Abstract
This chapter draws on texts generated throughout the lifetime of the European Union to underline how its relationship to, and understanding of, language and culture has changed. It argues that the changes have been influenced by both academic debate and political considerations.
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Notes
- 1.
Heller (2011c), among others, rejects the understanding of languages as whole systems bounded and linked to specific territory. While her stance does not relate to formal linguistics such a position does create profound problems for many aspects of linguistics.
- 2.
Balibar (2004:221) makes the point that a ‘collective identity … is certainly not a mythical image that can be forcefully imposed on reality by inventing this or that historical criterion’.
- 3.
Cultural diversity only becomes a key descriptor for the centrality of plurality in EU discourse after competence in the area of culture achieved by the EC was consolidated in Article 128(1), and the contribution of the Amsterdam Treaty to 151(4). The focus on cultural diversity was consolidated outside the EU through the UNESCO declaration of 2001, the Convention on Cultural Diversity of 2006, and the Council of Europe’s 2001 Declaration on Cultural Diversity.
- 4.
The EU chose ‘unity in diversity’ as its mantra in 2004.
- 5.
This point was central to Benveniste’s (1966) insistence on a constitutive subjectivity in language.
- 6.
However there are departments within the EC that make concerted attempts to practice some degree of equality across the three languages, using a different language on different days for example.
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Williams, G., Williams, G. (2016). EU Discourse. In: Language, Hegemony and the European Union. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33416-5_2
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