The Politics of Difference:

Statehood and Toleration in

a Multicultural World*
MICHAEL WALZER
Abstract. The author identifies four possible attitudes of tolerance toward groups
with different ways of life: resignation, indifference, curiosity and enthusiasm. He
explores the potential for these attitudes and concludes by discussing the role of
boundaries within communities in modernism and postmodernism. The author is
not going to focus on toleration of eccentric or dissident individuals in civil society;
he is interested in individual rights primarily when they are exercised in common
in the course of voluntary association or religious worship or cultural elaboration
or when they are claimed by groups on behalf of their members.
I.
I will begin with a couple of distinctions. I am not going to focus in this
paper (except at the very end) on the toleration of eccentric or dissident
individuals in civil society or even in the state. Individual rights may well lie
at the root of every sort of toleration, but I am interested in those rights
primarily when they are exercised in common (in the course of voluntary
association or religious worship or cultural elaboration) or when they are
claimed by groups on behalf of their members. The eccentric individual,
solitary in his difference, is fairly easy to tolerate, and at the same time social
repugnance for and resistance to eccentricity, while certainly unattractive,
isnt terribly dangerous. The stakes are much higher when we turn to
eccentric and dissident groups.
Nor am I going to focus here on political toleration, where the groups in
question are oppositional movements and parties. These are competitors
for political power, necessary in democratic regimes, which quite literally
require that there be alternative leaders (with alternative programs), even if
Ratio Juris. Vol. 10 No. 2 June 1997 (16576)
* First published in The Morality of Nationalism, 1997 Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan. Used
by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
they never actually win an election. They are fellow participants, like the
members of the opposing team in a basketball game, without whom there
could not be a game, and who therefore have a right to score baskets and
win, if they can. Problems arise only in the case of people who want to dis-
rupt the game, while still claiming the rights of players and the protection of
the rules. These problems are often hard, but they dont have much to do
with the toleration or difference, which is intrinsic to democratic politics, but
rather with the toleration of disruption (or the risk of disruption)another
matter entirely.
My concern here is with toleration when the differences at stake are cul-
tural, religiousway-of-life differenceswhen the others are not fellow
participants and there is no common game and no intrinsic need for differ-
ence. Even a liberal society does not require a multiplicity of ethnic groups
or religious communities; nor do any of the groups require any or all of
the others. The groups may be competitive with one another, seeking con-
verts or supporters among uncommitted or loosely committed individuals,
but their primary aim is to sustain a way of life among their own members,
reproducing their culture or faith in successive generations. They are in-
wardly focussed, which is exactly what political parties cannot be. At the
same time, they require some kind of extended social space (outside the
household) for the sake of assembly, worship, argument, celebration, mutual
aid, schooling, and so on.
Now, what does it mean to tolerate groups of this sort? Understood as an
attitude or state of mind, toleration describes a number of possibilities. The
first of these, which reflects the origins of religious toleration in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, is simply a resigned acceptance of difference for
the sake of peace. People kill one another for years and years, and then
mercifully, exhaustion sets in, and we call this toleration. But we can trace a
continuum of more substantive acceptances. A second possible attitude is
passive, relaxed, benignly indifferent: It takes all kinds to make a world. A
third expresses openness to the others, curiosity, respect, a willingness to
listen and learn. And, furthest along the continuum, there is the enthusiastic
endorsement of difference: an aesthetic endorsement, if difference is taken to
represent in cultural form the largeness and diversity of Gods creation or
of the natural world; or a functional endorsement, if difference is viewed as
a necessary condition of human flourishing, offering to individual men and
women the choices that make their autonomy meaningful.
But perhaps this last attitude falls outside my subject: How can I be said
to tolerate what I in fact endorse? If I want the others to be here, in this
society, among us, then I do not tolerate otherness, I support it. I do not,
however, necessarily support this or that version of otherness. I might well
prefer another other, culturally or religiously closer to my own practices and
beliefs (or, perhaps, more distant, exotic, posing no competitive threat). So it
seems right to say that though I support the idea of difference, I tolerate the
166 Michael Walzer
instantiated differences. And there will always be people, in any democratic
society and however well-entrenched the commitment to pluralism is, for
whom some particular differencethis or that form of worship, family
arrangement dietary ruleis very hard to tolerate. I shall say of all people
who actually accept differences of this sort, without regard to their standing
on the continuum of resignation, indifference, curiosity, and enthusiasm,
that they possess the virtue of tolerance.
Similarly, I shall treat all the social arrangements through which we
incorporate difference, co-exist with it, allow it a share of social space, as the
institutionalised forms of this same virtue. Historically, there have been four
different sorts of arrangements that make for toleration, four models of a
tolerant society. I want now to describe these briefly and roughly, and
then to say something about the self-understanding of the men and women
who make them work today (insofar as they actually work: Toleration is
always a precarious achievement). What exactly do we do when we tolerate
difference?
II.
The oldest arrangements are those of the great multi-national empires
beginning, for our purposes, with Persia and Rome. Here the various groups
are constituted as autonomous communities, political/legal as well as
cultural/religious in character, ruling themselves across a considerable range
of their activities. The groups have no choice but to co-exist with one
another, for their interactions are governed by imperial bureaucrats in
accordance with an imperial code, like the Roman jus gentium, designed to
maintain some minimal fairness, as fairness is understood in the imperial
centre. The bureaucrats do not, however, interfere in the internal life of the
autonomous communities for the sake of fairness or anything elseso long
as taxes are paid and peace maintained. (An exception to this rule: The
British decision to ban the sutteethe self-immolation of a Hindu widow
in India, which they rightly regarded as an extreme examplethey did not
pursue other examplesof the oppression of women.) Hence they can be
said to tolerate the different ways of life, and the imperial regime can be
called a regime of toleration, whether or not the members of the different
communities are tolerant of one another. Under imperial rule, they willy
nilly manifest tolerance in their everyday interactions, and some of them,
perhaps, learn to accept difference, standing somewhere on the continuum
that I have described. But the survival of the different communities does not
depend on this acceptance. It depends only on bureaucratic toleration,
sustained, mostly, for the sake of peace (though individual bureaucrats have
been variously motivated, a few of them famously curious about difference
or even enthusiastic in its defense).
The Politics of Difference 167
This is probably the most successful way of incorporating difference
and enabling (requiring is more accurate) peaceful co-existence. But it is
not, or at least it never has been, a democratic way. Whatever the character
of the different autonomies, the incorporating regime is autocratic. I
do not want to idealise this autocracy; it can be brutally repressive, for the
sake of maintaining its conquests, as the history of Assyria and Israel,
Rome and Carthage, Spain and the Aztecs, Russia and the Tatars, amply
demonstrates. But settled imperial rule is often tolerantand tolerant
precisely because it is everywhere autocratic, which is to say, not bound
by the interests or prejudices of any of the conquered groups, equally
distant from all of them. Roman proconsuls in Egypt or British regents in
India ruled more even-handedly than any local majority was (or is) likely
to do.
Imperial autonomy tends to lock individuals into their communities and
therefore into a singular ethnic or religious identity. It tolerates groups, not
(except in a few cosmopolitan centers and capital cities) free-floating men
and women. Lonely dissidents or heretics, cultural vagabonds, intermarried
couples and their children will flee to the imperial capital, which is likely to
become as a result a fairly tolerant placeand the only place where social
space is measured to an individual fit. Everyone else will live in homogen-
ous neighbourhoods or districts, tolerated there but not likely to be welcome
or even safe across whatever line separates them from the others; they can
mix comfortably only in neutral spacethe market, say, or the imperial
courts and prisons. Still, they live, most of the time, in peace alongside one
another, respectful of cultural as well as geographic boundaries.
Today, all this is gone (the Soviet Union was the last of the empires): the
autonomous institutions, the carefully preserved boundaries, the ethnically
marked identity cards, the far-flung bureaucracies. Autonomy did not mean
much at the end (one reason, perhaps, for imperial decline); its scope was
greatly reduced by the impact of modern ideas about sovereignty and by
totalizing ideologies uncongenial to the accommodation of difference. But
ethnic and religious differences survived, and wherever they were territorially
based, local agencies, more or less representative, retained some minimal
functions and some symbolic authority. These they were able to convert very
quickly, once the empires fell, into a kind of state machinery, driven by nation-
alist ideology, aiming at sovereign power. With sovereignty, of course, comes
membership in international society, the most tolerant of all societies but,
until very recently, not so easy to get into. This is where and how most groups
would prefer to be tolerated: as nation-states (or religious republics) with
governments, armies, and borders, co-existing with other nation-states in
mutual respect. But will these new nation-states tolerate their own minority
groups? And how can we respect them if they dont? There ought to be limits
to international toleration, but no one has yet figured out how to establish
these limits or maintain them.
168 Michael Walzer
III.
Before I consider the nation-state as a possibly tolerant society, I want briefly
to turn to a morally but not politically more likely heir to the multi-national
empirethe consociational or bi- or tri-national state. Examples like Belgium,
Switzerland, Cyprus, Lebanon, and the still-born Bosnia suggest the range of
possibility here and also the imminence of disaster. Consociationalism is a
heroic program since it aims to maintain imperial co-existence without the
imperial bureaucrats and without the distance that made those bureaucrats
more or less impartial rulers. Now the different groups are not tolerated by
a single transcendent power; they have to tolerate one another and work out
among themselves the terms of their co-existence.
This is not impossible. Success is most likely where there are only two
roughly equal groupsand where the equality is stable over time. Then the
proportionate allocation of resources and offices in the civil service is relat-
ively easy, and neither group need fear the dominance of the other. It is the
fear of dominance that breaks up consociations. Mutual toleration depends
on trust, not so much in each others good will as in the institutional
arrangements that guard against the effects of ill-will. I cannot live tolerantly
alongside a dangerous other. What is the danger that I fear? That the con-
sociation will collapse into an ordinary nation-state, where I will be a mem-
ber of the minority, looking to be tolerated by my former associates, who no
longer require my toleration.
IV.
Most of the states that make up international society are nation-states. To call
them that does not mean that they have nationally (or ethnically or reli-
giously) homogenous populations. Homogeneity is rare, if not non-existent,
in the world today. It means only that a single dominant group organizes the
common life in a way that reflects its own history and culture and, if things
go as intended, carries the history forward and reproduces the culture. It
is these intentions that determine the character of public education, the
symbols and ceremonies of public life, the state calendar and the holidays it
enjoins. Among histories and cultures, the nation-state is not neutral. At the
same time, nonetheless, it can, as liberal and democratic nation-states com-
monly do, tolerate minorities. This toleration takes different forms, though it
rarely reaches the full autonomy of the old empires. Regional autonomy is
especially unlikely, for then members of the dominant nation living in the
region would be subjected to alien rule in their own country.
Toleration in nation-states is commonly focused not on groups but on mem-
bers of groups, minorities, generally conceived stereotypically, qua members,
and allowed (or expected) to form voluntary associations, organizations for
mutual aid, private schools, publishing houses, and so on. They are not
The Politics of Difference 169
allowed to sustain a corporate existence or exercise legal jurisdiction over
their fellows. Minority religion, culture, and history are matters for what
might be called the private collectiveabout which the public collective, the
nation-state, is always suspicious. Any claim to act out minority culture in
public is likely to produce great anxiety among the majority (hence the
controversy in France over the wearing of Muslim head dress in state
schools). In principle, there is no coercion of individuals, but pressure to
assimilate to the dominant nation, at least with regard to public practices,
has been fairly common and, until recent times, fairly successful. When nine-
teenth century German Jews described themselves as German in the street,
Jewish at home, they were aspiring to a nation-state norm that made privacy
a condition of toleration.
The politics of language is the key area where this norm is enforced and
challenged. The majority insists that all minorities learn and use the lan-
guage of the dominant nation, at least in their public transactions. Minor-
ities, if they are strong enough, and especially if they are territorially based,
will seek the legitimization of their own language in schools, state docu-
ments, public signage, and so on. Sometimes, one of the minority languages
is recognized as a second official language; more often, the dominant nation
watches its own language being transformed by minority use (which is also,
I suppose, a test of toleration).
There is less room for difference in nation-states than in multi-national
empires or consociations. Since the tolerated members of the minority group
are also citizens, with rights and obligations, the practices of the group are
more likely than in multi-national empires to be subject to majority scrutiny
(the suttee is imaginable only in a Hindu nation-state). Nonetheless, a variety
of differences, especially religious differences, have been successfully sus-
tained in liberal and democratic nation-states. Minorities may, in fact, do
fairly well in sustaining a common culture precisely because they are under
pressure from the national majority. Individuals drift away, pass themselves
off as members of the majority or slowly assimilate to majority life-styles.
But for most people, these self-transformations are too difficult or too hu-
miliating; they cling to their own identities and to similarly identified men
and women.
National minorities are the groups most likely to find themselves at risk.
If they are territorially concentrated, they will be suspected, perhaps rightly,
of hoping for a state of their own or for incorporation into a neighbouring state
where their ethnic relatives hold sovereign power. In time of war (whether
they are territorially concentrated or not), their loyalty to the nation-state
will readily be called into doubteven against all available evidence, as in
the case of German refugees in France during the first months of the Second
World War. Once again, toleration fails when minorities look, or when nation-
alist demagogues can make them look, dangerous. The fate of the Japanese-
Americans a few years later makes the same pointtheir fellow Americans
170 Michael Walzer
imitating, as it were, conventional nation-statehood. In fact, the Japanese
were not, and are not, a national minority in the United States, at least not
in the usual sense: Where is the majority nation? American majorities are
temporary in character, differently constituted for different purposes and
occasions, whereas a crucial feature of the nation-state is its permanent
majority. Toleration in nation-states has only one source, moves or does not
move in only one direction. The case of the United States suggests a very
different set of arrangements.
V.
The fourth model of co-existence and possible toleration is the immigrant
society. Now the members of the different groups have left their territorial
base, their homeland, behind them, come individually or in families, one by
one, to a new land and then dispersed across it. They cluster for comfort only
in relatively small numbers, always intermixed with other, similar groups in
cities, states, and regions. Hence no sort of territorial autonomy is possible
(Quebec is the crucial exception hereand another exception must be made
for conquered native peoples; I will focus primarily on the immigrants). All
ethnic and religious groups have to sustain themselves as voluntary asso-
ciationswhich means that they are more at risk from the indifference of
their own members than from the intolerance of the others. The state, once it
is pried loose from the grip of the first immigrants (who imagined in every
case that they were forming a nation-state of their own), is committed to
none of the groups that make it up. It is, in the current phase, neutral among
them, tolerant of all of them, autonomous in its purposes.
The state claims exclusive jurisdictional rights, regarding all its citizens as
individuals rather than as members of groups. Hence, the objects of tol-
eration, strictly speaking, are individual choices, acts of adhesion, rituals of
membership and worship, cultural expression, and so on. Individual men
and women are encouraged to tolerate one another as individuals, difference
being understood in each case as a personalized (rather than stereotypical)
version of group culturewhich also means that the members of each group,
if they are to display the virtue of tolerance, must accept each others differ-
ent versions. Everyone has to tolerate everyone else. No group is allowed to
organize itself coercively or to seize control of public space or to monopolize
public resources. The public schools teach the history and civics or the
state, which is conceived to have no national but only a political identity.
The history and culture of the different groups is either not taught at all or it
is taught, as it were, in equal doses, multi-culturally. Similarly, the state
provides no help to any group or it is equally supportive of all of them-
encouraging, for example, a kind of general religiosity as in those subway
and bus advertisements of the 1950s that urged Americans to Attend the
church of your choice.
The Politics of Difference 171
As this last maxim suggests, neutrality is always a matter of degree.
Some groups are in fact favoured over othersin this case, groups with
churches. But the others are still tolerated; nor is church attendance or any
other culturally specific practice turned into a condition of citizenship. It is
relatively easy, then, and not at all humiliating, to escape ones own group
and take on the reigning political identity (American). But many people
in an immigrant society prefer a hyphenated or dual identity, differentiated
along cultural/political lines as in, say, Italian-American. The hyphen join-
ing the two symbolizes the acceptance of Italianness by other Americans,
the recognition that American is a political identity without particular
cultural claims. The consequence, of course, is that Italian is a cultural
identity without political claims. That is the only form in which Italianness
is tolerated, and then it must sustain itself, if it can or as long as it can, pri-
vately, through the voluntary efforts and contributions of committed Italians.
And this is the case, in principle, with every cultural and religious group, not
only with minorities (but, again, there is no permanent majority).
Whether groups can sustain themselves under these conditionswithout
autonomy, without access to state power or official recognition, without a
territorial base or the fixed opposition of a permanent majorityis a question
still to be answered. We might think of the toleration of individual choices
and personalized versions of culture and religion as the maximal (or the most
intensive) form of toleration, but whether its effect is to foster or dissolve
group life is radically unclear. The fear that soon the only objects of toleration
will be eccentric individuals leads some groups (or their most committed
members) to seek some more positive support from the state. I have already
argued that support, in principle, can only be provided equally to every group.
But the demand for quota systems and subsidies cannot be met equally; hard
choices would have to be made if policies like these were ever adopted.
Toleration is, at least potentially, infinite in its extent; but the state can under-
write group life only within some set of political and financial limits.
In fact, there are moral limits to toleration, too, perhaps of the same sort in
domestic as in international society, ruling out intolerant and oppressive
practices in any of the constituent groups. But if the groups are voluntary
associations, and if exit is a real possibility for their members, these limits
wont usually require legal enforcement. In multi-national empires, conso-
ciations, and nation-states, the limits are historically given, which is to say,
worked out over long periods of time. Most of the groups that require tolera-
tion have been around for centuries and have accommodated themselves at
least to the minimal norms of the majority. Only new groups will be closely
scrutinized. In immigrant societies, by contrast, limits are sure to be politically
contested, for all the groups are in some sense new. Old country cultures are
reconstituted among the immigrants, but rarely in a single version, and one
of the versions is likely to be especially dogmatic and intolerantrepresent-
ing a desperate effort to deny that immigration involves any cultural loss. At
172 Michael Walzer
the same time, new doctrines proliferate and gather followers, who experi-
ment with new ways of life. The practice of polygamy among American
Mormons suggests the limits of toleration in such cases. But no one has
defined these limits with any precision.
VI.
Let me summarize the argument so far by considering these four regimes in
terms of the power relations they involve. It is often said that toleration is
necessarily a relationship of inequality, where the tolerated groups or indi-
viduals are cast in an inferior position. Therefore we should aim at some-
thing better, beyond toleration, like mutual respect. Once we have mapped
out the four regimes, however, the story looks more complicated: Mutual
respect is one of the forms toleration can takethe most attractive form,
perhaps, but not necessarily the most stable.
In multi-national empires, power rests with the central bureaucrats. All
the incorporated groups are, in principle at least, equally powerless, hence
incapable of coercing or persecuting their neighbors. Any local attempt at co-
ercion will produce an appeal to the center. So Greeks and Turks, for example,
lived peacefully side by side under Ottoman rule. Were they mutually re-
spectful? Some of them probably were; some were not. But the character of
their relationship did not depend on their mutual respect; it depended on their
mutual subjection. Consociation, by contrast, requires mutual respect at least
among the leaders of the different groupsfor the groups must not only co-
exist but negotiate among themselves the terms of their co-existence. Cyprus,
before its partition into Greek and Turkish states, represents a failed example.
In nation-states, power rests with the majority nation, which uses the state,
as we have seen, for its own purposes. This is no necessary bar to mutuality
among individuals, which is in fact likely to flourish in democratic states.
But minority groups are unequal by virtue of their numbers and will be
democratically over-ruled on most matters of public culture. The case is sim-
ilar early on in the history of immigrant societies, when the first immigrants
aspired to nation-statehood. Successive waves of immigration produce what
is, in principle again, a neutral state, the democratic version of imperial
bureaucracy. But this state addresses itself to individuals rather than groups,
and so creates an open society in which everyone is required to tolerate
everyone else. The much heralded move beyond toleration is, presumably,
now possible. As I have argued, however, it remains unclear how much of
group difference will remain to be respected, once this move is made.
VII.
I havent said anything yet about regimes of intolerance, which is what many
empires and nation-states actually are. These sometimes succeed in obliterating
The Politics of Difference 173
difference but sometimes (when they stop short of genocide and mass de-
portation) serve in fact to reinforce it. They mark off the members of minor-
ity groups, persecute them because of their membership, compel them to rely
on one another, forge intense solidarities. Nonetheless, neither the leaders of
such groups nor their most committed members would choose a regime of
intolerance. Given the opportunity, they usually seek some form of collective
toleration: a recognized place in domestic or international society with this or
that degree of self-ruleautonomy, consociation, or sovereign statehood.
We might think of collective toleration as the central project of modern
democratic politics: To provide all the victims of intolerance, all the unrecog-
nized, invisible, oppressed, and vulnerable groups with a voice, a place, and
a politics of their own. For many people on the political left, this was once
thought to require a struggle for inclusion, on the model of the working class
and socialist movements, storming and breaching the walls of the bourgeois
city. But the groups with which I am concerned here require a struggle for
boundaries. The crucial slogan of this struggle is self-determination, which
implies the need for a piece of territory or, at least, a set of independent
institutionshence, decentralization, devolution, autonomy, partition, sover-
eignty. Getting the boundaries right, not only in geographic but also in func-
tional terms, is enormously difficult, but it is necessary if the different
groups are to exercise significant control over their own lives and to do so
with some security.
The work goes on today, adapting the old imperial arrangements, extend-
ing the modern international system, proliferating nation-states, self-governing
regions, local authorities, and so on. Note what is being recognized and
tolerated here: It is always groups and their members, men and women with
singular or primary identities, ethnic or religious. The work obviously
depends upon the mobilization of these people, but it is only their leaders
who are actually engaged with one another, across boundaries, one on one
(except when the engagement is military in nature). Autonomy confirms
the authority of traditional elites; consociation is a kind of power-sharing
arrangement among those same elites; nation-states interact through their
diplomatic corps and political leaderships. For the mass of group members,
toleration is maintained by separation, on the assumption that these people
understand themselves as members and want to associate mostly with one
another. Good fences make good neighbors.
The last of my toleration models, however, suggests a different pattern
and, perhaps, a post-modern project. In immigrant societies (and also now
in nation-states under immigrant pressure), people experience what we
might think of as a life without boundaries and without secure or singular
identities. Difference is, as it were, dispersed, so that it is encountered every-
where, everyday. The hold of groups on their members is looser than it has
ever been. And the result is a constant intermixing of individuals, intermar-
riage, and a literal multi-culturalism, instantiated not only in the society as a
174 Michael Walzer
whole but in each and every individual. Now tolerance begins at home,
where we often have to make ethnic, religious, and cultural peace with our
spouses, in-laws, and childrenand with our own ambiguous (hyphenated
or divided) selves. Religious fundamentalism must be understood in part as
a rejection of any such peace, an attack on ambiguity.
The Bulgarian-French writer Julia Kristeva has been the most important
theoretical defender of this post-modern project, urging us to recognize a
world of strangers, and acknowledge the stranger in ourselves. In addition
to a psychological argument, which I must pass by here, she restates a very
old moral argument, whose first version is the biblical injunction: Do not
oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. Kristeva
changes the verb tense and the geography for the sake of a contemporary
reiteration: Do not oppress the stranger, for you are strangers in this very
land. Surely it is easier to tolerate otherness if we acknowledge the other in
ourselves. I doubt, however, that this acknowledgement is sufficient by
itself or in a merely moral form. We do not live in the world of strangers all the
time; nor do we encounter each others strangeness only one on one, but also,
still, collectively, in situations where morality must be seconded by politics.
It is not the case that the post-modern project simply supersedes modern-
ism, as in some grand metanarrative of historical stages. The one is super-
imposed on the other, without in any way obliterating it. There still are
boundaries, but they are blurred by all the crossings. We still know ourselves
to be this or that, but the knowledge is uncertain, for we are also this and
that. Strong identity groups exist and assert themselves politically, but the
allegiance of their members is measured by degrees, along a broad con-
tinuum, with larger and larger numbers clustered at the farther end (which
is why the militants at the near end are so strident these days).
This dualism of the modern and the post-modern, which is probably not
as straightforward as I have presented it, requires that difference be doubly
accommodated, first in its collective version and then in its dispersed and
divided version (or the other way around; I am not committed to a sequen-
tial argument, though the order as I have just stated it is the more likely). We
need to be tolerated and protected as members and also as strangers. Self-
determination has to be both political and personalthe two are related, but
they are not the same. The old understanding of difference, which tied
individuals to their autonomous or sovereign groups, will be resisted by
dissident and ambivalent individuals. But any new understanding, focused
solely on the dissidents, will be resisted by men and women struggling to
enact, elaborate, revise, and pass on a common religious or cultural tradi-
tion. So difference must be twice tolerated, with whatever mixit doesnt
have to be the same mix in both casesof resignation, indifference, curiosity,
and enthusiasm.
Even those of us who are enthusiasts are bound to come up against
differences, cultural and personal, that give us trouble. For we do not want
The Politics of Difference 175
to tolerate hatred and cruelty; nor does our respect for difference extend
to oppressive practices within groups (which were commonly tolerated by
imperial bureaucrats). The more closely we live together, the more the limits
of toleration become everyday issues. And closeness is one of the aims of the
post-modern project. So the solid lines on the old cultural and political maps
are turned into dotted lines, but co-existence along and across those lines is
still a problem.
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176 Michael Walzer