Building Inclusive Societies: The Role of Substantive Equality, Ideas of Justice and Deliberative Theory

Abstract

The coexistence of cultural and religious minorities in liberal democratic systems presents various complexities. Faced with a choice between acculturation and assimilation, minorities routinely struggle for justice and experience discrimination and exclusion. Modern political discourse has traditionally drawn on ideas such as tolerance, accommodation and assimilation and group rights to protect minorities on the basis of attributes perceived to be constitutive of their cultural, religious or national identities.

The chapter presents a brief overview of the difficulties inherent in political models such as liberalism, liberal multiculturalism and limited self-government used to reconcile the status of cultural and national minorities in plural societies. These frameworks fix the political subject into rigid categories, highlighting their lack of political sensibility given the fluidity of identity today. This chapter argues that immigrant minorities exhibit complex layers of identity that challenge the singularity and mono-dimensionality attributed to political loyalty, citizenship and political identity in an age of plurinational states. Drawing on theories of identity-matrixing, it is argued that the deconstruction of identity is indispensable to better understanding and effectively influencing the development of sentiments of loyalty, group affiliation and shared morality.

This chapter draws on theories of justice, deliberative theory and principles of substantive equality to illustrate how belonging, commonality of purpose and loyalty can be cultivated through regular engagement with other groups in deliberative decision-making processes. Deliberative theory and substantive capacity-building measures to ensure meaningful participation have the potential to transform multicultural societies into multicultural polities by securing inclusive governance.