Speaking in Tongues: The Language of Politics and the Politics of Language in the European Union

Politics increasingly takes place at the international level, in global or regional organizations, yet research tends to disregard one important reality of this development: politics is conducted in multilingual environments by national politicians who interact with one another either in non-native languages or rely on interpreters and translators as intermediaries. This oversight is striking considering that politics is fundamentally about communication and interaction. Indeed, much of what we are interested in as political scientists – deliberation, bargaining, persuasion, agenda-setting, framing, etc. – is a function of political communication and interpersonal relationships. Language is, simply put, at the core of politics. Moreover, an increasing body of research in the cognitive sciences indicates that the use of a foreign language affects people’s political attitudes, how they perceive risks and make inferences, and even their moral judgments. There is much reason, in other words, to assume that a multilingual context systematically affects political processes and outcomes. This project investigates the relationship between politics and language in the most multilingual institutional environment today, the European Union. The research treats multilingualism as a core feature of EU politics and builds on in-depth interviews with 91 officials and policy-makers in the EU’s four main institutions, as well as a variety of quantitative data. It demonstrates that the EU’s multilingual regime carefully balances the symbolic, representational, legal, and functional roles of language, and that it works surprisingly well. The reasons for why the system works are its reliance on English as the dominant shared language paired with the ability of participants to “fall back” on their native tongues by using the highest quality language services in the world, as well as a policymaking process that involves a great many checks and controls along the way. Notably, however, the data also suggest that participants in policymaking at the EU level are highly tolerant of the difficulties associated with operating in a multilingual environment and empathetic toward those with limited foreign language capacity. Moreover, multilingualism seems to depoliticize EU politics, as the language(s) used in deliberation and negotiation tend(s) to be more neutral and utilitarian than in conventional political contexts.