Should Communities Have Rights? Reflections on Liberal Individualism

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.