What makes multiculturalism in contemporary Asia so different from its Western counterpart? And by the same token, how might Asian engagements with multiculturalism help inform and expand concepts of multiculturalism itself? Multiculturalism in Asia, edited by Will Kymlicka and Baogang He, offers an articulate, thought-provoking look at one of the most ethnoculturally diverse regions in the world as it struggles to come to terms with ideas of socio-cultural identity, pre- and post-colonial legacies, and the necessities of economic and political survival in increasingly global contexts. Management of ethnocultural diversity is essential to the stability of the region and is also thought to be key to the process of democratization. It involves not only identity politics and the equitable sharing of power, but also broader questions of entitlement, justice, and the framing of issues in ways that are both universally and locally appropriate. Kymlicka and the other contributors necessarily engage these issues from perspectives of minority rights only, but ultimately these are profoundly human issues that involve what it means to be human and part of civilized society. In that sense, Multiculturalism in Asia helps underscore the urgent need in the region to develop leadership and an educated public conversant in both indigenous and foreign humanistic traditions.

From the outset, Kymlicka limits “multiculturalism” to mean the liberal management of ethnocultural diversity at the institutional level. Within these boundaries, the 13 articles in the collection achieve remarkable richness and engages the reader from theoretical, historical, and pragmatic perspectives. Mika Toyota in Chapter 5 asks whether the traditionally migratory tribes of Thailand, who are relative newcomers to the territory, can be ascribed the rights of “indigenous peoples” based on similarity of their traditional culture and marginalization to the indigenous peoples in the Americas. In Chapter 8, Chua Beng Huat provides an articulate account of how such “politics of recognition” work in Singapore, where every citizen is assigned an official ethnic, religious, linguistic identity at birth, thus overriding personal input or even reality. In the interests of communitarian stability and ethnic harmony, Singapore recognizes its three major ethnic constituents (Chinese, Malays, Indians) equally but reduces the diversity and difference within each group—i.e., recognizing Mandarin as the sole Chinese language and Islam as the religion of all Malays. Here, as throughout the book as a whole, freedom of choice over one’s social identity and destiny is a central issue pertaining to democratic multiculturalism.

A particularly illuminating case study on the nature of the democracy-multiculturalism relationship is Lam Peng-Er’s differentiation, in Chapter 10, between the formally liberal democratic Japanese state and the illiberal, prejudicial Japanese society that is barely aware of the existence of widespread discrimination against Ainus, Okinawans, and ethnic Koreans. Caught up in the myth of a homogeneous Japan, most Japanese are unwilling to “talk about,” let alone “adopt any proactive state policies of recognition or multiculturalism.”

In conjunction with these theoretical issues, the book raises a host of historical questions specific to the region. All the major ethical, religious, and communal traditions in Asia include values of tolerance, but that tolerance may be based on different rationales and therefore lead to different conceptions of multiculturalism. In Chapter 3, Baogang He describes what he calls Confucian China’s duty-bound paternalism toward its minority “younger brothers.” In Chapters 4 and 5, by contrast, Vatthana Pholsena and Mika Toyota explain the Buddhist system of “galactic polities” in Laos and Thailand respectively, based on loose center-periphery relations. Here the tradition of tolerance is less based on Confucian assimilation of minority peoples and more on a laissez-faire detachment from their welfare, different again from the “plural and accommodative nature” of Hinduism in India.

These often deeply entrenched ethos of tolerance can furthermore abet or be at odds with various modern political ideologies and infrastructures, ranging from liberal, consociational, and communitarian models of democracy (Japan, Malaysia, Singapore respectively) to multicultural and multination federalism (India, Sri Lanka), Marxist (Laos) and Maoist (China) Communism, authoritarian dictatorship (Indonesia under Suharto), and decentralized conglomerate of local adat communities (Indonesia after Suharto). Complicating the picture even further is the legacy of colonial history in which European imperial powers privileged discontented minorities against the majority and fostered distrust between them to “divide and rule” the large populations. The new resentments that were created affected post-independence negotiations of power and privilege whereby both majority and minority groups can claim histories of injustice, victimization, and betrayal at the hands of the other.

Finally, these emotionally charged questions stand in opposition to more pragmatic concerns as well. Though firmly on the side of liberal multicultural values, each contributor provides a realistic assessment of the complex, competing needs that inform the individual multicultural policies in Asia. As Kymlicka notes in his introduction, minority rights are not likely to be recognized in states where they are seen as potential collaborators with a neighboring enemy along religious, ethnic, ideological, historical, and linguistic ties. The book is also hindered by extremes of poverty in which “niceties” of civility—multicultural and otherwise—are seen as idle dreams beside the more immediate needs of material subsistence and economic development.

Caught between these theoretical, historical, and practical obstacles, the contributors cautiously agree that there is room for hope, but suggest that real change will be slow to come. Such change is dependent on material factors such as the growing need for outside labor force to support the aging and dwindling populations in developed countries. Until then, the book suggests, pressures exerted by NGOs and improved access for minority groups to information on the internet and other sources offer the best weapons for the fight for minority rights in Asia.

What is not sufficiently considered in the book is the need for integrated educational systems in the region that will lead to the development of public leadership as well as a public capable of supporting that leadership with “fellow feeling” or empathy for one another. As Japanese, Sri Lankan, and Burmese cases make clear, democracy itself makes little difference in the actual practice of multiculturalism unless it is supported by an educated majority willing to engage in public life for more than private interests. Education to build such a public would have to be based on at least two principles. First, that individuals identify with values of noblesse oblige and civility as extensions of—in Neo-Confucian terms—self-cultivation and self-fulfillment, organic values neither to be imposed from without nor to be understood as negating the individual self. Second, these values must be founded on respect for each native tradition toward a new, mutually informed, and revitalized “indigenous” tradition.