Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. x, 309 pp. US$85.00, ebook. ISBN 978-3-030-59426-8.
The Theory of Recognition and Multicultural Practices in Colombia and New Zealand argues for the superiority of a deliberative model of democracy over a multicultural model for a politics of recognition (274). This model provides an alternative to the reductive symbolism of identity politics, and, by moving deftly between theory and empirical analysis, Nicolas Pirsoul’s political corrective documents the limitations of neoliberal multiculturalism for indigenous sovereignty and autonomy. The book engages the work of Will Kymlicka, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, and James Tully on multicultural citizenship, and theories of justice and recognition. Jane Mansbridge provides an operative definition of the ideal deliberative system: “a loosely coupled group of institutions and practices that together perform…three functions…seeking truth, establishing mutual respect, and generating inclusive, egalitarian decision-making” (75). Pirsoul firmly illustrates throughout that deliberative democracy has the potential to counter indigenous elite, neoliberal, compromised trickle-down policies.
Pirsoul sets up a productive comparison between two geographically disparate plural societies in need of a “deliberative turn” in the politics of recognition (17)—binational Colombia and bicultural New Zealand. A dual parallel organization structures four descriptive, empirical chapters on ethno-cultural recognition. In Colombia, a broad historical sweep from 1499 to the 1991 constitutional reform to current political representation for Afro-Caribbean peoples in a republic provides the basis for analysis of ethnocultural recognition. In New Zealand, the similarly comprehensive overview of settler history extends from precolonial 1280 to the contact wars to the Treaty of Waitangi settlements. Both case studies focus respectively on land rights, political representation, and welfare.
Pirsoul shows that Colombia “recognizes collective territorial rights for its indigenous population, and these territorial rights go hand in hand with some level of political autonomy” (99). The case also illustrates that traditional social movements provide more indigenous political power than reserved seats in the senate and the chamber (148). The author presents the Colombian Constitution as a neoliberal project, a critique that is essential to his goal—to illustrate that the state’s self-interest is often disguised “behind facades of ethno-cultural recognition, local development, democracy, and sustainable development” (139)—an argument that can extend beyond the Colombian case to New Zealand.
Readers of Pacific Affairs will find the Māori case particularly instructive with its potential for comparative application elsewhere in the region. Pirsoul illustrates that the exercise of a politics of recognition within the justice system of a bicultural nation has mixed results. While the Waitangi Tribunal and subsequent settlements provide the central focus, recognition of te reo Māori as the official language for revitalization, and the Whānau Ora program (the indigenous health care initiative) also reveal policies that that “have more to do with reconciliation and restoring mana to Māori than with self-determination” (214). Pirsoul explains that their benefit is sometimes more superficially economic than substantively political. Drawing on Marie Bargh and John O’Sullivan’s arguments, Pirsoul succinctly notes that New Zealand policies often undermine self-determination for Māori “as self-ruling people which would require differentiated law and possibly control over territory in a decentralized New Zealand state” (215). A more effective and exceptional Māori case is that of the Tūhoe Settlement Act 2014 whose redress for Tūhoe iwi as a nation has led officially to mana motuhake (self-determination) and its coincident retention and restoration of power and control over their affairs (216).
The analysis of the Waitangi Tribunal as a powerful internationally recognized instrument of presumed bicultural recognition sets the stage for Pirsoul to reveal the underside of New Zealand’s “cunning” bicultural policies. Drawing on Axel Honneth’s and Elizabeth Rata’s work, they illustrate that the Treaty settlements confuse “redistribution” with “recognition” (220–221), support uneven capital accumulation through ethnic revivalism, create a Māori elite through a form of iwicentrism that impedes trickle down monetary benefit, and co-opts power in assimilationist strategies of parliamentary representation. In contrast, Afro-Colombians, while sharing “ethnoecological imperatives” (246) can better conform to Elizabeth Povinelli’s formulation of recognition, land rights, and autonomy, in which “offering indigenous people the possibility to develop their own legal system as a group while securing individual freedom to appeal to another set of rules is a good compromise that respects the normative guidelines of the theory of recognition” (245).
The presentation in The Theory of Recognition and Multicultural Practices in Colombia and New Zealand is systematic with a comprehensive overview of these central theoretical concepts and a detailing of the history and topical components of the two national sites demanded by the original dissertation on which it is based. A more radical reorganization and stylistic revision could have provided more dynamic engagement for the reader, however. Some specific contemporary case studies, perhaps focused on indigenous conflicts and successful protests, likely would add more narrative force to the extended historical background and descriptive materials in chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 focusing on Colombia and New Zealand respectively. A mention of Pacific cultural practices of speech and argumentation as in the Māori institution of hui, for example, provides potentially culturally rich evidence that indigenous collective practices foster the dynamic cooperation that Nicolas Pirsoul prefers over the competition fostered by neoliberalism. The book’s warranted ambitions to broaden a theory of recognition and the positive potential for the parity fostered by deliberative multiculturalism also invites more explicit comparative and productive asides to other binational and bicultural nations in Latin America and the Pacific.
Michèle D. Dominy
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson