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Multicultural odysseys: navigating the new international politics of diversity, by Will Kymlicka, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, 316 pp. + bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-19-928040-7

Multicultural Odysseys is a virtuoso performance, a clear exposition of the forms, origins, logic, and diffusion of what Will calls "liberal multiculturalism." In this venture, Will shows himself to be a philosopher willing to get his hands dirty willing to learn about international conventions, about Eastern European and former Soviet states, about ethnic conflict, and about policy diffusion. He displays a remarkable catholicity of investigatory strategy. In political philosophy, such qualities of curiosity, necessary though they may be, are not uniform, as a quick glance at some utterly a priori theories of self-determination and secession, for example, would show. Furthermore, the causal account in this book is admirably parsimonious and (I think) for the most part persuasive. For example, Will contends, the causal role of reliable human rights protections and the absence of Fifth Column minorities in the West facilitated the adoption of multicultural policies there, whereas the absence of these two features in Eastern Europe and in much of Asia and Africa impedes their growth there. Or, again, consider the critique of the perverse incentives created by OSCE minority policies in Eastern Europe, based, as they are, on security concerns and therefore rewarding majority suppression of minorities, on the one hand, and minority seizures of territory, on the other. That critique is dead-on. Not that everything in the book is right. In explaining why the rights of territorial minorities have fallen on deaf ears in Asia and Africa, Will blames the fact that the colonialists "privileged" the very minorities who now seek protection, so majorities have felt the need to curtail, rather than expand, minority rights. And he cites the Tamils in Sri Lanka as one such colonially privileged minority. This is not an accurate reading of either the general propensity or the Tamil case. In general and in Sri Lanka, minority advantages had much more to do with education than with colonial privilege, but it would take too long to pursue the point here. There are some other small mistakes of historical fact as well. It is asserted that, in Malaya, Malays, Chinese, and Indians did not oppose the Japanese (114). But they did. And it is claimed that the first steps toward desegregation in the US came "from the executive" (117), whereas the courts had actually been chipping away at this issue since the 1930s. Nevertheless, these errors do not mar the argument. On the whole, the book is a coldly realistic assessment of multicultural policies and their current limits. Romanticism does occasionally creep in, as when Will states baldly that precolonial polities "had complex systems of interethnic tolerance and coexistence," citing the well-worn Ottoman example. Undoubtedly, there were such systems, but the general assertion would be news to the mutually hostile Khmers and Vietnamese; or the neighbors of the Amhara (of whom an old proverb ran that "the wolf and the Amhara count sheep