Mind Over Matter: The European Union Defies the Odds
Thus, for EU leaders, multilingualism is more than a good idea. It's obligatory. Thanks to the Union's legendary labyrinthian bureaucracy, pinning down language policy details is difficult; inquirers risk becoming eternally enmeshed in Europa, the EEC Internet server, as they struggle to sort action from proposal. Nevertheless, in practice the Union's language policies are more forthright and more realistic than those of any other government in history. Official documents are often released in several languages. These are not translations; such documents are actually generated in multilingual committees using an Apollo-Soyuz method. Union legal terminology classes these versions "authentic." Subsequent translations are for informational purposes only; their headings list the authentic versions, which are the only ones that may be cited in official proceedings.
In its determination to protect nonofficial languages, the EU ran headlong into linguistics' dirtiest secret: nobody knows what a language is. Just labelling some languages is a royal headache, and politics muddle an already dubious process considerably. EU cultures also define languages differently. Some are splitters; the French label superficial accent differences "languages." Others are lumpers; the British consider differing traditions one language if they are mutually intelligible. Finally, dominant cultures often dismiss hearth tongues as corruptions of the larger tradition, and deny education in the language in question. As a result, hearth tongues may not generate literature (some are not even alphabetised), a customary if unscientific measure of linguistic autonomy.
The EU's protection of minority languages is a source of conflict among majority-language speakers. Having spent a millennium trying to obliterate nonconforming cultures, dominant societies must now contend with a government that militantly protects minority rights. As a result, minority language speakers (about 40 million EU citizens) tend to be very pro-Union, while members of the ruling classes range from wary to stridently opposed to it.
The issue of how much confederation how fast, and under what conditions, is as complex as the cultures involved. North American media have done a miserable job covering the emergence of this powerful new nation on the world stage. What discussion there is centres on economic issues. But business concerns are only part of the story. The European Union is a social experiment that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. And aside from a few spectacular instances of over-government, it's working. Other nations would do well to take a page from the United States of Europe, particularly
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