Democracy and “Distinctive Status”

Multicultural Citizenship
by Will Kymlicka
Oxford University Press, 1995. 296 pp., $35.

In recent years there has been a profusion of interest in the concept of citizenship—a development that is far from surprising. In her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, writing in the aftermath of a world war that had left twelve million people displaced, observed that twentieth-century history had proved that the “rights of man” were meaningless unless they could be enforced by national governments. Last April the New York Times featured the tragic story of a young woman from Togo who fled to the United States to escape ritual genital mutilation, only to be kept in a holding cel...