Minority Nations in the Age of Uncertainty is an excellent summary of and addition to the political science literature on minority group inclusion. Part literature review of the field, part discourse on disenfranchisement within the Canadian province of Quebec, and part philosophical discussion on the role of a central government within federalism, Gagnon’s book does justice to each of these weighty topics without including an overwhelming amount of data in the actual text, a challenging task. His basic premise is that modern democracies have had varying degrees of success with incorporating organized minority groups, and he lays out a theoretical framework for doing so effectively, punctuating his vision with case-study examples from Quebec, Canada.
Minority Nations in the Age of Uncertainty is comprised of six main chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on how national governments have accommodated minority languages in the past. For the purposes of this book, all minority nations have a separate or additional language from the majority. Chapter 2 discusses globalization as a primarily negative influence for minority nation recognition. Chapter 3 is a case study of how the government of Quebec works within the citizenship regime provided by the national government. Chapter 4 focuses on how national governments can move from containment of national minority requests to allowing these groups to gain additional autonomy. Chapter 5 is the model that Gagnon has been approaching throughout the course of the book: multinational federalism. This chapter is Gagnon’s overall aim, blending theory and case study to provide an excellent framework for minority recognition. Gagnon’s discussions of interculturalism and the failures of multiculturalism in addressing diversity in modern democracies are obviously the product of extensive research. He wraps together concepts of staatsvolk with an integration-accommodation dyad and thoroughly debunks the arguments of those who would provide minority nations less autonomy rather than more (77). Chapter 6 concludes the body of the text by reverting back to the potential future of Quebec if Canada adopts Gagnon’s recommendations.
The book’s author, whenever discussing a specific case, almost always returns to Quebec’s incorporation or lack thereof into Canada proper. Catalonia and Scotland are referenced briefly, usually to provide a minor alternative point of view. In this sense, Gagnon’s focus on minority nations overall seems slightly disingenuous. Quebec is always taken as the primary example, and while Gagnon’s treatment of this area is excellent, this book could have been made far richer by including Catalonia and Scotland case studies in equal measure. It is important to note that Gagnon does include Catalonia in greater detail in one of his other books, The Case for Multinational Federalism (80).
In addition, Gagnon primarily defines national minority groups by their language difference. The author utilizes chapter 1 for a discussion of governmental language policy, showing the importance of this concept to his definition. Even though Scotland, an area that shares the majority language of the rest of the UK, is incidentally mentioned, it does not even receive the brief treatment of Catalonia. If Gagnon seeks to discuss all minority nations, as the title promises, this would include areas that do share a common language with the majority but may be a minority for other cultural reasons. Doing so would allow Gagnon’s work to be applied to a much wider swath of humanity than is discussed in this book. Criticism notwithstanding, Gagnon’s Minority Nations in the Age of Uncertainty will definitely enhance the English-language literature on minority incorporation into the national polity, and will remain a useful text for anyone interested in identity politics for years to come.
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[Review length: 589 words • Review posted on April 27, 2016]