Scholars of the politics and sociology of Canada’s francophone minority communities have not, for the most part, invested in or engaged with the predominantely European scholarship on non-territorial autonomy and/or national cultural autonomy. That should not be taken to mean they have not explored notions of autonomy, though. Autonomy, both normatively and institutionally, has been a topic of discussion since the emergence of this field of research in the late 1970s. In this paper, I seek to build bridges between these two analogous yet unconnected bodies of scholarship through the works of four key scholars: Rodrigue Landry, Linda Cardinal, Pierre Foucher and Johanne Poirier. The task consists in introducing conceptions of autonomy developed in the French-language Canadian literature on linguistic minorities before then identifying two important areas of convergence with the English-language European literature on NTA / NCA. These two areas are the articulation of a moral case for cultural autonomy and the fundamental concern with institutional mechanisms. In the end, this paper will hopefully pave the way to more fruitful collaborations between Canadian and European scholars working on issues with a number of important similarities.
