National Cultural Autonomy and its Contemporary Critics

Ephraim Nimni (ed.), London and New York : Routledge , 2005 . 260 pp. £55.00 (hbk). This is a thoroughly worthwhile book, with a deeply misleading title. While the model of ‘national cultural autonomy’ (NCA) is certainly a focus of attention, discussion in the volume is organised around consideration of the seminal contribution of Karl Renner in his essay of 1899, ‘State and Nation’. Serious discussion of Renner's work is long overdue in the English-speaking world. The publication of an English translation of Renner's essay would in itself be sufficient justification for this volume. The book began life as a conference on the contemporary relevance of Renner's NCA model. It is a great pity that the true focus of the volume was not signalled in the title. As things stand, students and scholars anxious to acquaint themselves with Renner at first hand run the risk of missing this book altogether. Anyone lacking a background in Austro-Marxism or late imperial Austrian history will not find Renner easy to approach. His primary concern in the essay in this volume is to devise a legal/constitutional model that might (at least) contain the endemic nationality problem within the Austro-Hungarian empire. His central insight, that cultural nations and political orders could not be presumed to overlap in all cases, exposed the conceptual and political fragility of the idea of a nation-state. Before the horrors of trying to redraw the political map of Europe to fit the requirements of (notionally) homogeneous nation-states had fully emerged, Renner urged the adoption of overlapping jurisdictions as a means of ameliorating the minority problems that arise in any political context. Renner accepted multinational territories as a fact of political life, much as we have come to accept cultural pluralism as a fact of life in the modern state. The thought that ‘nations’ and ‘states’ should somehow be congruent invited, in his view, endless attempts by minority nations to secede from larger political entities, while majority cultures would be bent on forced nation-building as a condition of their survival. Either way, minority national cultures would remain, in deeply uncomfortable and sometimes physically precarious circumstances. Separating territorial jurisdiction from cultural affiliation at least opened up space for self-government and collective responsibility in certain spheres, without generating endless pretexts for national struggle. Renner's text is addressed to a very specific Austrian context. And (it must be said) not all the contributors to this volume show any great awareness of that context. Nimni does a heroic job in his introduction trying to explain the rationale and context of Renner's NCA model. Too many of his contributors, however, are intent on drawing direct lessons from Renner's text, without exploring deeper justificatory arguments. There is an obvious affinity with some contemporary multiculturalist arguments (pursued effectively by John Schwarzmantel). Renner's arguments can also be effectively incorporated into discussions of sovereignty and more limited schemes of power sharing (see the chapters by Genevieve Nootens, Geoffrey Levey and John McGarry and Margaret Moore). But too often commentators simply juxtapose Renner's arguments with their own, and accordingly find him wanting. Will Kymlicka, for example, deplores Renner's failure to endorse his own view of ethnocultural justice; while Paul Kelly contends that Renner would have been in a better position to sustain his political objectives if he had adopted a liberal egalitarian stance. In the last resort, it may be that Kymlicka and Kelly might get the better of the argument. Their engagement with Renner, however, is cursory. Chapters focusing on contemporary institutional detail pose different problems. Michael Keating surveys the complex multi-level governance of the European Union as a possible context for reading Renner, though his specific use of Renner is slight. Mary Farrell and Luk van Langenhove hardly engage with Renner at all in their survey of the fortune of cultural autonomy in Belgium. Walter Kemp's discussion of the limitations of NCA in a contemporary context makes more of Renner's argument, though he makes clear that in modern rights-based political cultures the argument has moved on in significant respects. Bill Bowring, by contrast, shows how Renner's argument has been taken very seriously indeed in different phases of Soviet and Russian history. And Ilona Kilmova shows the genuine relevance of Renner for the protection of the interests of states peoples in her discussion of the Romani. Some of the contributors to this volume have clearly found their engagement with Renner productive. Others have less interest and sympathy. Reading between the lines, however, debate at the original conference must surely have been spirited. It remains a hotly contested issue in political theory precisely how far recognition of group rights might contribute to the ‘ghettoisation’ of particular cultural communities. Rainer Bauböck (in one of the most rewarding essays in the volume) addresses the issue directly in a specific critique of Renner. Other contributors were evidently getting on with their own argument. That Renner should inspire such heat is a sure indication that he should be taken more seriously.