Protecting the Rights Of Minorities, Tully-Style
Ok, I had my second-to-last exam today, and one of the questions asked "How can diverse ferderalism help protect the minorities globally?"
Diverse federalism is froma book written by James Tully, a Canadian, who studied the development of the Canadian state as one which has grown into one of social harmony based on accomodation and group interaction in the federal state as a whole. It was a state born in a time of nation-states which managed to accomodate two nationalities.
Anyways, I wanted to write up a bit of an argument and see what other people think.
As I said in my essay, in this sense, Tully's work shows us that value of deconstructing the notion of state-hood by removing the concept of nationality that is inherent in its contemporary meaning. If we leave a state as a political entity that also represents a concept of nationality, it allocates power to one nationality within the state, and thus in essence helps to give the dominant power in oppressing or violating the rights of minorities in a state. Thus, tying nationalism to politics creates a political atmosphere for the potential appropriating a disproportionte level of rights to one group and denying rights to another.
What I think is best is that we totally remove this concept of nation-state from our political vocabulary. It has out-lived its purpose in politics, and we need to look at new ways to envision statehood. Ones that dissasociate things like race ethniciity, religion and other inherent notions that discrimination can be drawn along. It should be a political entity that is an all-representative body and not one which structurally favours one group over another. Very few, if any states are ethnically homogenous, anyways.
Given all of that, I think it's time to do away with the nation state, and get on with rebuilding our concepts that do not have inherent sturcturally-based discrimination built in to the concept itself. Better to make states which are based on cooperation of groups, rather than have states as one big political entity representing one nationality and suppressing all others. Of course there will be some states with dominant nationalities due to historic patterns. But as long as we continue to try and tie nationhood and statehood together, places like Africa will have lasting social and political division that creates things like civil war and political inability to progress. It's almost impossible now to change the borders of the world. So why don't we change the way we look at those borders?
What does everyone else think about this? Any other suggestions on helping to end political discrimination towards minorities?
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