Linguistic justice and democracy in Europe: the unexplored tension

Much of the debate opposing defenders of a multilingual language regime for the European Union and those arguing in favour of establishing English as lingua franca on the European level has been framed in reference to different theories of democracy on the one hand, and theories of redistributive justice on the other hand. The democratic dimension has given rise to a disagreement between multiculturalists, emphasizing individual citizens’ right to democratic participation in their own language (Kymlicka 2001; Kymlicka 1995), and cosmopolitans considering the existence of a shared language of communication as precondition for the emergence of a democratic public sphere on the European level (Archibugi 2005; Bonotti 2013). On the justice dimension, the discussion has recently been shifted from a framework in terms of language rights (Kymlicka and Patten 2003), focussing on individual or group rights, to a more comprehensive theory of linguistic justice (van Parijs 2011). In this very rich body of literature, the link between the dimensions of justice and democracy when assessing different language regime scenarios has not been addressed systematically. Even among authors who evaluate the fairness of a language regime primarily in regard to criteria of redistributive justice, the democratic dimension is central but implicit: either democratic procedures are considered as means to reach linguistic justice, or linguistic justice is on the contrary seen as a precondition for shifting the scale of democracy. This paper argues that it is crucial to explicitly address the articulation of the dimensions of justice and democracy when assessing different European language regime scenarios in order to specify the boundaries of the justificatory community in regard to which a language regime should be evaluated. If we consider that as of today the much called-for European demos does not (yet) have an empirical existence, at which level should the fairness of a European language regime be taken into account?