English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy by Robert Phillipson

Considering that I’ve studied quite a bit of European Union history, it surprised me to look back through the reviews I’ve written and find that I haven’t really posted many reviews for the books I’ve read on that subject. Here’s one of them, at least.

English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy by Robert Phillipson

It is no secret that over the course of the last century, English has gradually replaced French as the international language of diplomacy and business and even general conversation. One might say that the path to English-language dominance began shortly after the end of World War I, when English and French were used as the official languages of the peace negotiations at Versailles. But with about 20 official languages used in the institutions of the European Union — not to mention the scores of other languages commonly spoken in Europe today — the predominance of the English language has caused no small amount of controversy amongst EU member states. Language is an extremely sensitive subject across the board in Europe, intricately tied to national and regional identities and never far out of the forefront of political and social debate. And while many people in Europe can converse or do business in languages that are not their native tongue, language policy in the European Union is far from cohesive…or even, at times, coherent.

Robert Phillipson is a research professor in the English department of one of Denmark’s largest business schools. His book, English-Only Europe?, examines current EU language policies and makes a fairly convincing argument for the EU to take a more active approach to safeguarding a multilingual Europe into the coming century. The book examines the dangers of leaving general language policy up to individual countries, as well as the problems of merely adopting a laissez-faire attitude toward languages and expecting them to look after themselves. By looking at statistics on language use and language learning both inside and outside the EU, Phillipson considers a wide range of options for creating a more forward-looking set of language policies. Granted, I found some of his ideas a little peculiar — one example being his push for the use of Esperanto as a pivot language in intra-EU communications. Yet most of his suggestions make perfect sense to me: do more to promote and encourage the study of foreign languages and foreign study on all educational levels from pre-primary through post-secondary, look more closely at how non-EU countries manage their language policies (Phillipson mentions Canada and South Africa in this context, as countries worthy of closer study), along with other ideas and suggestions that encourage the learning of another language as a key to better understanding one’s native tongue. And as a native English speaker myself, I am very thankful that Phillipson does not make the critical mistake of completely demonising English, or regarding it as some horrible destructive force that should be feared and shunned in favour of a narrow, insular focus on language defence. The prospect of an ‘English-only Europe’ is not a pleasant one, or one that I would ever like to see come to pass, but the blame cannot be placed solely on the English language and its speakers. A more active and positive approach to the study of other languages has the potential to preserve European multilingualism on all levels — and that multilingualism may very well be one of Europe’s greatest assets in this new, information-driven century.

Reading about language policy is not, I will admit, the most thrilling or engrossing means of spending one’s time unless it happens to be your particular field of study. (It’s only tangentially related to mine.) Phillipson nonetheless does an excellent job of keeping his study in plain English, as the saying goes, and not going off on unrelated tangents or throwing in anecdotes that add nothing to the discussion. I’ve looked through books that make points similar to his in language that appears to be twice as complicated and ten times as unreadable. On the whole, anyone who might be interested in the politics of language and how these kind of politics affect international cooperation might find English-Only Europe? worth investigating.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

A little less than a year ago, I attended a talk organised by the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The subject of that talk was a recently published book about the October-November 1956 Hungarian crisis, where the Soviet Union sent troops into Hungary to crush an escalating series of protests by anti-government and anti-Soviet demonstrators. I picked up a copy of the book when I was there, and the review came surprisingly easily for a book on a subject that’s not really in my area of expertise.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

The violence and brutality of the Soviet action in crushing the 1956 Hungarian rebellion shook the faith of many left-leaning individuals outside of Soviet bloc — but at the same time, Soviet action also punctured the lofty rhetoric of ‘rollback’ and ‘liberation’ that American political leaders had favoured when speaking of Western policy towards the Soviet satellites. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolt occurring this past year, historians have been looking back at this major incident in the early Cold War in an attempt to figure out what happened to make things go so wrong so quickly. And Charles Gati’s point in his new book is essentially this: in Hungary in the autumn of 1956, everyone screwed up — everyone.

Attempting to summarise the full course of events in October 1956 is a bit beyond me, so I’ll do my best to summarise why things went so catastrophically wrong. There were many illusions in Hungary in late 1956. Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, the only Hungarian politician who had any real credibility with the people, was under the impression that he could keep hold of the situation even when his version of reformed communism was overtaken by events. The Hungarian demonstrators were under the impression that they could expel Soviet forces from Hungary all in one go — dreams further promoted by irresponsible agit-prop from Hungarian-language broadcasters at Radio Free Europe — and were also under the impression that the Western democracies would not let the Soviet Union get away with murder. The Soviet leadership in Moscow had been feeding their Hungarian comrades mixed messages for ages, but they were under fewer illusions than the other players involved. The only decisive message left for them to send was the one that involved tanks. And in America, President Eisenhower was facing re-election plus troubles in the Suez plus a complete lack of any actual military/intelligence plans to support an anti-Soviet revolution in Central Europe. American illusions that anti-Communist rhetoric would be sufficient to keep the Soviets out of Hungary were quickly destroyed. By the time the smoke cleared and all the illusions vanished, a new Soviet-backed Hungarian government had suppressed all political opposition and reasserted control over the country. Time magazine might have made the Hungarian revolutionary its ‘Man of the Year’ in 1957, but by then the revolutionaries were dead, imprisoned, or in exile. And Imre Nagy, who had fled to the Yugoslavian Embassy in search of sanctuary, would later be tricked out of hiding to face a secret trial and the hangman’s noose.

Failed Illusions is quite a solid history book. Granted, it isn’t always easy to keep the names of the historical figures straight even if you’re familiar with them from other sources, and I would have greatly appreciated a dramatis personae either at the front or the back of the book for quick reference and reminder. But even though Gati writes with the passion of one who is personally involved in the history being written (he had witnessed the turmoil as a young reporter in Budapest and was one of over two hundred thousand Hungarians to flee the country in 1956-57), he is able to keep the standard romanticised account of the rebellion at arm’s length. He examines the crisis from four different perspectives — the Hungarian government, the Hungarian people, the Soviet leaders and the American politicians and broadcasters — and manages to blend the perspectives together while still preserving the distinct motives and reasons behind the differing actions. It might not be the ‘definitive’ history of the failed revolution in Hungary, but the information Gati provides and the wealth of resources he refers to have laid out more than enough for future scholars of this time period to be getting on with.