This chapter launches the contemporary section of the book. The overarching argument is that despite the binaries leveraged by leaders and analysts alike, political contestation in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth and twentieth, is not reducible to an “Islamist vs. secularist” cleavage. Instead, contestation and key outcomes are driven by shifting coalitions for and against pluralism, notably, an Islamo-liberal/secular liberal coalition that marked the sixth major, pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat reforms. It would transform state and society, even though the coalition itself proved short-lived as democratization stalled against a backdrop of debates over Islamophobia, the headscarf, minority rights, freedom of expression, media freedoms, and sweeping show trials.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

This chapter argues that the 1848 Revolutions can profitably be understood through the prism of arguments over rights. It highlights a series of contests between those who championed a “thin” conception of individual civil and political rights and those who defended a variety of “thicker” understandings: whether of rights as belonging to collectives, especially national minorities; as protecting cultural, linguistic, or gender identities and differences; or as demands for extensive state action to challenge economic domination of workers by landowners and capitalists. The offer of individual rights under a “thinner” constitutional order in the Habsburg monarchy was insufficient to address conflicts between the dominant Magyar nation and the claims of the regime’s other national groups; at the same time, these conflicts generated nuanced efforts to theorize individual and collective rights by figures such as József Eötvös. Ostensibly “thin” demands for individual equality under the law proved unable to protect individuals – particularly emancipated slaves, peasants, laborers, and women – from domination deep-seated in existing social structures.

This chapter will analyse the right of self-determination in respect of its external and internal dimension, the rights of minorities and the rights of indigenous peoples. Self-determination is the point of reference for any discussion of indigenous and minority rights, although it is far broader than both of these. Minority rights in turn are not considered collective entitlements in relevant international human rights instruments. None the less, as the reader will come to appreciate, they are not devoid of a collective character altogether. Indigenous rights are largely based on soft law and some of their fundamental premises (for example, land rights) are hotly disputed by interested states. Yet, it is indisputable that the international community recognises that the vulnerable status of indigenous peoples necessitates a distinctive approach based on the adoption of measures that allow the preservation of their culture and traditions, while on the other hand helping them to develop, whether technologically, financially, educationally or otherwise. Group rights are controversial primarily because they give rise to questions of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in addition to challenging traditional notions of state sovereignty.

Faced with the challenge of accommodating diversity, liberal justice and human rights promise to provide an adequate normative framework for securing equal liberties and rights for all. However, despite great advancements in theory and law, discrimination endures, and these promises have not been fulfilled for enduring minorities, especially in places of ethno-national conflict. The problem this chapter aims to highlight is that while liberal democracy and human rights frameworks provide us with a desirable ideal, they fail to provide useful guidance for progress, from a situation of ethno-national conflict – which often involves political exclusion, sharp inequalities, low mutual trust, and high animosity – to more just and peaceful societies that respect the human rights of all. Self-determination is currently blocked as a legal remedy; states are reluctant to grant minority rights, especially in cases where majority–minority relations are in conflict; and scholars of equality law, asserting that any real advancement is blocked because of the individualist orientation of the law, send us back to collective measures.

In many countries, the idea of minority autonomy is a taboo topic, rejected out of hand as a threat to the state. Yet the desire for some degree of self-government runs deep in many ethnic and religious communities. Some people have suggested that a generalized scheme of decentralization or devolution, understood as a country-wide process that shifts power from the central state to lower levels of government, can de facto enable minority autonomy without invoking any idea of group rights or ethnic autonomy. This chapter argues that this proposal is unlikely to work. Generalized decentralization can be implemented in ways that disempower and fragment minorities, and has often been adopted precisely with this intention. Decentralization is only likely to benefit minorities if and when it is designed with minority aspirations in mind. And this in turn requires that minority aspirations be moved out of the taboo category into the category of normal democratic politics: minority aspirations must be “normalized” and “desecuritized.” This is likely to require changes both in the broader geopolitics of the region and in the local self-understandings of nationhood and peoplehood.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for our study, introducing both the political violence and repression endemic to Xinjiang. We provide a brief account of the recent history of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs to contextualize the current situation before introducing the book’s motivations, arguments, and structure.

Multiculturalism has been turned upside down. Stated in the 1990s as a political theory and public policy of cultural minority rights, its language of cultural victimhood, oppression, and alienation has been hijacked by politicians speaking on behalf of national majorities. Some scholars have argued that liberal arguments for cultural group rights must apply to majorities as well as to minorities. I object that the notion of cultural majority rights is incoherent on empirical and conceptual grounds, and indefensible on normative grounds. The chapter suggests an alternative approach that relies on the core values of freedom, equality, and self-government. These values serve to justify cultural freedom rights for everybody, cultural rights for minorities, and powers and duties to establish a pluralistic public culture that includes all citizens. I claim that this framework covers all cultural rights that can be defended on grounds of liberal and democratic principles. There is no space left for special rights of cultural majorities.

Liberal democracy arguably requires a sense of equal membership in a shared society, and in today’s world, this “shared society” is inextricably linked with ideas of nationhood. Defenders of majoritarian nationalism worry that this sense of membership in a shared national society is being eroded by multiculturalism, and argue that we must instead reaffirm the centrality of shared national identities, perhaps through “majority rights.” In this chapter, I argue that while the idea of a shared society is indeed important for liberal democracy, and that it will inevitably reflect ideas of nationhood, this is in fact an argument for strengthening, not weakening, multiculturalism and minority rights. The fact that membership claims are filtered through the lens of nationhood creates a series of formidable “membership penalties” for minorities. A robust commitment to multiculturalism and minority rights can be seen, not as a threat to the ideal of equal membership in a shared society, but as a remedy for membership penalties, and as a way of building a more inclusive ethics of membership.

Koopmans and Orgad argue that multiculturalism has taken a life of its own, swinging too far in one direction. The authors assert that the rapidly changing reality calls for a new majority–minority theory and argue that the moral justifications for cultural minority rights should also apply to majority groups. They present two areas in which majorities may become culturally vulnerable and need legal protection: immigration control and domestic affairs. The core of the argument is rooted in a unique framework to address majority–minority constellations. This “intergroup differentiation approach” distinguishes between “homeland majorities” and “migratory majorities,” alongside the traditional distinction of indigenous/national and migratory minorities. In doing so, they criticize the tendency in the multiculturalism literature to gloss over differences between the Anglo-Saxon classical immigration countries, where majorities are of migratory origin, and the countries of the Old World, where new minorities of immigrant origin face indigenous majorities. Koopmans and Orgad provide practical examples for the implementation of their approach and explain the different meanings of cultural majority rights. Only by a contextualized and relational consideration of groups, they conclude, can competing demands of majorities and minorities be fairly evaluated.

This chapter covers how the debate over multiculturalism has evolved over the past fifty years (1970–2020). While the twentieth century was marked by fear of minorities, the twenty-first century is marked by growing fears of majorities. The panic hovering over Europe is not concentrated on the political arrangements of the present but on a deep concern for the future of liberalism. This perception of the future turns social and cultural relationships into a zero-sum game. But is there a way out? The chapter ends with a discussion of contemporary majority and minority tensions in liberal societies and offers a common moral ground that allows managing these tensions, reaching a political compromise that is likely to leave both sides dissatisfied, but it is the most one can achieve. Perhaps the most important lesson of the last fifty years of rights-talk, the chapter argues, is that the expansion of the notion of rights offers an inclusive tool of social discourse but cannot offer a receipt for how societies should handle themselves. That remains the role of democratic process and for that they should be cherished and protected.