Search

The purpose of the article is threefold: First, the paper provides a descriptive overview of the history of Canadian immigration policies and its current legal framework; it stresses the importance of the various paradigmatic shifts in Canadian immigration law as the most important pull factor that has shaped immigration in the past and is structuring the multicultural Canadian mosaic in the present. Second, the paper analyzes the varieties of Canadian multicultural policies vis-a-vis the Indigenous peoples/“First Nations”, the “Quebec nation within” and the different immigrant groups of the so-called “New Canadians”, applying the theoretical reasoning and analytical categorizations by the Canadian political philosophers Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka. Third, the paper discusses some of the obvious problems of minority politics caused by the inherent tensions between individual basic rights and collective group claims, and it argues for a more differentiated approach, that takes into account the distinct conditions and needs of the various societal sub-systems or “spheres of justice” (Walzer), thereby trying to bridge the gap between the liberal an d communitarian perceptions of multicultural integration.

When analyzing institutions and events in the “New World,” observers from the “Old World” have rarely been motivated just by curiosity. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, both liberals and conservatives tried to paint a picture of the United States that was supportive of their own position in the domestic debates (von Beyme 1986: 25ff). Alexis de Tocqueville explicitly stated in the foreword of his seminal work on “Democracy in America” that his interest in the United States arose from his desire to seek “the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress” (de Tocqueville 1956: 36). Thus, the political instrumentalization of America, so pervasive in the current public discourse in Europe, is not a new phenomenon. Ever since the birth of the American nation, Europeans have tended to project their highest hopes or worst fears onto the “New World.”

Constitutional politics as a research field is currently marked by a peculiar contradiction:1 On the one hand, processes of constitution-making and constitutional reform have abounded on a global scale at least since the post-1989 upheavals (von Beyme/Offe 1995; Merkel 1996; Merkel et al. 1996). On the other hand, there is a considerable dearth of solid empirical and comparative work on these processes, even though constitution-making and constitutional engineering are genuine subfields of political science. The verdict made by German constitutional-law scholar and Federal Supreme Court Justice Dieter Grimm in 1978, according to which German political science had not contributed much to the research on constitutional politics and reform up to that point, is still largely valid today, minor exceptions notwithstanding (Grimm 1994: 338ff.). Although a series of monographs, the bulk of which examine the so-called unification reforms, has been published in the meantime, there is no systematically comparative elaboration of the topic to date (Benz 1993; Batt 1996). From an international perspective, the state of research is strikingly similar. Jon Elster, for instance, just recently (1993: 174) observed that “[t]he comparative study of ordinary law making is a central field of political science. The comparative study of revolutions has a long history. But to my knowledge there is not a single book or even article discussing the process of constitution-making in a general comparative perspective. The gap is puzzling, but it appears to be undeniable.”