Them as Morons,” Edmonton Journal, 2 Nov. 1999; Muir v. Alberta, 305, 36, Alberta Law Reports 3d.: 305–73.

  11. Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).

  12. Bernard Yack, “The Myth of the Civic Nation,” in Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Robert Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 103–19. Philip Resnick, “Civic and Ethnic Nationalism: Lessons from the Canadian Case,” in Canadian Political Philosophy: Contemporary Reflections, eds. R. Beiner and W. Norman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

  13. Edmund Burke [1790], Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  14. Gwyn, Nationalism without Walls, 255-56.

  15. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  16. Will Kymlicka, “Misunderstanding Nationalism,” in Theorizing Nationalism, ed. Beiner, 131–41.

  17. Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992).

  18. “Schools Fear for Immigrant Students,” Globe and Mail, 3 Mar. 1998.

  19. Bissoondath, Selling Illusions.