The Political Participation of Ethnic Minorities

Abstract

The author calls attention to the theoretical and empirical difficulties of assigning a presumptive capacity for collective consciousness and action to ethnic categories. Evidence from Western Europe shows how the ways in which numerically small ethnic groups are recognized, either positively or negatively, may promote specific forms of marginalization in democratic systems. To this extent, an ethnic problem exists within Western liberal democracies. However, this problem can be analyzed using the tools appropriate to other instances of unequally distributed citizenship rights, and it expresses both the ideal and the inherent limits of citizenship.