The central question for this paper is whether communities should have rights. This is a question that I will consider in a certain ideological or normative context, namely, that of liberalism. There are other contexts in which the question could be asked; for in non-liberal ideological settings there have sometimes been clear positive answers to the question of whether minority communities should have rights. Thus, the Ottoman Empire’s millet system provided a system of group rights. Various other autocratic states like Czarist Russia have also provided at least some de facto if not de jure protection for various minority groups. One might even argue that various nineteenth and twentieth century European colonial regimes protected to some extent minority ethnic rights. On paper, Marxist governments in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have made provision for various sorts of group rights; but as current events attest, neither Moscow nor Belgrade is very comfortable with the vigorous exercise of such rights. Indeed, in both the origins and the consequences of the First and Second World Wars, group rights played an extensive role.

Most liberal democracies exhibit cultural pluralism, that is, citizens of the same country belong to various cultural communities, and so speak different languages, read different literatures, practice different customs. Most contemporary liberal political philosophy, on the other hand, assumes that countries are “nation-states”. Citizens of the same state are assumed to share a common nationality, speak the same language, develop the same culture. My concern in this paper is with how liberals have adapted their principles to deal with cultural pluralism.

A first task of a philosophy of law and morals is to try to make explicit and authenticate a standpoint that allows for the evaluation of things in normative terms. It cannot begin straightaway with conceptions of the right, the good or the moral worth of persons. For these are notions whose adequate elucidation presupposes that we are already occupying a standpoint which, taken by itself, is unqualifiedly normative and complete. The account of what I shall refer to as “the standpoint of the normative” is thus prior to the explication of the criteria and contents of our normative conceptions.

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in considering collectivities to be moral agents and holders of collective rights. Peter French and others have argued that corporations are agents and bear moral responsibility for their actions. Virginia Held makes similar claims about nations. She also believes that we have “obligations to humanity collectively, to bring about its continued existence, and perhaps also to such lesser groups within it as our fellow nationals or conceivably the ethnic group to which we belong or the family or clan of which we are a member” and that in some of these cases—humanity, nations—the obligation correlates with a collective right. Perhaps, the area where claims of collective rights have aroused the greatest interest is that of the alleged rights of minority groups within some larger political unit. Thus, in recent political debate in Canada, collective rights have been ascribed or invoked in relation to Quebec and to aboriginal peoples. It is with this last group of alleged collective rights that I will be particularly concerned in this paper.

In this paper, I distinguish two views of collective rights, viz., rights of collective agents and rights to collective goods. My argument is that although both have a place in moral, political and legal argument, only the second can fulfil the political function generally assigned to collective rights, and that even it can do so only partially.

The question addressed in this paper is whether there are any collective rights. I am inclined to answer this in the negative; but the main challenge is to provide a reasonably clear sense to the notion of collective rights. My negative answer will then be defended from a general viewpoint utilizing what we may call a kind of ‘individualism’. Some are inclined these days to reject a priori anything with that label. I shall have something to say later on that inclination. Individualism, as I shall explain, by no means implies that there are no group rights in any sense that may reasonably be given to that term. Very much the contrary. A careful explication is needed.

This paper focuses on Quebec language legislation which has the effect of prohibiting the use of the use of English on signs. The controversial “Frenchonly” sign law is considered in spelling out an argument for collective rights and assessing some of the obstacles which a collective rights thesis must overcome. No attempt is made in this discussion to resolve the question of the relative weight of the collective and individual rights which come into conflict in this situation. No doubt this latter is itself a difficult task. If the argument of this paper is sound, however, a solution phrased wholly in terms of individual rights and the public good is simpler only because it omits important dimensions of the problem.

When the liberals of the 18th and the 19th centuries demanded that the rights of men, of citizens or of peoples be guaranteed, it was in opposition to the abuse of power. They proclaimed in the name of mankind rights inherent to individuals and nations. From the French Revolution to President Wilson, one might have believed that individuals and peoples had been winning their freedom together. Individuals participated as citizens of a single nation in the power of the state. This power enforced civil and political, private and public rights. The Old Regime had to be destroyed, the empires dismembered and the nations liberated so that the people could be organized into states. But in practice, things were not so simple.

Since all peoples could not become nation-states, it was hoped that minorities could be protected. But how can they be protected? Who will protect them? How can one define a minority? What rights should they have? Are the collective rights of a people or a minority compatible with individual rights? These are the questions that arise spontaneously and which will be discussed in the following pages. We shall find no simple answer, but rather shall see why the answer is so difficult.

The very idea of collective rights has for a long time now been regarded with suspicion by moral and political philosophers. In recent years, however, this attitude has become more difficult to sustain, for the language of collective rights has come to dominate some of the most contentious political issues of our day. Consider, for example, the controversy surrounding the alleged injustices suffered by the indigenous peoples of North America. The arguments that best capture the core of these allegations appeal to collective rights. These arguments maintain that the injustices commonly suffered by an indigenous people involve the violation of rights held collectively by them rather than by particular individuals.

The principle of national self-determination asserts the collective right of the nation for self-government. This principle is now a corner-stone of modem political thought. The idea of “home rule” or the ideal of a self-governed political community is a very old one which originated in classical Greece. Yet the modern idea of the free self-governed community differs in some important aspects from the old one.

National sovereignty, or the community’s collective right of “home rule”, means today the right of the political community to its own State. The State, at least the modern liberal democratic Nation-State, is conceived as an instrument by which sovereignty is constituted and national interests are promoted. In this way antiquity poses an interesting problem, since the State is a product of the modern era and was hardly known in the ancient world. The absence of State was not accidental to the ancient community; it was accompanied by an adequate system of ideas concerning the nature of the political community.

In the opening pages of Liberalism, Community and Culture Will Kymlicka tells us that the book was motivated by two concerns: