Global Strategy - blog

Auguste Comte memorial lecture was given today by Prof. Philippe Van Parijs. The topic was interestingly ‘European Democracy and the Language Question'. Despite democracy being interesting and all, what appeared to me to be the most striking insight of his talk was the whole discussion around European Union, unified (political) decision-making bodies and the apparent question of lingua franca. Van Parijs is also originally from Belgium, a country struggling with severe problems of identity, language and governance, so he also has some additional weight in his words.

Spicing his speech up with a nice anecdote from the cost of having more than one language within an institution (the cost of translation over a weekend at the European Parliament being approximately €175,000, covering all 27 languages), he made a convincing case in favour of one language across national borders. There are many reasons for the present domination of English, the roots being perhaps in the era of the British colonial empire, the USA winning both of the world wars, etc. Despite all these reasons, the fact is that an ever-growing number of people worldwide having a different native language, communicate with each other in English. Thus, the de facto language of the world is used less and less to communicate with the native speakers of English, or in order to understand the English culture.

This, of course, is a question that touches the foundations of pretty much everything in modern-day Europe. One need not have a university degree in international relations to realise that certain countries are especially allergic to mono-linguistic tendencies not favouring their own (yes I am looking at you, Jean-Pierre). However, as Van Parijs very well put it: "a language is for communication, what is the value of not understanding each other?" In addition, he sees no intrinsic value in languages. This means, dying languages should not be protected or privileged "just because". I agree.

Achieving a state in which politics, public sphere and communication in general would be truly pan-European, remains a utopia as we speak. One, additional side to this is that how to implement (or even conceive) Europe-wide policies with nationally elected parliamentary representatives with nationalist and linguistic passions? What appeared to me, however, was the present state of academia. In my view, English is already the lingua franca, and very few seem to have a problem with that, why? Are the scholars just that pragmatic, trying to ease communication as much as possible in contributing to the development of the field?