Sometimes the only right a minority seems to want is the right to become a majority; and sometimes the minority achieves this by bringing about a change in the political context, including by means of civil war. But apart from the rights which minorities actually claim, or want, what rights should they have? Or can such a separation in practice be maintained at all rigidly? Certainly there is no use telling a minority it should have rights which in fact it does not want, or which it feels to be irrelevant to its actual needs and situation. And the rights which minorities have actually claimed vary widely indeed.

Many minorities have asserted, and for periods of time maintained, a right to rule over majorities: the British in India, for example, or the Afrikaaners in South Africa, East European Communist parties, and the West Nile soldiery in Uganda. This claim of right has been grounded in theory on genetic, theological, and ideological conceptions, and in practice most often on superior fire-power. It may be said that the right of a particular minority to rule over a majority is no right at all but an arrogant pretension. In terms of liberal and democratic values this is certainly so. But some uncomfortable considerations enter here. For is not a commitment to liberal and democratic values in itself a characteristic of a minority, quite a small minority, as it would appear, of the inhabitants of this planet? That being so, by exactly what right do we (that is, our kind of people) tell or try to tell or think about telling other minorities what their rights are and what they are not? Not by any democratic right, certainly. We tell, let us say, the Tutsi that the right he fancies he possesses to dominate the Hutu is not a real right. He replies in effect that as far as his culture is concerned it is a right. We tell him it is not a right because it is contrary to democracy, an ideology to which our ancestors became converted in the 19th century. He says his ancestors did not become so converted; are we claiming that our ancestors were superior to his? Now, that is a forked question, and we have to be very careful how we answer it. If we say, “No, no, of course not, my dear fellow,” he can say in reply: By what right then are we telling him that he must act according to the acquired convictions of our ancestors who are admittedly no better than his own? If, on the other hand, we say, yes, our people represent a more advanced stage of civilization than his do, he may reply that this is exactly his own position in relation to the Hutu.

An imaginary discussion of this kind illustrates, I think, a real difficulty inherent in attempting to define, from within a particular historical phase of a particular culture, norms that will be applicable in widely scattered and diverse human conditions and situations about which, generally speaking, our knowledge is limited. It would take the nerve of an early 19th-century missionary explorer to set about such a task with full conviction. We do not have that kind of nerve any more, but neither, fortunately, have we acquired the opposite kind of nerve, the nerve to say, with Nietzsche, “There are whole peoples who have failed,” and to be entirely indifferent to their lot. Western ideas about the underdeveloped world have never been so uncertain and so tentative as they are now. The certainties of imperialism are gone, but so are the certainties of anti-imperialism: the bright hopes of decolonization, the faith in the transforming power of technical aid, the charismatic appeal of a great convergence of world revolution. All these ideas are still around, but one senses a certain lack of conviction in relation to them. We are groping, and more than half afraid of the things we may find. We send and receive faint and ambiguous signals. Sometimes, as in the case of Biafra, of Bangladesh, of the Uganda Asians, we are sufficiently moved to try to help in some way, and sometimes also, when we look back, we cannot be sure whether what we did actually helped or hindered.

The cases which in any event have touched imaginations and consciences in Europe and America are cases not of ruling minorities but of underdogs—people suffering varying degrees and kinds of harassment, from the quiet but terrible social ostracism which surrounds the Burakumin in Japan to the waves of violent persecution experienced in turn by Bengali and Bihari in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, to take only fairly recent or contemporary examples. It is of these endangered or stigmatized minorities that we generally think when we ask what rights minorities should have. Yet even in relation to such minorities the question remains extraordinarily hard to answer. The rights which such minorities, or at least their spokesmen, have historically sought, include—and this is not an exhaustive list—first of all, social integration into the wider society, a right claimed at various times by certain American Negro groups, Jews in 19th-century Germany and elsewhere and in the 20th-century Soviet Union, Algerian Moslems in France at one time, Catholics in Northern Ireland at the time of the campaign for full British rights (1967-69), and West Indians in Britain at one time. We may take it too that this is what people like the Burakumin in Japan want, and that without this particular right other rights can have little meaning for them. And this is a right which neither domestic law nor international convention can secure, although in certain circumstances some display of international interest may help. American blacks certainly benefited from such interest from the time of Little Rock on, and so also, although more ambiguously, have Northern Irish Catholics.

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A second form of rights which minorities have sought is economic, technical, and functional integration, including equality of access to training and promotion, but without the demand for full social integration: the Chinese of North America, the Pakistanis of Britain, are examples. Most of those who have sought or seemed to seek social integration have in fact often been interested in this economic kind as well, and perhaps in some cases more in this kind than in social integration. There can be notable ambiguities and deceptive appearances in this area. For instance, when Northern Irish Catholic spokesmen demanded full British rights in 1968-69, they were not really, as they seemed to be, looking for assimilation into the British community. What they were really doing was tactical: turning the Ulster Protestant claim, “Ulster is British,” into a weapon against the internal realities of the Ulster Protestant state. Only four years later the right claimed by the same spokesmen was opposite in direction: integration into a united Ireland. And it could reasonably be argued that the contradictory rights sought at different times were in reality aimed at securing the only right that would have much practical meaning in the lives of those concerned, namely, economic and functional integration. In practice, also, the line between economic and social integration is hard to draw. To the extent that education is conducted in common with the majority, it works, however imperfectly, toward social integration. If education is separate, the majority will not be easily convinced, or will not easily admit, that the schools of the minority can really give adequate training to warrant the kind of access to jobs and promotion that the minority will accept as constituting equality of opportunity.

A third case: sometimes the right to which a minority comes to commit itself, often having tried other things with what it feels to be lack of success, is the diametrical opposite of integration, namely, political secession. The same minority, under different conditions, may be committed at one stage to total integration and at another to complete secession. The Ibos of Nigeria offer perhaps the classic example of this in recent times.

With the exception of the right claimed by certain minorities to rule over majorities, secession constitutes the most doubtful and controversial of all minority rights, if indeed it can be called a right at all. Secession is an unpopular idea, and naturally so since it threatens public order and the very life of a state. Yet hardly anyone would claim that there is no such thing as a right to secede under any circumstances at all. The nearest one comes to such a position is in the United States, where for more than a century the dominant tradition—that of the Northern victors in the Civil War—has been strongly anti-secessionist; yet even proponents of this position would hardly deny in retrospect the right of the American colonies to have seceded from the empire of George III, or of what are now the Latin American states to have seceded from Spain with the help of the United States.

For a long time the distinction was made that it was all right to secede from things called empires but wrong to secede from things called republics. This distinction stood Woodrow Wilson in good stead when at the end of World War I he dropped that great secessionist fragmentation-bomb, the principle of the self-determination of nations. In the wake of World War I this principle was used to break up the defeated empires, and after World War II it was applied to the territories of the British and French empires. But there was a difference. In the post-World War I period an attempt was made to build the new states as far as possible around historical, cultural, and linguistic groupings, such as we have been accustomed to describe as nations. In the case of the post-World War II division, hardly any corresponding effort to sort out peoples was attempted, and the arbitrary assumption was made, perhaps had to be made, that the various colonial administrative territories, all of short duration and some of vast extent, now in fact constituted nations, and were exercising their self-determination. (The meaning of the term “self-determination” had perceptibly changed by this point in time.) In fact some of the peoples included in these new nations, and some of those later anxious to escape from them, were, at least for a time, more numerous than the population of some of the new states that had been set up in Europe under the principle of self-determination at the end of World War I.

It is hard to see, if the question is put on a moral plane, why self-determination should be right in one case and necessarily wrong in another. I believe that secession is an evil, or rather the recognition of an evil, a breakdown in human relations. I also believe that no minority is likely to have recourse to it, with all its dangers, unless the pressures on the minority are felt to be intolerable, and unless there are also other sufficient conditions to make it possible—I have in mind such factors as numerical strength, terrain, diplomatic conjuncture, and so forth. It would be uselessly pedantic to draw up a set of rules for when secession may be regarded as a right. The Biafrans, for example, felt after the Northern massacre of Ibos that they had—and they asserted this passionately—the same basic right to defend themselves as had had the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. They may have been unwise in attempting secession, and it now seems they were. They may have exaggerated the danger, and it now seems they did. But it would be hard to find grounds for saying that they had no moral right to make their attempt. As for the recognition of that right by others, here we may apply the cynical old maxim about treason: “Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason? That if it prosper none dares call it treason.” Bangladesh is now recognized by all, Biafra by none. The reason is not that Bangladesh had necessarily a better moral case than Biafra, though perhaps it had. The reason is that the Indian army beat the army of Pakistan. Biafra, having no such ally, died.

The fear or threat of secession, as opposed to secession itself, is a double-edged weapon for minorities. On the one hand, it may secure advantages, by making a majority anxious to conciliate lest worse befall. On the other hand, fear may goad the majority to particularly harsh and oppressive action. There may even be a cyclical alternation of these two different reactions over longer or shorter periods, like the alternations of coercion and conciliation in 19th-century Ireland, or the oscillations in recent British policy in Northern Ireland. Finally, a population which is not in itself secessionist and which is even fairly far along the road of one form or another of integration can harbor militant secessionist elements, and can regard these with the most varied and fluctuating emotions. Thus, minorities can look upon their own militant secessionist elements, with their claims to represent the political vanguard, with such emotions as admiration, sympathy, apprehension, anxiety, guilt, fear, and hatred. These emotions may follow changing patterns in response both to the activities of the militants themselves and to whatever forms of coercion or conciliation the majority is trying and with what success—all in a great flux in situations of potential secession.

Minorities are in fact often divided as to what rights they really want, or think they want. Even individual members of minorities are often divided within themselves, and change in mood from year to year or month to month, or even at different times of the day. A partly integrated society forces versatility in role-playing in an unusual degree on minority members. I have observed both in faraway countries and nearer at home certain minority people playing one role in the presence of local majority people, a second role, equally artificial, in the presence of more militant members of their own minority, and a third role, more natural, with their own friends, all minority people but none of them aggressively minoritarian. (That is a point too: minorities are not being minorities, or thinking of themselves as minorities, all the time.) In the first context these people may sound like social integrationists; in the second they may behave as if they were at heart secessionists; and in the third they may show themselves to be on the whole economic integrationists, with not much more taste for social integration in the full sense than for secession. But the conviction with which they adopt these roles will vary according to mood, the previous day's news, or even the rumors of the day itself.

There are, finally, minorities which are so placed that neither social or economic integration nor secession seems relevant to their situation. Thus the Crimean Tartars, it seems, wish neither to be integrated in Kazakhstan, nor to secede from it. They just want to be allowed to return to their Crimean home. The Ugandan Asians at the end just wanted to get out of Uganda—with their lives, their families, with anything they were allowed to carry. This is of course the last right, or almost the last right, of a minority, and is an extreme case. For most it is a question of one or another form of integration, or a blend of the two, or, much more rarely, of contemplated secession, independence. And the last is not likely to be undertaken seriously by any sizable body of people, except as a result of a total or at least major breakdown in the process of integration.

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One approach to the entire problem with which I am concerned here is not to speak of minority rights or majority rights at all, but rather of human rights. Rights, that is, may be best thought of as inherent in each human being, irrespective of what kind of cultural grouping he or she may belong to. Those who hold this point of view—it is one I myself have increasingly come to share—point out that the culture of a group can sometimes condone or even legislate systematic violations of basic human rights. When we are asked to respect the culture of a group we may be asked to respect, for example, the Hindu caste system, the treatment of women in Islam and in a number of other cultures, female circumcision in certain cultures, ostracism of twins in others, and so on. To speak in terms of group rights—as we do when we speak of minority rights—may thus involve connivance in the actual denial of rights to stigmatized members of the groups in question.

There is a great deal of force in this argument, which is reflected in a document like the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In general at the United Nations this is the approach that has been favored, nor is there much debate about it among the various blocs or between developed and underdeveloped countries, although on the whole the “developed” countries are more sympathetic to group rights than are the “underdeveloped” countries. This may seem surprising for more than one reason. The language of the document which people of so many cultures appear to find acceptable is clearly the product of one special culture, that of Western Europe including the Europeans of North America. More than that, it has been powerfully argued by some people from the Third World that this generalized and abstract concern with human rights as defined by Europeans has historically served as an instrument, consciously or unconsciously applied, for the disruption of other people's cultures. That case is argued, with considerable subtlety and power, by Frantz Fanon. I am not thinking particularly here of The Wretched of the Earth (which seems to me a somewhat overrated work) but of an essay in a volume called Studies in a Dying Colonialism. The essay is on the haik, the veil-garment worn by Moslem women, which Fanon takes as a symbol and analyzes in a most interesting way.

Fanon was writing about conditions in Algeria under French rule in the period after World War II and before the Algerian Revolution. This was a time when ideas of integration were in the air, when many Arabs, led by Ferhat Abbas, were demanding full French rights, and when some Frenchmen saw France's future in Algeria as depending on the development of a large class of Arab Frenchmen—and Frenchwomen. It was on this last point, as Fanon describes it, that the test came. Would the typical Arab civil servant, who claimed to be as French as anyone else, and who demanded promotion rights on a French scale, bring his wife to an office party without the veil? Fanon describes the hints, the arch inquiries made on this score. Frenchmen now saw, and French Arabs at least tried to see, the rejection of the haik as an act of liberation. Fanon, in his turn, throws a harsh light on the humiliations that could accompany such an apparent act of liberation. For Fanon, the later reappearance of the haik was the real act of liberation, insofar as it symbolized in his view the recovery by the Arabs of their pride in themselves and their culture, their final rejection of “interior” colonization. Yet Fanon also thought of the resumption of the haik by Arab women as both voluntary and temporary. He stressed the role of some Arab women in the revolution, and even rather pathetically pointed out how useful the veil was for concealing arms and ammunition. He thought that after liberation the haik and all it stood for would disappear. (So far as I know, it did not; in reading Fanon we should remember this too.)

The point is, Fanon assumed the veil should disappear. And thus, beneath all his ultra-Third World rhetoric, which has fascinated so many people, Fanon can be seen to have had more in common with the French, of whose educational system he was a product, than with most of the Arabs whose cause he championed. The same, or something corresponding to it, is true of most educated Third World intellectuals who represent their underdeveloped countries at the United Nations and other international bodies. These people have no difficulty with the Universal Declaration, because they were brought up on the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme or its Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Any one of them would think it derogatory to his country's status were someone to suggest he might be unwilling to sign such a document, even though he might know that no such rights were in fact recognized by his own government in its daily relations with its citizens. Even when he pays lip service to the declaration in a cynical spirit he is not necessarily being more hypocritical than some of his 18th-century predecessors, the philosophes, who (like Voltaire) were not above a flutter in the slave trade, or the slave-owners who signed the Declaration of Independence. Universal declarations tend anyway to be professed with mental reservations, sometimes unconscious: “not for slaves,” “not for savages,” “not for ‘those’ people.” Sometimes language has helped. A Japanese, for example, can sign a declaration setting out the rights of people without having to think at all about the position of the outcastes in his own society, since the word for these outcastes in his language is hinin, non-people.

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As a matter of experience I have found that people who are all in favor of human rights generally speaking are very likely to become suspicious where there is any question of minority rights. Human rights is a pleasing abstraction impregnated with the notion of one's own benevolence. But minority rights evokes a sudden sharp picture of “that lot” with their regrettable habits, extravagant claims, ridiculous complaints, and suspect intentions. Governments are representative, of course, either of majorities or more often of ruling minorities which of course do not think of themselves as minorities. It is therefore unlikely that an international association on the scale of the United Nations could promulgate an effective code giving specific protection to minorities. The United Nations has attempted from time to time to cope with this problem in a gingerly way, but has flinched away from it. More limited bodies like the Council of Europe, representing countries which are more secure from threats of secession, have taken some steps in this direction, but the countries most affected by minority problems and where minorities themselves have the most acute problems are not anxious to enter the area. As for a private body attempting to draw up such a code, that would be a most difficult task, and I am not at all sure that its utility would be proportionate to its difficulty. The leverage applicable to governments through their adherence or putative adherence to the Universal Declaration is not much (indeed it is pitiably little), but it is something. The leverage applicable through a code not accepted by governments and—almost by definition—not acceptable to them, would likely be nil; it might even be counterproductive.

Despite its defects, and I have tried to indicate some of them, I believe that on the whole the universalist approach, based on rights inherent in each individual being, remains the most hopeful one. We ought not, after all, to idealize minorities or to forget that today's underdog may be tomorrow's power-crazed bully. (Anyone who may be inclined to forget this lesson should place on his desk a photograph of General Amin and contemplate it daily.) Or that certain custodians of minority cultures, and certain vehement exponents of minority political rights, may already be playing such a role within their own little community. In present conditions, we ought in effect to be saying to governments whose policies we deplore and seek to change: “We desire no special rights for minorities, yours or any others. Members of minority groups should have the same human rights as members of majorities, no less and not necessarily any more for the moment than those set out in the Universal Declaration to which you subscribe. But we have evidence that shows that members of such and such a minority are being denied these rights under your government. Unless you set about correcting this situation, we shall have to publish this evidence with, inevitably, undesirable results for your country's reputation and prospects.” Such efforts in fact are not in vain. In mild situations a government will not wish any part of its population to be the object of private or international attention, and will wish to ameliorate the conditions so described. And even in the most dire situations, international attention can at least help the survivors. Thus, it is no detraction from the credit due to the magnanimity of the present Nigerian government in relation to the defeated people of what was once Biafra, to say that the attention concentrated on the question by the world at large was probably of a nature to encourage precisely this counsel of magnanimity—if only to prove that the alarmist things that were being said about what Nigeria would do were not true. Our most pressing concern should now perhaps be, not to define what rights minorities should have, but to find which techniques are most appropriate for conveying to governments the message that decency in relation to minorities is a quality helpful to any country in its international relations.