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Addressing Linguistic Diversity in the European Union: Strategies and Dilemmas

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Addressing Linguistic Diversity in the European Union: Strategies and Dilemmas EUROSPHERE Diversity and the European Public Sphere Towards a Citizens' Europe Linking the European Union with the Citizens Evaluation of EU Diversity Policies Aiming to Create an Inclusive European Public Sphere Edited by Peter A. Kraus, University of Helsinki Giuseppe Sciortino, University of Trento This paper can be downloaded without charge from: http://eurospheres.org/ ISSN 1890-5986 EUROSPHERE FINAL COMPARATIVE STUDY VOLUME II Title: Linking the European Union with the Citizens. Evaluation of EU Diversity Policies Aiming to Create an Inclusive European Public Sphere Editors: Peter A. Kraus and Giuseppe Sciortino This version: December 2012 Webpage: http://eurospheres.org/ © EUROSPHERE, 2013 http://eurospheres.org/ © 2013 by Editors and Chapter Authors All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including notice, is given to the source. The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the EUROSPHERE Project. The statement of purpose for the EUROSPHERE Online Working Paper Series is available from the EUROSPHERE working papers website, http://www.eurospheres.org Peter A. Kraus Helsinki University [email protected] Giuseppe Sciortino Trento University [email protected] ISSN 1890-5986 (online) Introduction Over the last decades, the concept of diversity has attained a pivotal role in the official discourse of the European Union. Since the early 1970s, all main treaties and declarations that document the successive construction of a European polity pay tribute to diversity. The term’s normative preeminence becomes especially salient in the context of attempts at defining Europe’s political identity, and, in particular, the novel aspects that set this identity apart from previous models of political organization. Thus, the European Union (EU) has given itself the motto “united in diversity”, and the unity in diversity which Europe claims to stand for is supposed to introduce a critical element of difference with regard to the institutional legacy of nationalism. While unity in European nation-states was generally conceived of as a synonym of cultural homogeneity, through which the people were linked to “their” state, and the state to “its” people, the rationale of European integration is supposed to follow another direction, namely to pursue common political objectives without menacing the diverse cultural and linguistic affiliations which are observable among the Union’s citizenry. The Treaty of Lisbon, adopted in 2009 as a surrogate of sorts for the aborted Constitution for Europe, offers a compact piece of evidence of the normative status assigned to diversity in the process of European polity-building. Article I- 3, which lays down the Union’s primary goals, includes the following two paragraphs: It [the Union] shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States. The Union shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced. In a succinct way, the quotation captures the key components of what can be considered Europe’s approach to the identity issue, an approach outlined for the first time in the “Declaration on European Identity”, which the European Community (EC) laid down in Copenhagen in 1973. A first component puts forward a set of political landmarks which is shared by all forces involved in the construction of Europe. In addition to cohesion and solidarity, such landmarks typically include freedom, democracy and human rights as central political values. The second component then emphasizes the importance cultural diversity has for creating a political framework that unites Europeans. In the four decades that have gone by since the drafting of the Copenhagen declaration, 1 there has been a remarkable continuity in connecting these two identity layers. At the same time, the commitment to the protection of cultural diversity has come to be a principle repeated ritualistically in all resolutions of symbolic weight drafted in the name of Europe. Again and again, the EU has kept reassuring its member states and its citizens that regardless of all political common ground that may emerge among Europeans, the European project does not involve any measures making for uniform patterns of cultural identification (Kraus, 2011: 24–25). The celebration of diversity, especially when set against the background of nation-state formation, can be regarded as one of the most genuine new contributions European integration has thus far made to the language of contemporary constitutionalism. Since the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC) by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, the gradual uniting of Europe has remained connected to the imperative of respecting the particular cultural identities of the Member States. In this respect, the continuous emphasis placed on cultural and linguistic diversity may well be seen, first and foremost, as the tribute the Union has to pay to its key units – i.e. the European nation- states – in order to make them comply with the institutional implications of the process of building Europe. On the other hand, the emphasizing of diversity has also been interpreted as the most substantial innovative element in the normative template that underpins Europe’s semi-constitutional discourse (Weiler, 1999). It may be conceded that, in the course of the last decades, those who have been acting as the architects of an emerging Euro-polity have made a conscious effort at establishing diversity as a core value to be safeguarded by European integration. But which are the diversities that are to be considered as protected and enhanced by the European project? Which of the many forms of social heterogeneities that structure the European populations are to be considered a significant focus of contention from the point of view of the European public sphere? Which categories of difference-based claims are to be regarded as legitimate interlocutors of the European institutions, and why? And how different categories of diversities have been encountered – sometime purposefully, sometime incidentally – by the various agencies and institutions that have a stake in the European project? This questions have gained center- stage during the activities of the Workpackage 8.2, as soon as the team members have started to discuss the issue. It is easy to realize that some differences – linguistic, territorial, national – had been a focus of reflection and action since the very beginning of the European project. They have been part and parcel of the notable attempt to create a new 2 kind of institutional reality functionally differentiated from, but fully respectful of, the segmentation of Europe in a variety of nation-states. Nevertheless, as will be shown in our assessment of EU policies related to language, the recurrent official statements stressing the importance of diversity as a European value do not produce a programmatic frame that would provide us with a set of consistent guidelines fleshing out political criteria for the protection of diversity in the realms of society which are most openly exposed to the standardizing pressures connected with the dynamic of European integration (see chapter 1). Along the years, and with the intensification of the European project, EU action has more and more frequently stumbled upon other sources of diversity – such as those related to religious segmentation and the changes in population composition brought about by immigration – that had been initially avoided by the self- understood technocratic nature of seminal European institutions. Since the early ’90, they have become increasingly salient, raising important issues at the polity and policy level (Chapters 2,4). Still some other – such as gender differences – have acquired a new meaning – and a new European salience – as part of the complex semantic restructuring of what means to be a ‘European’. As a result, European institutions face today a much wider and complex set of ‘diversities’ demanding recognition and claiming protective action than in the past. Each of them raises very different questions, and challenge in different ways the dominant discourses of ‘efficiency’ and ‘justice’ that operate as the dominant justification regimes of the European project. This growing complexity has opened a new scenario, and – as the present report document in detail – it has made necessary quite a bit of institutional learning, trying out different approaches in different fields. A process, as this report argues, that is still very much underway. Before entering the detail of the analysis of different fields, it is worth to stress that the new scenario here surveyed is surely the outcome of the growing significance of EU institutions in a variety of social domains, that has made increasingly difficult to respect a tight and clear-cut functional distinction between prerogatives of the EU versus prerogatives of its member-states. But it should not be forgotten it is also the result of a growing set of expectations cast upon European institutions by a variety of difference-based claim-makers, placing requests on ‘Europe’ often extending beyond the strictly established mandate of each single EU institution. From the point of view of the analysis, the impact of EU policies on this penumbra of expectations is often more important that the actual content of each single decision. 3
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