Debating merits of affirmative action?

Ralf Dahrendorf, Former Rector, London School of Economics, Project Syndicate

Equal rights for all citizens are fundamental to a liberal order. Such rights offer opportunities for political participation, to form associations, and to speak one's mind. But they also open doors to economic participation, and doors to participation in social institutions like education. Constitutional guarantees of these rights are the great achievement of the long battle for citizenship that marked the last two centuries.

However, such legal guarantees of rights are often insufficient. Even the right to vote means little for someone who is totally dependent on other people or institutions. Equality before the law remains an empty promise for those who cannot afford to make use of it or simply do not know how to do so.

The civil right to an education according to talent requires encouragement of many kinds. Thus, one great theme of social progress in the last century was to imbue the abstract concept of equal rights with social substance. This meant active encouragement by information, by political education, for example. As far as education was concerned, it often meant committing resources to financial assistance for students, such as subsidized loans or scholarships.

Yet when all this was done, certain stubborn obstacles to equal participation remained. Major groups remained underrepresented among societies' most successful citizens. This was notably the case for women and for some cultural minorities, especially if these were defined by unchosen "ascriptive" characteristics, such as skin color.

Few people from these groups were found among senior managers, government ministers, professors, doctors, and lawyers, so that the suspicion grew that there are largely invisible barriers blocking access to such positions. Perhaps entrenched institutional cultures militated against women or black people. Wanting real citizenship for all meant that more had to be done than offering legal guarantees, information, or even financial support.

It was a courageous step, first taken in the U.S., to decide that at least for a while a new kind of policy was needed to remedy long-term injustices. Affirmative action, as it was called, consisted of rules that set aside a certain percentage of representation among candidates for office, students and teachers, police and the military, and in other walks of life to members of hitherto disadvantaged groups. The U.S. Supreme Court became the guardian of affirmative action.

Wherever it was seriously tried, affirmative action undoubtedly had some success. This is notably the case in countries that were once homogeneous but now have to deal with citizens who are black or Muslim or are otherwise in an identifiable and neglected minority position. But at the very moment that other countries were looking to America for a policy model, affirmative action began to raise questions, of which three are particularly important.

First, is there not a risk of a kind of inverted injustice by which the traditionally privileged become the new underprivileged? The U.S. Supreme Court confronted this question when it first dealt with the case of a white student who was not admitted to medical school despite having better academic qualifications than other applicants. In Britain, children in private schools must now fear to be at a disadvantage because of the pressure on universities to admit more students from state schools. This takes us back to the old and vexing question: Can we be equal and excellent too?

Second, is equal representation at all levels really what all groups want or need? After all, the "feminization" of the teaching profession in many countries has not done any harm. Many countries have benefited from the entrepreneurialism of their Chinese or Jewish minorities. Are we perhaps pursuing too mechanical an ideal which confuses the absence of privilege and disadvantage with the absence of diversity?

Third, is affirmative action in some cases producing a new kind of rigid segmentation that destroys the very civil society it was intended to create? Are women, for example, always the best defenders of women's interests?

The same question can be raised for members of religious groups and ethnic minorities, or even of certain social classes. One shudders to think of parliaments in which the main criterion of membership is to belong to a group in need of affirmative action. Indeed, in some countries, democracy fails to deliver imaginative and effective governance because the main objective seems to be to have all major groups on board.

To repeat the earlier point: Affirmative action was and is a courageous final step in the fight for universal citizenship rights -- not just on paper, but in reality. But affirmative action must not become an enduring principle of a liberal order.

If any set of rules needs a "sunset clause" to enforce review after a specific and limited period, it is affirmative action. The flexibility of the U.S. Supreme Court in this regard is admirable. Elsewhere it is probably best to include in the laws of countries and the statutes of organizations a clause that makes affirmative action lapse after five years, or at most ten. Such a clause could be renewed, but there is nothing so effective as a firm deadline to force a thorough review and concentrate minds.