Individual autonomy, group self determination and the assimilation of indigenous cultures

Abstract

The most successful effort to reconcile the apparent irreconcilable clash of liberal and communitarian values has often been identified with the political philosophy of Will Kymlicka. Communitarians argue that liberals emphasise the value of the individual to the exclusion of the community, and urge us to reaffirm the value of the community and extend the protections necessary for its survival. Kymlicka argued that theoretically, there was no inherent conflict between valuing the individual and protecting the community. Underlining individual autonomy as the central value of liberal society, he claimed that a viable community is essential for providing a cultural context of choice in which autonomy is possible. He agreed that the cultural community maintains a particular cultural context, and when the cultural community is undermined, shocks to individual identity also undermine autonomous decision-making, the central value in liberal theory. Kymlicka’s formulation thus brings together two concepts, that of autonomy with respect to individual agency, and autonomy as applied to the group in its independence from the dominant cultural community; and the latter is necessarily supportive of the former. These two distinct ideas are often blurred in the simple demand for the self-determination of indigenous groups, as Stephen Schecter observes. ‘Self-determination is a concept that manages to combine individual and collective rights without mentioning either. It has a better press than collective rights, since the self makes us think of the individual.’ In this paper I argue that these two forms of autonomy may well prove to be antithetical in practice. I mean this not in the more familiar sense in which liberals fear that prioritising the rights of the collectives may license the suppression of individual choice and associated freedoms, but in another sense in which the successful survival of the community may inevitably mean the unconscious adoption of assimilationist forms of behaviour, which undermine the original cultural context of choice which, it is supposed, is necessary to protect a cultural based concept of individual autonomy. Show more