Language, Nationalism and Democracy in Europe

Abstract

One need not look far into history or, for that matter, the burgeoning academic literature on nationalism, to find that Europe has provided us with the model of the modern nation-state as we know it today. The French Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath created the precedent for a form of political organisation not countenanced before — a polity represented and unified by a culturally and linguistically homogeneous civic realm (May 2001). Previous forms of political organisation had not required this degree of linguistic uniformity. For example, empires were quite happy for the most part to leave unmolested the plethora of cultures and languages subsumed within them — as long as taxes were paid, all was well. The Greek and Roman Empires are obvious examples here, while ‘New World’ examples include the Aztec and Inca Empires of Central and South America respectively. More recent historical examples include the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s overtly multilingual policy. But perhaps the clearest example is that of the Ottoman Empire which actually established a formal system of ‘millets’ (nations) in order to accommodate the cultural and linguistic diversity of peoples within its borders (Dorian 1998). Nonetheless, in the subsequent politics of European nationalism — which, of course, was also to spread throughout the world — the idea of a single, common ‘national’ language (sometimes, albeit rarely, a number of national languages) quickly became the leitmotif of modern social and political organisation.