The Changing Politics of Language: Europe and Beyond

After introducing a basic conceptual framework for assessing the relevance of language and linguistic diversity in modern societies, the paper discusses the dialectic of linguistic hegemony and conflict in European nation-states and in contexts that diverged from the European model. It then analyzes how major structural transformations, which bring about increasingly complex forms of diversity, are affecting the language-citizenship link. Finally, it argues that these transformations entail an intermingling of old and new conflict patterns that has major consequences for language policy.

 

 

Peter A. Kraus is a full professor of political science (comparative politics) and the director of the Institute for Canadian Studies at the University of Augsburg (Germany). He previously was the chair of ethnic relations at the University of Helsinki, an associate professor of political science at Humboldt University in Berlin, and a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University. In 2022, he held the Joan Coromines Visiting Chair at the University of Chicago. He has also been a visiting lecturer at the New School for Social Research and a recurrent visiting professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has published widely and in several languages on cultural diversity and identity politics, political linguistics, ethnicity, nationalism, populism, and migration, the dilemmas of European integration, as well as problems of democratization and democratic theory.

 

Kraus has been the Chair of the Research Networking Programme “Responding to Complex Diversity in Europe and Canada” (RECODE, www.recode.info), funded by the European Science Foundation, and a member of the Steering Committee of the European Commission’s Seventh Framework project “Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe” (MIME, www.mime-project.org).