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. The author argues that there are three semantics used to manage cultural borders: dialectical, binary and relational. It depends on the choice among these semantics what kind of ideal model is followed in order to include people into citizenship. The latter can be configured as a culturally neutral public sphere (based upon the neutralization of cultural borders) or as a morally qualified public sphere, which defines the borders of citizenship as mutual relations between different cultures so to avoid any form of exclusion, discrimination or segregation.
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