The modern pluralist democracies have posed a great threat to the fabric of nation state. Discuss. (2000)
The nation-state assumes one sovereign authority and one national people. Pluralist democracy questions both: political pluralism disperses authority among groups, and cultural pluralism recognises many communities within one citizenry. Both strain the classic nation-state, but mostly by reshaping it; where it breaks, rigid centralism is as often the cause as pluralism.
Political Pluralism and Sovereignty
- The English pluralists attacked the monistic sovereignty of Thomas Hobbes and John Austin. John Neville Figgis (Churches in the Modern State, 1913) held that churches and guilds have a life the state recognises but does not create. Harold J. Laski argued that because society is federal, authority must be federal too.
- Robert A. Dahl (Who Governs?, 1961) found power dispersed among competing groups, which he called polyarchy.
The threat. Mancur Olson (The Rise and Decline of Nations, 1982) showed organised interests forming distributional coalitions that slow growth. Theodore J. Lowi (The End of Liberalism, 1969) saw public authority parcelled out to interest groups, and Dahl himself (Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, 1982) admitted groups can entrench inequality and weaken civic loyalty.
The limit. The pluralists never abolished the state; even Laski came to call it the keystone of the social arch (1925). Dispersal disciplines sovereignty rather than dissolving it.
Cultural Pluralism and National Identity
- Will Kymlicka (Multicultural Citizenship, 1995) defends polyethnic rights for immigrants, special representation and self-government rights for national minorities. He concedes that self-government rights, unlike the others, can feed a desire to secede.
- Bhikhu Parekh (Rethinking Multiculturalism, 2000) asks for intercultural dialogue within a shared political culture.
The threat.
- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (The Disuniting of America, 1991) warned that a cult of ethnicity fragments common citizenship; Samuel P. Huntington (Who Are We?, 2004) feared the erosion of America’s Anglo-Protestant core. Brian Barry (Culture and Equality, 2001) held that group rights undermine equal citizenship.
- Secession through democratic means. Scotland held a referendum in 2014 (55.3% chose to remain). Catalonia held an unauthorised one on 1 October 2017, declared independence, and Madrid imposed direct rule under Article 155.
Why Pluralism Can Strengthen the State
- Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav (Crafting State-Nations, 2011) contrast the nation-state, which assimilates, with the state-nation, which builds multiple but complementary identities through asymmetric federalism and group rights. For robustly multinational societies, they argue, the second is likelier to sustain democracy.
- Catalonia confirms the point in reverse: support for independence surged after Spain’s Constitutional Court curtailed the 2006 Statute of Autonomy in 2010.
Indian Illustration
India chose the state-nation path. The States Reorganisation Act, 1956 conceded linguistic states despite fears of balkanisation, and the Dravidian secessionist demand faded: in 1963, as the Sixteenth Amendment required legislators to swear to uphold India’s sovereignty and integrity, the DMK dropped it and turned to state power. Sixth Schedule autonomy and the Mizo Accord (1986) turned insurgents into governing parties.
Conclusion
Pluralist democracy threatens the homogenising nation-state, not the state itself. It replaces one nation and one sovereign with shared sovereignty and nested identities, and where accommodation is real it prevents break-up rather than causing it.