1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Pluralist Nations: Pluralist Language Policies?
Mr Joseph Lo Bianco
Chief Executive, The National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia Limited
Introduction: Imagination and Materiality
Whether nations become more pluralist in general may well be too large a question to ask and answer satisfactorily. We can however discern some of the characteristics of modern nations that make them hostile to pluralism and some of the conditions of possibility (e.g. economic interdependence, high population mobility and new communications technologies) and new ideologies that make it possible to imagine ways that pluralism will be embraced by nations in their self interest.
Beyond, and in addition to, the material and lived conditions of sociality that are necessary for the formation of human groupings, there is the work of imagination (Nile 1991). Modern states, co-terminus with and contiguous with the nation, are a product of wide imagining as much as they are the outcome of material conditions.
It is only by acts of imagination that the notion of community can be extended to individuals (vaster in number and territorial expanse) than ever was conceivable in the village. In the village community was materially sustained. The conditions of possibility for the extension of community, therefore of belonging, to political entities of great scope exist in many parts of the modern world. Population mobility is at unprecedented levels and affects all corners of the globe (Castles and Miller 1993). The types of population transfers are ever more differentiated, with some estimates putting the numbers of "denizens" or temporary residents in some nations at 15%. The addition of narrow casting to mass broadcast media carries the promise of targeting groups for cultural and linguistic maintenance that until recently seemed inconceivable. These conditions make for diversity in all countries and will produce multicultural societies everywhere, or at least will make it possible for individuals and groups to sustain their differences from any surrounding society without having to fragment the unity of the state.
The term community now is a term that is dragooned into the service of even more extraordinary dimensions. Australian political leaders and their counterparts in some Asian countries use the term to modify a series of words, the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Group for example, which incorporate a religious, political, ethnic and linguistic diversity greater that all of Europe's by several factors. To talk of the APEC as a community is to add an act of language to the facts of economic interdependence.
That it is even possible to argue that the word "community" can be attached to a trade bloc is an act of language, and an act of imagination. It attempts to connote shared destinies and interdependencies. It is possible, therefore, to embrace in language previously very contradictory ideas. The term that described highly particularised and very local culture now does service in the interests of spanning the highly generalised and the virtually global. Indeed this attachment of the notion of community to a vastness it never before described is evident in the discourse of internationalism and is exemplified in documents such as the report of the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development, "Our Common Future". Such documents appropriated discourses more like those used to describe particularity and the "localness" of belonging and yet the subject matter is the global. In "Our Common Future" all the mutualities of small communities are used to make points about global responsibility. But is this mere misuse of words or is it something real? Is it indeed possible to attach meaning to such vastness ? What other than difference describes such scope?
What effect would the creation (or rather the seeking) of community at such vast levels have on the previously homogenising tendencies of the nation state? If we are writing our understanding of the state at such a great level, will this be in nature a different state? And what will be the bonds of such states? Will the unity that is surely the base of diversity (NACCME 1987) be some notion of common human destiny or will it be an idea of citizenship that allows diversity because difference is all that is shared? Is it totally naive, or worse, pernicious, political rhetoric to claim such bonds when they are so far from the experience of most people?
More specifically, can we reasonably hope that from the creation of political and inter- governmental structures that aggregate on the basis of geography, economic interest or one or other construct of internationalism that the functional social space and exclusive domains that are essential for languages to prosper will be permitted? After all in the nation state these domains were demanded for national language. In education, for example, will it be the case that mother tongue teaching and first language literacy will seriously be supported in structures of state that are greater that nations? Or will these supra national structures be the instrument for a spread into all corners of the globe of international consumer culture and Americanised forms of English? I want to start looking at such questions firstly in the "popular" literature on globalism, futurology and management.
It is hardly possible to read a book, much less a training manual, on management theory or on organisational change without finding many references to culture. Professional culture is a theme of much industrial and management restructuring and of organisational change. Organisation change, management and industry restructuring are especially important because the traditional mainstays of economic wealth are being replaced by so called information-rich (or knowledge-based) "industries". Resource wealth is no longer an accurate predictor of national wealth. In Australia's case this change is especially true and powerful. If such changes predict more stress on services then interpersonal encounters become more salient and so do language and cultural knowledge.
New forms of organisation are needed to find (or manufacture) the niches, to imagine new products and services and to generate new ideas of competitiveness (i.e. distinctiveness). In addition, the massive redistribution of trading wealth since the second world war away from an Anglo-American ascendancy to a north Asian and a North European dominance means the likely consumers are different, the target markets are new. Such pragmatic evidence of the importance of culture has given more prominence to the concept in public policy these days than ethnic diversity has ever managed to produce. The nation state, one of whose prime functions and effects was to stamp out pluralism, is now faced with internal and external pressures that value diversity as a material resource.
In addition to languages and cultures other issues have been swept up by these generic changes. One is a concern for communication efficiency. This concern, once promoted by "rights" advocates is now taken on by economic rationalists. The cause of plain language in legal documents or of adult literacy campaigns is now advanced as much by issues of economy as by questions of social justice. The goal is smaller, less expensive, more effective government and the rhetoric is all about efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery.
These concerns are part of the change to post-industrial economy (these days called the post-Fordist economy) in which mass production and dehumanised processes of production have been replaced (at least in the literature) by consensual processes, by participation and discussion rather than directive hierarchical groupings.
John Naisbitt is an exponent of a premillennial desire for prediction. In a hugely popular book, Global Paradox (1994), he argues that the rate of nation production is so rapid at the present time that it could reach 1,000, an increase of some 200 by the end of the century.
Naisbitt argues that we will proliferate nations rather than aggregate them and that this works against a general trend towards political unity in the European Union. He also argues that difference, distinctiveness and particularity are economically important in a consumer world. Niche markets are powerful. The subtitle of his bestseller is: The Bigger the World Economy the More Powerful its Smallest Players. There is a large number of futurologists like Naisbitt who analyse what they call mega-trends in the receptive climate of the pre-millennium.
These mega-trends are held to make local groups powerful and strategic and as economies globalise, societies may, in fact, particularise in terms of language, culture and effect. Among the well-read others who prophesy such a world are Keniichi Ohmae in his The Borderless World; Samuel Huntington, whose vision of the same reality is that the economic global connections will in fact lead to conflict on the grounds of what he considers the basic civilisations of the world; and Lester Thurow, who predicts a head to head conflict between three economic powerhouse blocs in the European Union, the US and in an Asia led by Japan. Robert Reich (1991) describes the work changes that will occur and counsels on what preparations are needed. In all of these forecasts, mobility of people is critical to economic advantage; research and innovation underlie competitive advantage; change and the collapse of past certainties are forecast; knowing consumers is essential to economic success and consumers are not always, or rarely, speakers of English. Culture and diversity are on the up.
The Nation and the State
It can be seen then that many of the "statist" reasons for construing the nations as unilingual have dissipated. The notion of a national language was the creation of an era of nations, especially in 19th century Europe, and the export of this to far flung parts of the world. Its primary purpose was the pragmatic one of facilitating national administration and the creation of a national schools system as Eric Hobswawm (1993) has shown.
Notwithstanding its pragmatic origins, making one language co-terminous with the nation, naming it for and of the nation, led to an ethno-linguistic definition of nations. In the industrial age, the age of the nation as state, the state as expression of the nation became a homogeniser of linguistic behaviours for reasons of state.
To some extent the state is now ceding space to supra-national structures, at least for economic management. In the classical nation state there is conjoining of culture and effective bonds with the instruments of public administration, i.e. the nation as the realm of culture and belonging joins with state as the realm of decision making and distributive administration. So what are the nation, the nation state and the state?
For Seton-Watson (1977) the nation is a "community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness" whereas the state is "a legal and political organisation with the power to require loyalty and obedience from its citizens".
Enloe echoes this comment and helpfully lays it out graphically: "The state is a vertical structure of public authority. In contrast with the nation, which is essentially a horizontal network of trust and identity (Enloe 1981: 123).
The conflating of the nation with the state (the vertical with horizontal) is one of the processes whereby national languages came to be created. In this creation emerged the objective need for uniformity and homogeneity. That it also took ideological character is certain and indeed under the influence of the Romantic philosophy, the national language (see Edwards 1985 and 1995) came to embody the soul like characteristics of the people whose communicative vehicle it was, however tangentially. In addition, therefore, to the need for national languages to fulfil the pragmatics of nation-making i.e. public administration, census taking, compulsory education and so on, there was added the notion of languages as cultural definers of peoples.
Nineteenth century Europe is often called the century of the nation state. The idea of cultivated standard languages, more ancient than the nation state itself, was taken up to include cultivated national standard languages. The language academies already in existence and Romantic philosophy, especially in the hands of key exponents like Herder, Fichte and others, gave newly-forming nations a rhetoric of singular language, one per nation. About a century later other newly forming nations states, in Asia and in Africa this time, wrote into their constitutions the idea of a one language one nation link. Some also established academies to protect and to purify, to cultivate and to "develop" these into prestigious standard form. Today the language planning efforts of South Korea to "purify" the national language of Japanese and Chinese influence show how pervasive the link is.
Attributing the adjective "national" to selected forms and varieties of the languages spoken in given states was divisive but the cultural loading of these varieties added the potential for chauvinism. It is true that some of this preceded the nation state itself, but in these cases linguistic chauvinism only prefigured national chauvinism and helped to bring it about.
By contrast in agrarian or pre-industrial society, language diversity was normal and unthreatening. According to Edwards (1994: 130) "In all parts of the world there was benign linguistic neglect on the part of rulers" and that "given linguistically diverse empires, peace and prompt payment of taxes were the major concerns linking rulers and ruled".
Kedourie (cited in Edwards 1994:132) argues that the formula in Europe was something like the following: "A group speaking the same language is known as a nation and a nation ought to constitute a state". This is perhaps the extreme demonstration of the general principle. This formula is being applied in many parts of the world today, European, Europeanised and non-European parts alike.
Such ideology is relevant beyond its European origins largely through its imposition in the Europeanised worlds of the post-colonial era of the latter half of this century and its absorption by Asians, Africans and Americans in their construction of nations. But it clearly has local elements and precursors as well.
It seems unlikely that any polity based on such a symmetric pattern of ethnicity, language and state (i.e. on appropriating primordial attachments to define itself) is likely to be anything other than barely tolerant of diversity. Sometimes some aspects of internal diversity, so long as they do not pose a serious threat to the dominant group, may be cherished as forms of (trivial or safely bounded) diversity, rustic colour, perhaps, that adds a dimension of acceptably contained difference to the nation.
In the contemporary world the process of forming ever larger group identities and attachments necessarily invokes the creation of new language forms. These and categories of social being that find their form at least partly in language are signs that new forms of social organisation are being invented. This evolution can be seen today in the struggle for labels for the interdependent super-states brought about mainly by economic interdependence. This is a form of acronym soup, with NAFTAs, EAECs, EUs, APECs, and many others. Actual community in these gigantic global blocs is a big ask, and so we imagine it.
Benedict Anderson (1983) has argued that even the nation state is an imagined community. An American will never meet and certainly will not know more than a handful of his or her fellow citizens. Community here comes to mean something more projected (more virtual we might say these days) than the usual meaning of community would lead us to believe, hence the imagined community. For Anderson the American constitution is the dating point for the imagined nation as community. In this regard citizenship (and the practical benefit it confers and protects), the obligations it enshrines, are the common glue to the otherwise great diversity, the unum of the pluribus as the US motto says.
In such an analysis citizenship rights produce attachment to the political nation and thereby reduce the prospect that there will be conflict within the cultural nation. This separation of material rights, economic opportunities and political enfranchisement on the one hand and the nation as culture on the other, recalls agrarian society in which diversity also flourished (but with more democracy and mobility). This seems to me to be the political structure that the EU is stumbling towards?
The EU is more likely to recognise internal diversity, and therefore the separation of the cultural nation from the economic and political nation, than the nation states that comprise it. Jayasuriya (199la and 1991b) has argued that common citizenship is a key substitution in a liberal democracy for the absence of a normative culture, the toleration of a diverse ethnicity has, at least in Australia, been the basis of a political compromise by requiring and facilitating loyalty to the vertical axis of state in exchange for allowing and even encouraging difference within the nation.
If this works, then what is needed to avoid conflict in pluralistic nations is the homogeneity of the political nation, not the cultural nation. Smolicz (1983 and 1984) has called this cultural democracy. It can flourish within a unitary political structure because this structure, if shorn of ethnicity, can produce social and economic mobility for citizens regardless of background. Such mobility and a common (i.e. a shared but not necessarily solitary language) can make it possible for a unitary political environment to cohere. Unlike other markers of difference it is possible to be bilingual (unlike religions which do not encourage bi-religiosity) and domain separation makes it possible to retain linguistic repertoire. Smolicz also assists us to work our way through the possible conflicts by distinguishing between core values of particular cultures, such as language, and overarching national values or attachments to polity.
The political nation, then, is constructed around equality of opportunity, common and equal enfranchisement and common citizenship whereas the cultural nation can admit of diversity precisely because the centripetal forces of commonality are rooted in the unitary political state. These arrangements are the fruit, where they occur, of both imagining (i.e. of ideology) but also, and critically, of certain conditions of possibility. Trust that the state is indeed trustworthy and de-ethnicised, that the ethnicities and languages that comprise it do not wish it to be otherwise, and that material benefits in the form of social mobility can be enjoyed regardless of background.
The Pre-Nation State
If what I am arguing is true of the state in the contemporary world then in some broad ways the state may be returning to the idea advanced by Ernest Gellner of the agrarian polity. In this pre-industrial world rulers communicated horizontally with their peers, rather that vertically with their subjects. Within the confines of the state there co-existed many nations, a vast variety of language and cultural forms, highly localised and circumscribed.
In such pre-industrial societies the state did not see it as its role to homogenise the population into particular linguistic norms and behaviours.
Gellner argues that the incorporation of most parts of the world into like structures of global economy leads to a threat to unique languages: " Diverse languages might and probably would, of course, survive: but the social uses to which they would be put, the meanings available in them, would be much the same in any language within this wider shared industrial culture. In such a world, a man moving from one language to another might indeed need to learn a new vocabulary, new words for familiar things and contexts, and he might also at worst have to learn a new grammar, in a more or less linguistic sense; but this would be about the limit of the adjustment demanded of him. No new thought styles would be required of him" (Gellner 1983: 116-7).
Perhaps he overstates the point but the general tendency is clear. As the economic-industrial base of nations becomes more similar and role relationships, work and attitudes become more common, languages may evolve more common underlying systems of meaning. More relevant to my purpose here though is to see whether the nation states that bring about such commonality are in fact ceding ground to political and economic structures where language tolerance and diversity may more closely resemble the agrarian state.
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