Metanationality , comprehensive democracy and left communitarian rights : lessons from Ghana for South Africa

Metanationality, comprehensive democracy and left communitarian rights: lessons from Ghana for South Africa The Ghanaian philosopher, Kwame Gyekye, defends a concept of metanationality (nationality-transcending specific ethnic groups, yet accom­ modating them all on a basis of equality), which he regards as eminently suitable for application in multicultural societies. Metanationality dis­ tinguishes between firstand second-tier solidarity. Second-tier solidarity entails commitment to the democratic institutions of the state and a system of rights to which individuals bear title. These rights include social and economic rights which are backup rights ensuring effective use of political rights. This system of comprehensive democracy requires that the constitution does not differentiate between citizens, though individuals are differentiated at first-tier solidarity with reference to the communocultural groups with whom they identify. Gyekye succeeds in marrying rights to a politics of the common good. This success is due largely to a novel feature of his philosophy the equal moral standing of individual and community and to a limitation clause designed to limit liberty whenever it is necessary to protect the requirements of equality. Gyekye’s attempt to find a reciprocal balance between rights and the common good is instructive for attempts in South Africa to effect a just dispensation for all citizens.


Introduction
Kwame Gyekye defends a left-communitarianism critically founded on his view that the individual and her community are morally of equal value or standing, an idea Gyekye calls their equiprimordiality.The equiprimordiality of person and community is primarily a structural defense against Koers 65(1) 2000:45-76 the possibility of cultural oppression of any ethnic group by another.The recognition of equal moral standing for individuals alongside their com munities creates a public space for internal criticism of moral practices which runs on a capacity for moral agency partially independent of the formative influences of community.The idea, central to Gyekye's communitarianism (the idea that the community has moral significance), that neither the common interest nor individual rights are by themselves absolutely overriding or trumps, determines that the political community and its institutions are never simply the neutral umpires of individually chosen goods.This non-neutral stand is, in Gyekye, a guarantee of free dom from oppression.Gyekye's left-communitarianism is inherently paternalistic.State inter ference in the private domain is not only permissible but justifiable from the point of view of capacity building.Gyekye's sense of justification connects with his concern that Africa should remain the master of her own fate, and that the African states might retain a hold on their choice of the shape of modernity provided that their governments create conditions conducive to cultural development and technological growth.This pater nalism creates space for a liberal critique, yet its possibility does not dampen Gyekye's enthusiasm for communitarianism.From his perspec tive, a defense of communitarianism -as he modifies it with additions from liberalism -is the appropriate response to the over-individualistic liberal treatment of the person and her community, and to the sense of alienation that accompanies individuals' experience of the liberal state.Gyekye's attempt to construct a left-communitarianism on the basis of the equiprimordiality of the person and her community contains an immanent critique of the liberal alternative.Specifically, the community and the individuals who make it up are equally significant loci of value.As a source of value the community acts as a restraint on the excesses of individualism, particularly with respect to claim-rights affecting the extent of liberty.Gyekye's anti-Lockean stand is apparent in the limita tions affecting the right to dispose of one's property (including one's body, one's life and one's talents) as one pleases.Individuals have responsibilities to their communities regarding the manner in which they conduct their lives, and to what ends they apply their talents.Indeed, in Gyekye's communitarian setting they are morally accountable to the community in this respect.In view of this public institutions have the power to shape the common good and to determine how it might best be served (with due consideration to the side constraints which the moral rights of individuals generate).Yet the values which the community espouses are never incontestably or selfevidently right or true.Ultimately value is determined in a contested dialogue between community mem Metanationality, comprehensive democracy and left communitarian rights ..._____________ bers and even between specific individuals and their communities.This is to say that for Gyekye value is ultimately relational.My object is to give an account of Gyekye's communitarianism and of the critique of liberalism it contains.I shall not be concerned with liberal objections to Gyekye's views and so will largely ignore the issue except where it affects points of exegesis.

Rights of the collective and individual rights 2.1 The associative concept of community and the relational concept of personhood
Since much of what Gyekye attempts to defend as rights (of the individual and of the community) turn on his conception of the collectivity, I begin by making some distinctions.Gyekye (1997:39-47) favours the associative concept of community, which he implicitly contrasts with the aggregative concept.Association is the view that the collective is constituted by patterns of interpersonal relationships and indeed, that the association is structured by these relationships and the (sociological, cultural, traditional) rules they imply (Bird, 1999:87-90).Individuals com prise the collective; they (re)produce the relationships which make up their association.How they do that marks the difference between strong and weak association, as we shall shortly see.According to the associa tive view community is "a group of persons linked by interpersonal bonds, which are not necessarily biological, who consider themselves primarily as members of a group and who share common goods, values, and interests.The notion of a shared life -shared purposes, interests, and understandings of the good" (Gyekye, 1997:42) is central to this conception.
Ontologically the community is "a reality in itself (Gyekye, 1997:42), grounded in the "fundamentally relational character of the person and the interdependence of human individuals arising out of their natural sociality" (Gyekye, 1997:38).Relationality and sociality are necessary attributes."The person is constituted, at least partly, by social relation ships in which he necessarily finds himself (Gyekye, 1997:38).Members share a way of life; they have "intellectual and ideological as well as emotional attachments to their shared goals and values and ... they are ever ready to pursue and defend them" (Gyekye, 1997:42).Their relationships are regulated by culturally reinforced "reciprocities, comprehensive interactions, and mutual sympathies and responsibilities" (Gyekye, 1997:42) which run on "a loyalty and commitment to the community" (Gyekye, 1997:43) experienced as "the desire to advance its interests" (Gyekye, 1997:43).A community structured by such relation ships and loyalties imply that in assuming the normative point of view an agent is primarily concerned with the instantiation and reproduction of these relationships and loyalties (Bird, 1999:90).Gyekye rejects the view that community is "a mere association based on a contract of individuals whose interests and ends are contingently congruent" (Gyekye, 1997:42).This view lacks the strong normative dimension which deliberate pursuit of the common good possesses simply because, in the appropriate social context, "Individuals are con cerned solely and primarily with the promotion of their own interests, ends, and well-being and pay attention to the common good of the society only sporadically' ' (Gyekye, 1997:43).Gyekye hereby rejects the aggregative sense of the collectivity.To construe the collective as an aggregate of individuals is to treat individuals as separate units who contribute arithmetically to the whole (Bird, 1999: (Bird, 1999:90).But as soon as individuals count morally as autonomous units apart from and independent of structured relationships, and qua autonomous units enjoy moral standing of equal value as that which they have in structured relationships, irreducibility is compromised.In Gyekye these relationships are organic but not structured by ethnic loyalties (Gyekye, 1997:104 105).Irreducible relationships tend to diminish the moral significance of the distinction between the two sets of membership relations mentioned above.The rules by which individuals act and those by which the collective act tend to be the same set (Bird, 1999:91) which means that rights are easily transferred from individuals to the collective (Bird, 1999: 91).Social contexts in which irreducibility is more or less compromised tend to exploit the distinction to demarcate an uncompromisable space for individual rights.A disanalogy between private and public agency is apparent (Bird, 1999:91) together with a concomitant disjunction between the rules by which individuals and collectives are held to act (Bird, 1999: 91).Individuals are separable from the relationships in which they participate without loss of moral status, but in spite of the space created for disanalogy and disjunction in Gyekye's theory, the collective interest may in specific contexts become overriding.An agent's status as moral agent is not exhausted by her being an individual-as-unit; she bears title to rights but she also has responsibilities to the collective.For Bird (1999:94)  The interpersonal realm of self-regarding ac tions is then not wholly selfregarding.In this realm individuals are free to act according to the range of options their cultures make available.But the principles by which they organize their private lives do not exactly mirror the principles by which the state acts on behalf of the collectivity.A strong strain of asymmetry in the sense Bird (1999:91) has in mind springs from this separation of private and public agency.
In an asymmetrical view ... the principles by which governments determine the appropriate action for the collectivity as a whole will bear no particular resemblance to those invoked by private agents as they lead and pursue their own lives and projects.But Gyekye's disjunctions and disanalogies are not complete because a notion of the common good, a substantive one, may on appropriate occasion be overriding.The norm of the common good insinuates itself into individual self-reflection in a way which attenuates conceptions of particularity, difference and identity, thus shaping commitments to act in certain approved ways.Gyekye's state paternalism will be examined shortly.For the moment I wish to stress that asymmetry (Bird's term -1999:91) is not fully realized.Gyekye (1997:45) says explicitly that the common good does not consist of, and cannot be derived from, "the goods or preferences of particular individuals" and that it is "not a surrogate for the sum of the different individual goods".Rather, the common good is a "substrate of commonly shared values and self understandings" (Gyekye, 1997:46) which underpin organized human society.Its overridingness (when appropriate) is exactly that feature of his thinking which distinguishes him from Western individual liberal theorists (Gyekye, 1997:103).

Persons-as-units and persons-in-relation: who is the locus of the value?
What does it mean to say that the common good is overriding?Though, as I have maintained, asymmetry is not complete, individual rights are nevertheless genuine.Their existence mean that there are culturally endorsed rules and principles for individuals to formulate life plans which are not analogous to the rules and principles which specify how the collectivity should be ordered.Private and public agency, then, are disanalogous.Yet, in Gyekye, this does not entail that the collective plan cannot be accorded priority over individuals' plans (whenever appropriate), and, indeed, be overriding.Gyekye wants to say that, in addition, there are forms of value which are irreducibly social.In particular the cultural matrix as provider of contexts of choice and identity makes possible the (self)understandings that render human action meaningful, and cannot, as Bird (1999:67) puts it, "be fully accounted for simply as a means to individual ends".Rather, they are independently valuable goods whose "'locus is a society'"independently, that is, of their utility to individuals.On this view, there are values assignable to societies as such, and they play a role in individuals' appraisals of how well or how badly they fare under their specific collective arrangements.
There is a useful way of showing how these two interpretations differ.
The effect of collective arrangements on the lives of individuals, and the state-of-affairs which make up these arrangements, should be distin guishable (Bird, 1999:69).There is a sense in which the set of goods which make up the common good -"freedom, respect, dignity, security and satisfaction" (Gyekye, 1997:46) -constitute a collective state-ofaffairs under which individuals live and which impacts on their lives.There is also a sense in which specific states of an individual is distinguishable from the collective state-of-affairs (Bird, 1999:69).Internal states of individuals are states "that subsist without any relation to anything outside the individual" (Bird, 1999:20).External states are "possible individual states relative to something outside" (Bird, 1999:20).Enjoying desire satisfaction, for instance, in being treated with respect in recognition of your dignity is not a collective state.But, now, as Bird (1999:69) points out, being treated with respect refers to a "collective state-of-affairs", in particular "a relation between an individual and the agents and institutions with which she is transacting".So is being treated with respect "an individual as opposed to a collective state-of-affairs"?(Bird, 1999:69).For Bird (1999:70) the matter turns on whether it is possible to draw a "meaningful distinction between the value of states of individuals and the value of states of the collectivity sui generis".If being  6 The point at issue here is one defined by Lomasky (1987:19)."Rights are side constraints that preclude the sacrifice of one individual for the sake of another in order to maximize impersonal value".

Koers 65(1) 2000:45-76
by the state is restricted to restoring equality, and may not exceed the side constraints (Lomasky's term -1987:19) which rights generate, i.e., interference may not frustrate the expected satisfaction of some for the sake of some optimal sum of impersonal satisfactions.So, though not every claim to a right is inviolable, the equal entitlement of everyone to basic rights are.Though the notion of liberty is inseparably connected to an equality of access to the other goods that constitute the common good, to secure the desired equality it is necessary that liberty be restricted, and this Gyekye attempts to effect by proposing a self imposed restraint.Individuals "may not be obsessed with insisting on their rights, knowing that insistence on their rights could divert attention from responsibilities that they, as members of the communitarian society, should strongly feel they have towards other members" (Gyekye, 1997:66).In Gyekye's view an equal distribution of basic rights is realized if individuals act with restraint, which they have good reason to do, opines Gyekye, because they have good reason to preserve the cultural structure that provides their contexts of identity and choice.
In Gyekye liberty and restraint are conceptually connected as we shall shortly see.Individuals have an area of moral space -the private domain -immune from the interference of others, but within this space they are not fully free to do as they wish because the state may interfere to bring about their well-being.They have a higher-order interest in being free; freedom is of such value that the state sets "external limits" (Bird's term -1999:116) to the violation of liberty.These limits apply to violationswhich may result from the intentional action of an agent, such that she can be held morally responsible for the harm done to others, and also violations which result from state action itself, such as sacrificing some person's rights for the sake of a greater overall utility.The harm done to others are the consequence of coercions.

Cultural oppression and moral revision
The

Weak cultural unity
Gyekye's agents have a higher order interest in the preservation of the cultural matrix.It is part of permissible state intervention in the lives of citizens to secure the matrix through educational policies which educate citizens into endorsing the public ethos.The public ethos is a feature of the national identity of the nation state, of "the principles of collective belonging ... the set of characteristics by which a nation can collectively define itself and be distinctly recognized" (Gyekye, 1997:113).In the multicultural states of Africa the idea of a national identity should be understood in terms of metanationality" (Gyekye, 1997:96) as a meta national identity consisting of a synthesis of communocultural identities, developed in a "shared" environment (Gyekye, 1997:113) as opposed to a monolithic cultural environment in which the individual and not the ethnic group to which she belongs, is the "primary unit" (Gyekye, 1997: 96).The metanational state is then a "state composed primarily of individuals who belong to cultural communities" (Gyekye, 1997:106).
Communocultural identities coexist with the metanational identity which lies anchored in a weakly unified cultural life12, one which members of the component communocultural groups can identify with without engendering conflict with their natural (communocultural) identities.Gyekye (1997:107) sees the weakly unified culture as a "participatory culture", a second-tier of shared meanings by which members under stand themselves and interpret their experiences, a political culture in the process of evolution which accompanies the development of a political identity (Gyekye, 1997:81).How does Gyekye propose to construct the metanational state?The mechanism is education.In the attempt to pursue metanationality, "ethnic identities and their concomitant primary allegiances will have to be ... de emphasized" (Gyekye, 1997:83), and "primary allegiances" will have to be transferred from the ethnocultural community to the state, that is, from the parts to the whole" (Gyekye, 1997:84).The upshot is that distinct, particularistic forms of identification would have to, through retraining and re-education, lose some of their meanings to the evolving, new socio political dispensation.(Gyekye, 1997:87)13 "De-emphasis" (Gyekye, 1997:88) of particularistic identities will encourage the growth of "horizon tal relationships" (Gyekye, 1997:89) as a complement to the vertical ones, the "intra-ethnic relationships" (Gyekye, 1997:90).The "politics of participation" (Gyekye, 1997:89) must redistribute the material as well as the moral goods of society."The allocation of development resources and projects must be horizontal, spread across the board", with no one district or region -and hence no one ethnocultural community left in limbo.(Gyekye, 1997:90).Privileging of one ethnocultural community over another, deriving from cultural dominance, will have to be countered by "the due consideration and respect that ought to be given to the dignity of every individual member of the state" (Gyekye, 1997:91).Gyekye's politics of participation is akin to Taylor's (1994) politics of recognition in that "component groups would consider themselves culturally and politically equal, even though they may not be really equal" (Gyekye, 1997:92).The presumption of equality would have to be compromised in one respect, which will privilege one group or some linguistically related group, viz. the choice of a national language."It would be necessary for the state to involve itself in deciding which language (or, languages) will be given official support" (Gyekye, 1997:93).But privileging would have to be played with due recognition to the politics of difference14 in Young's (1990) sense, i.e. without falling victim to the "group-neutral human capacity for self-making" (Young, 1990:165) a fallacy which denies group difference as a category15 of liberation.From an individual's perspective the emergence of "multiple identities" (Gyekye, 1997:95) weakens her allegiance to particular groups, but does not eradicate her group membership; it renders ethno cultural borders less well-defined, but does not render group membeship undesirable; her "multidimensional cultural identities" (Gyekye, 1997:104) enable her to elevate one or more language(s) to the level of official language(s) without compromise to her natural communocultural group,16 which remains as one basis of her identity as individual17 (Gyekye, 1997:105).
14 Actually Taylor also recognizes the need to play the politics of difference.Van der Merwe (1999:322) sums up: "the current demand for recognition of cultural differences ... involves an internalizing of the ideals of autonomy and authenticity and it leads to a bifurcation in the 'politics of equal recognition' between on the one hand the demand for the recognition of equal rights (whatever the differences) and on the other hand the demand for the equal recognition of the differences themselves, in other words of that which is experienced as the uniquely own.The former, which Taylor calls the 'politics of difference' and which I describe as the appropriation of the right to difference, cashes in on the credit of a universal recognition of equal rights, and changes it into the hard currency of recognition of the right to particular differences".
15 See Young (1990:156-191) 16 Gyekye prefers to use the term communocultural.See his distinction between ethnic and communocultural groups in Gyekye (1997:77-87)."An 'ethnic' group is in fact a cultural community, comprising people between whom there may or may not be kinship bonds" (Gyekye, 1997:105)... This is implicit con ditioning, a powerful force.Young (1992:180) calls the implicit conditioning power of a culture "structural or systemic" oppression which Kernohan (1998:17) compares to Foucault's (1982:781) notion of "a form of power which makes individual subjects".Foucault recognizes "two meanings of the word 'subject': subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to".Kernohan, like Galbraith and Young, is concerned with the latter.In the relevant Foucaultian sense tying people "to the conception of the good which form their own identities ... subjects ... them to their culture" (Kernohan, 1998:17).Subjugation in this sense, however, is not necessarily harmful.Subjugation is harmful if, for any individual, it interferes with "the very process of forming a conception of the good" (Kernohan, 1998:26), in knowing her good or in implementing her conception of the good, which is a harm to self-respect.If she is coerced Metanationality, comprehensive democracy and left communitarian rights ...___________ 17 "It is possible for groups of people to speak the same language while some features of their cultures differ, notwithstanding the existence of many other features that may be similar" (Gyekye, 1997:94)., 1997: 139).Rather, generality is a function of real participatory structures in which content-full persons assert their perspectives on social issues within consensually driven institutions that encourage the representation of their distinct voices.The need for consensually driven institutions is given by the social ideal of solidarity (Gyekye's "supermajority"), and by the need to prevent dominant groups from articulating the "common good" in terms influenced by their particular perspectives and interests (Gyekye, 1997:130-131).

The
Consensus is, of course, the cement of social integration in Gyekye's order of things.It represents, as Eze (1997:313) points out, a "return to the source" move, an attempt to order morality and politics in Africa along traditional lines.Gyekye and Wiredu are here in accord.Wiredu (1996:173) refers to the traditional ordering mechanism as a "culture of consensus" -a "deference to the common good" not inconsistent with dissent.A return to tradition would inspire a modern indigenous form of African consensual democracy, connecting post-colonial Africa with its pre-colonial past.The advantages of this would be twofold: a sharing with every constituency the exercise of governing power, and a sub stantive representation for even the smallest constituency.This re presents one answer to the all important question: "How to safeguard the rights of the minority parties who did not 'win' the election" (Eze, 1997:313 -paraphrasing Wiredu).Now, the strength of consensus, as presented by Gyekye and Wiredu, boils down to the "will to consensus", which, as Eze (1997:317) notes, may be interpreted in two ways: the idea that "human beings have the ability eventually to cut through their differences to the rock bottom identity of interest 'through rational discussions'" in either a belief in the power of reason or an African belief in the power of their belief "in a shared and common past and future" that leads them to pursue reason as a means of realizing the favoured shared life-form.Eze (1997:318 319) thinks the latter weighs heavily with Gyekye and Wiredu.They tend to conflate the "conflictual" with the "irrational" and the "rational" with the "consensual", and this conflation is clearly a cultural bias for harmony over conflict, i.e. for a politics of the common good over a politics of difference and individualism.There is not "much self-evident truth" (Eze, 1997:320)  Cultural contacts may lead an individual to think and act outside his history22...The historical emergence of moral visionaries or idealists in societies is an eloquent testimony that the moral hands of (some) individuals are not tied by the communal structure (Gyekye, 1997:60).Gyekye (1997), along with Kernohan (1998) and Ryan (1989), proposes a strategy under which the state uses its power to advocate reform, challenge false beliefs about morality, and ensure that no one falls below the minimum level required for effective political participation.Gyekye (1997:140-141) sees this strategy as entailed by his "comprehensive conception of democracy"."The comprehensive conception of democracy will be the kind that is likely to espouse the politics of the common good, the politics that aims at promoting a set of fundamental goods or interests held as essential to basic human flourishing" (Gyekye, 1997:142).Gyekye's paternalism preempts some options by structuring particular ranges of choice.This may prevent some people from "influencing the shared moral environment" (Dworkin, 1993:41) because the structures needed for the realizations of their goods are not available.This, how ever, does not mean that they cannot create those structures by exploiting the possibilities of revision.The challenges faced by these people may be more arduous than others who are content with their moral environment, but this does not deny them equality of access to shaping that environment; formally, equality of access is denied to noone, but there may be substantive differences, differences in material well-being, which give some an advantage over others, and which Gyekye attempts to combat by guaranteeing a minimum to ensure effective participation.Gyekye's position in this regard is comparable to Ryan's "exercisable rights" (Ryan, 1989:162)23.So Gyekye combines a laissez-faire strategy (Kernohan, 1998:91) which confines state inter vention to securing the basic conditions of equal basic liberties and material equality (favoured by Dworkin, 1990 andKymlicka, 1989), with the "advocacy" strategy (Kernohan, 1998:91) which entitles the state to structure the moral-political domain indirectly through its capacity building programmes.

From Ghana with love
It is instructive to note that the new South African constitution is firmly committed to the liberal concept of individual rights and that this commitment secures for many people a route from tribally grounded identities to wider collective identities, particularly a South African identity.Individual rights are also of critical importance in making space for choice in the issue of personal identity in that they serve as a public affirmation of the right to choose one's membership of identifying groups.The idea that a choice is possible is in part a function of the growing consciousness that it is possible to separate one's individual identity from one's social identity.But while affirming the right to choose, the constitution fails to make positive provision for this right to be exercised.It fails to equip the state with the power legitimately to promote a culture of pluralism, thus remaining passive in an area where active initiatives are needed.Such initiatives are valuable to offset some of the negative consequences of enforced membership at a time when it is becoming increasingly obvious that the monocultural (i.e.monoracial) identifications to which people were subjected on grounds of birth during the apartheid era underwrote not only a false view of the self, but also of the nature and value of identifying groups.The constitution remains silent on the issue of "groups" or "communities" (no doubt for fear of the "neo apartheid" label), but in doing so disables the cause of democratic pluralism.

Pieter Coetzee
For South Africa three important lessons are available.
• The relationship between first-and second-tier solidarity The first concerns the relationship between first-and second-tier solidarity.At second-tier solidarity citizens are not differentiated.But individuals' first-tier communocultural groups, the groups with whom they identify, are morally significant and therefore differentiated, and this is because membership of these groups is the source of loyalty to the political institutions which impact on their lives at the level of second-tier solidarity.If Gyekye is right, the kind of constitutional loyalty that he attempts to promote at this level is as far as one might push events on a continent still steeped in loyalties to ethnocultural groups.It is instructive to note that Gyekye's distinction between first-and second-tier solidarity corresponds to Van der Merwe's (1999:316) distinction between thin and thick multicultural societies.With thin multiculturalism is meant societies in which the cultural differences which are claimed as rights are embedded in a greater (political) culture, a liberal democratic culture or a culture of universal human rights in which a consensus exists about the right to differences as, for example, has been the case in Belgium until recently.Thick multicultural societies refers to societies, like Israel, wherein certain of the cultural differences which are claimed as rights, undermine a general acknowledgment of the right to difference, for example, when what is demanded is the right to a non-democratic political system, or the prohibition of religious freedom, freedom of speech and so forth.First-tier solidarity is of the "thick" kind; second-tier solidarity is of the "thin" kind.

• The use of state-backed social and economic rights
My second point concerns the use of state-backed social and economic rights as backup rights for effective use of political rights.Gyekye accepts the view that money does not lose its class specificity, i.e. it sustains a "self-reproducing class system" (Ryan, 1989:29).Ultimately the problem is due to the fact that the doctrine of rights in the West is welded to an individualist model of the social good in which the right to personhood grew up historically in conjunction with the right to property (Ryan, 1989:152).It is not difficult to see what impact the project of modernity in its liberal pluralist form have had in South Africa.Money and its concomitant social power differentiations, translated into political power, had elevated a white intelligentsia to the status of managers of a capitalist economic system which required labour exploitation as a necessary and rational feature of its operations.If Ryan is right, modernity's attempts to address the social problems which have 86-89), and who have interests only contingently connected.(Gyekye ascribes the aggregative view to Western theorists like Rawls and Dworkin.)Strong and weak association construe the relation between individuals and the collectivities with which they identify as a "'membership' relation"(Bird, 1999:85).Strong and weak association distinguish two sets of "membership" relation: the relation between individuals and the com munity that they collectively constitute, and the relation between the community and the political institutions of the state that act on behalf of the community whenever the rights of individuals are at issue(Bird,  1999:86).This distinction draws a line between the public and private domains which are significant for theories that entertain the notion of individual rights in some way.Now, if individuals count as moral agents only because of their membership of a group, and act as moral agents only through the marital, paternal, and maternal structures of their groups, the relationships between individual members are said to be irreducible (Bird's term -1999:87), and this is a characteristic of strong association.Strong association is a feature of Wiredu's theory, given the moral significance he attaches to kinship groups and lineages1.This does not mean, asBird (1999:88)  makes clear, that "the relationships defining an association ... exist apart from individuals"; strong association makes a claim "about how individuals compromise ... [the] collective" Metanationallty, comprehensive democracy and left communitarian rights...____________ 1 See Wiredu (1996:34-42).Wiredu does make provision for individual rights vested in human beings in virtue of their intrinsic worth as human beings.This aspect of his theory makes provision for rights owed to strangers which, as a class of rights, is distinct from the 'role'-rights observed by the Akan.Akans, of course, also owe each other rights of respect vested in the intrinsic worth of persons, a right Wiredu defends as a universal norm founded in the biology of the human species.
Gyekye's theory is in a crucial respect standardly communitarian.The arguments he advances regarding the cultural matrix as contexts of choice and identity is evidence for him that the collective interest overrides individual goods in cases of conflict.Gyekye (1997:40) formu lates the foundation of this thesis as the claim that "the cultural community must be held as [ontologically] prior to the individual".In Gyekye the overriding normative force of community and the common good derives from this ontological priority.Yet the common good is that set of goods which all humans universally desire, and which are essential for the "basic functioning of the individual in human society" (Gyekye, 1997:45).Now, one way of interpreting this view is to say that these are no goals or values which are independently or irreducibly collective.Indeed, the only goals which the collectivity pursues are those, as Bird (1999:51) points out, "whose value is fully reducible to individual interests and values".If this is correct, the cultural space I referred to above in which individual rights exist consists in the cultural constraint that, all other things being equal, collective aspirations are really individual interests and goals for which the collectivity provides the means of expression.But, this interpretation misses an essential part of Gyekye's meaning.
, 1997:46) -are obstructed.These rights can be obstructed by individual action, for instance, through coercion, which denies to some an equal entitlement to liberty and security or through non-recognition, which denies to some an equal entitlement to respect and dignity.In these cases remedial interference 3 Young (1990:120) argues that the distinction between the private and the public domains need not be a "social division" -each with 'different kinds of institutions, activities, and human attributes".It is not clear whether Gyekye has a social division in mind His concept of a heterogeneous public is much like Young's in conforming to two principles: "no persons, actions, or aspects of a person's life should be forced into privacy ... and ... no social institution or practices should be excluded a priori from being a proper subject for public discussion and expression".4 Rhoda (1990:179) thinks that "African scholars who advocate a distinct African concept of human rights seem to be [preoccupied with] the right of the individual to separate him -(or, as noted, frequently her-) self from the group, not to assert claims against the state".Though Gyekye is advancing an African conception through his notion of the equiprimordiality of person and community, individual rights are, for him, claims individuals assert against the state They assert their rights claims as individuals, but their rights protect the non-ethnic communocultural identifying way in which Gyekye's preferred form of collective organization structures the range of opportunities and choices available to an agent allows only talk of an estimate of the extent to which an agent is free10.Berlin (1969:xxxiv-xl) defines negative freedom as the "absence of [culpable] obstacles to possible choices and activities", which, when coupled with the thesis that culpable obstacles are coercions and coercions are unacceptable infractions of liberty(Berlin, 1969:122), implies a view of "individual inviolability"(Bird, 1999:115)  of the kind Gyekye's permissible interferences can accommodate."Individual invio lability" is the strong thesis that the only legitimate interferences with individual liberty are those which are necessary to guarantee the inviolable and equal entitlement of each to "exercise their own capacity for moral autonomy" (Bird's rendition of Kant's base line -1999:113), and to "personal and propriety security' ' (Bird's rendition of Mill's base line -1999:129).Both exclude any permissible right to structure individuals' opportunities and choices for their own benefit, or to "educate them into autonomy"(Bird, 1999:133).Gyekye's incomplete asymmetry stops short of the inviolability criterion of these theses: a public ethos does intrude upon the private sphere of activity in the sense that it may prevent the realization of some interests which some agents may in fact have.Incomplete asymmetry allows for this limited penetration of paternalism.It also allows internal boundaries to the zone of morally permissible actions alongside external ones.This feature of Gyekye's theory, in particular the reciprocal balance between these boundaries, I think, is the great strength of Gyekye's theory.How is the boundary drawn?I need to give a sense of the reciprocal balance Gyekye requires between internal and external limitations to liberty infractions.A culpable infraction of liberty, one for which the transgressor may be held morally responsible, counts as a harm.Meyerson (1997:15), following Nagel (1991), invokes the principle of "reasonable unanimity" to establish consensual grounds for the 10 Waldron (1995:109) concurs "To preserve a culture -to insist that it must be secure, come what may -is to insulate it from the very forces and tendencies that allow it to operate in a context of genuine choice ... The possibility of erosion of allegiance, or of the need to compromise a culture beyond all recognition in order to retain allegiance and prevent mass exodus, is the key to cultural evaluation.It is what cultures do, under pressure, as contexts of genuine choice".legitimacy of liberty limitations.Nagel asks what limitations citizens would agree to when the conditions under which they grant their assent were fair, i.e. when morally irrelevant considerations such as superior force, the de facto bargaining power of their economic and oppressive practices as "a set of actions taken not by a single person, but instead by different people each time, which are harmful either individually or collectively or both".Job discrimination, for instance, qualifies as a practice of social oppression.So does the transmission of false beliefs about values, such as the belief in the unequal moral worth of persons prevalent in societies which practise gender discrimination18.Kernohan (1998:12) treats oppressive practices as accumulative harms, which manifest as internalized nega tive self-images caused and sustained by the culture in which the agent lives.Cultural oppression is a form of power (Kernohan, 1998:14).Kernohan (1998:15), citing Galbraith (1983:25-26) sees the connection in the concept of implicit conditioned power.Only a part of the subordination of women was achieved by explicit instruction -explicit conditioning.Much and almost certainly more was (and is) achieved by the simple acceptance of what the community and culture have long thought right and virtuous .
Gyekye, Ryan advocates economic and social rights as backup rights to ensure effective utilization of political rights.
wake of differential patterns of distribution tend to assimilate difference and marginalize historical identities.This is a source of serious social tension.The problem is clearly that the open market favours those who hold the advantages, irrespective of how those advantages have been accumlated.. Like Gyekye, Ryan thinks the self needs to be reconceptualized.In the multicultural society there is no space for a non-relational self, and by implication, no space for non-relational action in civic or civil society.The self, then, must cease to be an owner for whom rights are property.If this be granted, the right to equal treatment becomes inseparable from its institutional context, and the "interrelational character of social wealth" (Ryan, 1989:117) and hence inseparable from material equality.So the doctrine of rights become a doctrine of exercisable rights" (Ryan, 1989:162).Only a state assisted capacity building programme can ensure that this outcome is achieved.And achieving this outcome is essential to the construction of second-tier solidarity.•The need for equity between regionsThe last point touches on the need for equity between regions.Thornton (1996:154) believes rightly that the metropolitan regions of South Africa are affluent compared to the rural-traditional regions."South Africa is a country stretched as thin as a sheet over three points of power and wealth."They are Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, veritable "citystates, not just cities"(Thornton, 1996:154), "each with its own identity and allegiances"(Thornton, 1996:154).It is only recently, notes Thornton (1996:157), that a universal politics in which "all persons are the primary units" have been established.But in this set-up the inhabitants of the metropolitan regions have all the advantages, economic and political.At least what they lack by way of direct political clout, they make up by way of economic influence disproportionate to their numbers.Social inte gration around the idea of a shared constitutional dispensation -a constitutional patriotism -which is a feature of Gyekye's second-tier solidarity, will not be achieved if the means to exercising political rights, means beyond the present political poverty line,