The Cultural Borders of Citizenship in a Multicultural Society

Abstract

One of the basic problems confronting multicultural societies is the inclusion of cultural differences into a common citizenship. What does it mean inclusion? And inclusion to what? The ‘inclusion’ formula of modernity (lib/lab) leads to the inadequacy of the forms of cultural universalism as conceptualized and practiced in the processes of Western modernization. The more we globalize the social world, the more we come to reinforce ‘local cultures’. The paper contends that the political inclusion of minorities into a ‘universalistic culture’ can be wholly misleading if the concept of political inclusion is not well managed in terms of the articulation of the borders between different cultures. In order to manage borders without either denying the boundaries (as in the assimilation solution), or consider the boundaries as barriers that separate cultures (as in the communitarian multiculturalism), we need a new relational semantics of borders.