Can Kymlicka's liberal multiculturalism be exported to Iran? The challenge of multinational federalism

The place of ethnic minority movements in Iran’s democratization is an important yet contested issue in Iranian social media, as well as the discourses of political activists and ordinary citizens both inside Iran and in the diaspora. It is also a crucial theoretical domain for Iranian studies academicians, although relatively neglected. When it comes to daily politics, some have even argued that one of the prevalent shortcomings of Iran’s recent anti-authoritarian and pro-social justice protests (including the post September 2022 “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in reaction to the universal compulsory hijab and the killing of Kurdish girl Mahsa-Zhina Amini under police custody) is the lack of constructive dialogue between prodemocracy intellectuals and activists at the center and ethnic activists on the periphery. When it comes to theory, unlike the huge bulk of literature produced by political theorists on the issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the last decades, there are few well-constructed theoretical arguments that combine the normative demands for liberal democracy in the Middle East, specially Iran, on the one hand, and minority ethnic groups’ demands on the other. Partially to address this problem, this chapter explores the relevance to Iran of the theories of the eminent Canadian political theorist, Will Kymlicka, exploring whether or not his theory of liberal multiculturalism, particularly as developed in his Multicultural Citizenship (hereafter MC), is exportable to Iran. MC is recognized as providing a theory of liberalism that is more sensitive to the rights of ethnic groups than other Rawlsian theories of liberalism. This essay deals mainly with the practical implications of Kymlicka’s multiculturalism for Iran by focusing on the challenges of the “self government rights”. Elaborating upon Kymlicka’s distinction between multinational and polyethnic rights, I will first argue that so-called self-government rights for national minorities, which require ethnic federalism as the form of government, provoke a lot of resistance among Iranian nationalists within the state and the opposition, whether religious and secular, both inside and outside Iran, and thus is not a plausible model for contemporary Iran. Following this, I will propose that what Kymlicka refers to as polyethnic rights, which he originally suggested to theorize the liberal state’s inclusive behavior toward immigrants, offers a more pragmatic basis to combine Iranian ethnic minorities’ demands for ethnocultural justice versus nationalist concerns about territorial disintegration, after the collapse or transformation of the Islamic Republic’s political regime. I will also briefly discuss why the underestimation of the socio-political role of religion in Kymlicka’s theory (what some may call his overtly secular stance) is a further obstacle to applying his theory to countries like Iran, where the role of religion (in Iran’s case, Shia Islam) is still relevant in providing historical socio-political bonds and cohesion.

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