Language and Minority Rights

Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Language

Stephen May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136837067
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The second edition addresses new theoretical and empirical developments since its initial publication, including the burgeoning influence of globalization and the relentless rise of English as the current world language. May's broad position, however, remains largely unchanged. He argues that the causes of many of the language-based conflicts in the world today still lie with the nation-state and its preoccupation with establishing a 'common' language and culture via mass education. The solution, he suggests, is to rethink nation-states in more culturally and linguistically plural ways while avoiding, at the same time, essentializing the language-identity link. This edition, like the first, adopts a wide interdisciplinary framework, drawing on sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, sociology, political theory, education and law. It also includes new discussions of cosmopolitanism, globalization, the role of English, and language and mobility, highlighting the ongoing difficulties faced by minority language speakers in the world today.

1

THE DENUNCIATION OF
ETHNICITY

In order to begin to understand why minority languages are held in such low esteem in the world today, we need first to examine related debates on ethnicity. This is a crucial first step because the ‘ideology of contempt’ (Grillo, 1989) exhibited so consistently toward minority languages has more to do with the (minority) ethnicities with which they are historically associated than with the languages themselves. Indeed, criticisms of minority languages almost always occur within a wider critique and/or dismissal of the particular ethnic affiliations of their speakers. If, as Grillo suggests, ‘subordinated languages are despised languages’ (1989: 174), then inevitably so too are those who speak them. Indeed, languages, in the end, only reflect the status of their speakers (Dorian, 1998). I will thus begin this chapter by charting briefly the long-held pejorative perception of ethnicity in much academic and popular commentary.

The predominantly negative view of ethnicity in academic and popular discourses arises from its consistently unfavorable juxtaposition historically with national identity and, more recently, as the longevity of the nation-state has itself come into question, with globalization and new forms of global identity. For example, it is almost de rigueur now in academic discourse to view ethnicity as socially and politically constructed; an essentially anti-modern and regressive phenomenon that is mobilized instrumentally by particular groups to achieve certain (self-interested) political ends. As a result, the ‘cultural stuff’ of ethnicity – that is, the ancestry, culture, religion and/or language to which such groups regularly lay claim – is regarded as largely fictive or fabricated. Indeed, many academic commentators view ethnicity as simply a convenient construction of an ethnic group's supposed distinctiveness that is employed retrospectively to engender ‘ethnic solidarity’ as a basis for social and political action.

Certainly, this is the view of ethnicity that has dominated in social anthropology over the last forty years, particularly since Frederik Barth's (1969b) seminal essay on ethnic group boundaries, a perspective viscerally encapsulated by Roger Sandall's (2001) notions of ‘culture cult’ and ‘designer tribalism’. It is evident in a parallel sociological consensus on the arbitrary constructedness of ethnic groups – a process Rogers Brubaker (2002) has dismissively described as ‘groupism’ – and a related rejection of the apparent fixity of such identities. The latter has in turn been heavily influenced by postmodernist understandings of multiple, fluid identity formation – that individuals are never limited to just one form of identity – as championed by, among others, Homi Bhabha (1994) and Paul Gilroy (2000). This acceptance of multiple identities, and related notions of (unfettered) identity choice, is also clearly reflected from within political theory in the increasing promotion of (heterogeneous) cosmopolitan identities as the ‘new’ form of global citizenship, replacing ethnic, racial and even national identities. Jeremy Waldron (1993, 1995, 2000), Martha Nussbaum (1997, 2001) and Seyla Benhabib (2002, 2004) are broadly representative of this cosmopolitan position.

I will revisit each of these academic traditions in more detail in due course. Meanwhile, popular commentary reflects a similarly skeptical bias toward ethnicity, albeit of a somewhat different kind. Fueled by lurid media reports of the immolation attending yet another ‘ethnic conflict’, the wider public locate in ethnicity the principal cause of many of today's social and political problems. Places such as Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and the former Yugoslavia – to name just a few examples – suggest starkly the destructive and unproductive nature of ethnicity and ethnic mobilization. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, the most common sources of political violence in the world have been ascribed to these so-called ‘ethnic conflicts’ (Gurr, 1993, 2000).¹

Such developments are closely related, in turn, to the proliferation of a variety of ‘ethnonational movements’ – movements based on ethnic affiliation which aim to establish a national state of their own and which often, but do not always, resort to violence to achieve their ends (Fenton and May, 2002). The separatist ETA movement (Euzkadi ‘ta Askatasuna) in the Basque Country, and the erstwhile Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the IRA Republican movement in Northern Ireland are obvious examples. In addition, there are minority groups who, while not necessarily wanting to establish a state of their own, want greater recognition, representation and autonomy within existing nation-states. Most notable here, perhaps, are indigenous peoples groups such as the Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, Sámi (Lapps), Inuit (Eskimos) and Native Americans.

Suffice it to say that, while these various developments present us with qualitatively different examples of ethnic minority affiliation and mobilization, they are widely held to be negative phenomena. This is so even when such groups may be seen to have legitimate and supportable claims. How (and why) has this negative perception of ethnicity come to hold such sway? I will attempt to answer this question in what follows by focusing in particular on the historical development of academic discourse in this area.

Academic denunciations of ethnicity

Over the last few centuries, the widespread dismissal of the legitimacy and value of ethnicity as a form of social and political identification has been juxtaposed historically against the valorization of national identity and the modern nation-state from which it springs. Itself a direct product of the era of nationalism (see Chapter 2), the nation-state in this view is something to which we can legitimately give our allegiance but ethnic groups are not. Nation-states are embracing and cohesive whereas ethnic groups are exclusive and divisive. Nation-states represent modernity while ethnic groups simply represent a harping, misinformed and misguided nostalgia. Or so the story goes. But it is a story long told and with an impressive academic pedigree. In the nineteenth century, the British liberal John Stuart Mill argued in Representative Government: ‘Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist’ ([1861] 1972: 361; my emphasis). Mill proceeds to elaborate on why he deems alternative ethnic affiliations (and their languages) to be so counter-productive to the political organization of the nation-state. In so doing, he invokes a clear cultural hierarchy between different groups, arguing that smaller nationalities – the equivalent of ‘ethnic minorities’ in modern political parlance – should be assimilated into the nation-state via its ‘national’ culture and language; that is, the culture and language of the dominant (national) group:

Experience proves it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people – to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship ... than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation [sic].² (1972: 395; my emphasis)

Likewise, the French nationalist and historian, Michelet – a near-contemporary of Mill – was to conclude of the French Revolution that: ‘this sacrifice of the diverse interior nationalities to the great nationality which comprises them undoubtedly strengthened the latter ... It was at the moment when France suppressed within herself the divergent French countries that she proclaimed her high and original revelations’ ([1846] 1946: 286; my emphasis). In this view then, a homogeneous national identity – reflected in the culture and language of the dominant ‘national’ group – should supersede and subsume alternative ethnic and/or national identities and their associated cultures and languages.

As we shall see in Chapter 3, many modern liberals continue to hold to this position. However, the merits of the dominant group's culture and language tend to be emphasized less overtly in contemporary commentary (although the cultural and linguistic hierarchies underpinning such assumptions remain). Rather, the argument is usually couched in terms of a defence of two ostensibly key liberal democratic principles – universal political citizenship, and the recognition of individual, as opposed to collective rights (see, for example, Barry, 2001). These two principles are seen as sufficient in themselves to repudiate the claims of other ethnic groups for greater social recognition in the public or civic realm of the nation-state – the private realm is seen as less problematic – and for associated cultural and linguistic recognition/representation. But more on this later.³

As for Marxist commentary on the legitimacy of ethnicity as a basis for social and political mobilization, Marx and Engels were themselves to adopt a remarkably similar position to that of their contemporary liberal commentators. In discussing the position of ethnic minorities, Marx and Engels drew on Hegel's distinction between nation and state – equating the ‘nation’ directly with the modern nation-state and ‘nationality’ with ethnic groups, or ethnocultural communities, which lacked a state of their own (Nimni, 1995). On this basis, Engels could observe (in 1849):

There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several fragments of peoples, the remnants of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation [nation-state] which later became the main vehicle for historical development. These relics of nations [ethnic groups], mercilessly trampled down by the passage of history, as Hegel expressed it, this ethnic trash always become fanatical standard bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution. Such in Scotland are the Gaels ... Such in France are the Bretons ... Such in Spain are the Basques ... (Marx and Engels, 1976a: 234–5; my emphasis)

The position of Marx and Engels vis-à-vis ethnic minorities arises from their somewhat contradictory views on nationalism. On the one hand, Marx and Engels argued, as one might expect, that the working classes were the motor of history. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx observes: ‘The working men have no country ... National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing’ (Marx and Engels, 1976b: 65). On the other hand, Marx and Engels also endorsed the nationalist causes of ‘historic’ nations where these were seen to facilitate and expedite the proletarian revolution. Thus Marx observes, again in The Communist Manifesto, that the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is ‘at first a national struggle’ and that ‘the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’ (1976b: 60). In neither instance, however, were the claims of ‘non-historic’ nations or ‘historyless peoples’ (geschichtslosen vælker) recognized-that is, ethnic and/or national groups which lacked the ‘historical vitality’ to consolidate a national state of their own. As Nimni concludes, in his lucid discussion of this question, ‘Marx and Engels were, to put it mildly, impatient with and intolerant of ethnic minorities’ (1995: 68; see also Guibernau, 1996: 13–21). In this regard, they were, like their liberal contemporaries, Mill and Michelet, very much a product of their times. Indeed, the pre-eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1990) argues that it is ‘sheer anachronism’ to criticize them for holding such views since they were shared by nearly all nineteenth-century political theorists on both the right and the left.

And yet, having said this, Hobsbawm's views are not too dissimilar to those of his nineteenth-century counterparts. For example, Hobsbawm (1990, 1995, 2008) contrasts a positive unifying nineteenth-century nationalism – modeled on the French Revolution and located in the political formation of nation-states – with a negative and divisive twentieth-century variant, largely centered on ethnocultural and linguistic differences (ethnonationalisms, in effect). This is clearly comparable with the distinction drawn by Marx and Engels between ‘historic’ and ‘non-historic’ nations, and the transitory and regressive nature attributed to the latter. Other Marxist commentators have been less skeptical about the legitimacy of ethnicity and ethnic mobilization,⁴ although such commentators continue to vary widely in the degree to which they regard capitalism as determining the construction of ethnic relations. Strongly class determinist theories of ethnicity seek to reduce ethnic categories to the exigencies of more encompassing (class-based) experiences. Weaker versions attempt a more open-ended examination of the interconnections between ethnic and class mobilization(s). However, in both cases, Marxist analyses of ethnicity continue to be predicated principally on the pre-eminent influence of capitalism and on the subsequent subsumption of ethnic and national relations within class relations. Thus, Marxist perspectives on ethnicity have considerable difficulty in accounting for the specificity of ethnic form and meaning in the circumstances of their mobilization (Smaje, 1997; Fenton, 1999, 2003; see below). More problematically still, they cannot account for the fact that it is often ethnic identity, rather than class, that is the principal catalyst of such mobilization in the first place.

Resituating ethnicity in the era of globalization

The advent of globalization,⁵ and related understandings of identity formation in a postmodern age, has seen the development of a potential counter-argument to this broadly articulated modernist position on ethnicity. Postmodernists argue that the rise of globalization – the next stage of the modernization process – has significantly undermined previous forms of identification and political mobilization. In this view, modern nation-states are finding it more difficult to impose a uniform national identity, given the rapid expansion of transnational flows of people, money, information and ideas (Appadurai, 1990). Consequently, a new decentered and ‘hybridized’ politics of identities is emerging.⁶ In the place of the previous certainties of nationhood and national identity, local, ethnic and gender identities have emerged as alternative identity choices and bases for mobilization. As Stuart Hall observes, the result is the simultaneous rise of new ‘global’ and new ‘local’ identities and the consequent proliferation of supra- and subnational identities:

Increasingly, the political landscapes of the modern world are fractured … by competing and dislocating identifications … National identities remain strong, especially with respect to such things as legal and citizenship rights, but local, regional, and community identities have become more significant. Above the level of the national culture, ‘global’ identifications begin to displace, and sometimes override, national ones. (1992a: 280, 302; see also James, 2006)

Postmodernist analyses thus provide a possible space for the re-emergence of ethnicity as a valid social and political form of identification and mobilization. However, ethnicity in this context faces some stiff competition. The fragmented, dispersed and decentered individual of the postmodern world is supposedly able to choose from a bewildering range of identity styles and forms of political mobilization, and ethnicity, it seems, is just one of them. Moreover, while advocating freedom of identity choice, there is still a lingering preference for the (new) global over the (old) local identities in these analyses.⁷ As I will argue in this chapter, this position significantly understates, and sometimes simply ignores, the key ongoing role that ethnicity often assumes in the processes of identity formation and social and political mobilization. Relatedly, postmodernists may also have underestimated the salience and resilience of ‘national cultures’ in which liberal and Marxist commentators have historically placed such store. Michael Billig cogently argues, for example, that national allegiances cannot simply be exchanged like ‘last year's clothes’. As he asserts:

There is a sense of ‘as if’ in some versions of the postmodern thesis. It is as if the nation-state has already withered away; as if people's national commitments have been flattened to the level of consumer choice; as if millions of children in the world's most powerful nation [the USA] do not daily salute one, and only one, style of flag; as if, at this moment around the globe, vast armies are not practising their battle manoeuvres beneath national colours. (1995: 139)

And so we come to a point where – despite both consistent negative attribution, and confident predictions of its imminent demise, for well over two centuries now – ethnicity continues to persist and prosper in the (post)modern world. Many contemporary liberals are confounded and dismayed by the resilience of ethnic ties, and the increasing advocacy of ethnic minority rights, within contemporary nation-states. Marxist commentators are similarly bemused by the emergent and ongoing claims of ethnonational movements in post-industrialist societies; a feature which the achievements of modernization (and class-based politics) should have rendered obsolete. Likewise, postmodernists, while they rightly highlight the contingent and multiple aspects of identity formation, cannot explain adequately why ethnicity (and nationality) should so often ‘trump’ the competition. The salience of ethnicity may well vary from context to context and, as we shall see, its interrelationship with nationalism and national identity, and with other forms of social relations and social identity, may be complex, overlapping and at times contradictory. Nonetheless, ethnicity cannot be as easily discounted as we have been led to believe.

Moreover, the rejection of ethnicity as a valid form of social and political action is in itself problematic. If ethnicity has survived and prospered – despite, it se...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Language and Minority rights
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Introduction
• 1 The denunciation of ethnicity
• 2 Nationalism and its discontents
• 3 Liberalism and multiculturalism
• 4 Language, identity, rights and representation
• 5 Language, education and minority rights
• 6 Monolingualism, mobility and the pre-eminence of English
• 7 The rise of regionalism: reinstating minority languages
• 8 Indigenous rights: self-determination, language and education
• 9 Reimagining the nation-state
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index