Cultural Diversity and Human Rights: a propos of a minority educational reform

instantiation in a wide variety of national and regional cultures.
The tensions between human rights universalism and cultural
relativism are familiar. These tensions are partly endogenous, that
is, inherent in the human rights system itself, in that nation states
are the parties to human rights treaties, not individual rights
subjects. Implementation is, therefore, always a site for national
autonomies, as exemplified in historical, political and cultural
traditions, customs and practices. It is certainly the case that
international human rights have displaced a more absolute form of
political and legal national sovereignty. However, absolute
national sovereignty has been replaced by the hegemony of
national cultures. This form of ‘subsidiarity’, whereby the manner
of policy implementation is devolved to the lowest level, introduces
strong tensions between the universality of human rights and
national cultural rights: human rights are to be implemented in ‘our
way’. The ensuing contradictions are well-known: for example,
between the apparent individualism of rights, and cultures which
focus more on a collective conception of personhood; or between
gender equality and the different cultures of patriarchy; or between
race and ethnic equality and the continuing inequalities of race,
ethnicity and nation in the context of post-colonialism, neo-
imperialism and global capitalism. These tensions are endemic to
the human rights system, and not, as is sometimes claimed, a real-
world evolutionary, teleological process of incremental enactment
of human rights

These tensions between human rights universalism and cultural
relativism are exacerbated by the national histories and forms of
education systems. Education systems have their origins in a

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