Civic Resources and the Future of the European Union by Viktoria Kaina & Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski

Author:Viktoria Kaina & Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski [Kaina, Viktoria & Karolewski, Ireneusz Pawel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415689007
Google: Vr8vOMe5wh0C
Goodreads: 13715982
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T07:21:36+00:00

Multilingualism

The case has been selected within a policy sector – education and culture – in which the European Commission has weak competences, merely supporting policy formation and implementation at lower levels. Hence neither direct regulation nor the standard Community method is possible. Influencing policy on the ground takes place primarily through the Open Method of Coordination, and national, regional and local authorities are responsible for providing the bulk of the funding. If it wants to steer education and culture policy, the Commission may need to build coalitions with actors in civil society, either through expert groups or newer forms of participation.

In general there are more expert groups in policy sectors where competences are shared between European and national/sub-national authorities, and fewest in sectors of exclusive European competence. In sectors where there is very limited or no treaty basis for Commission action, there is no clear pattern to the number of expert groups established by the relevant DG, but DG Education and Culture has about as many as could be expected under a shared competence regime (Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2008). In the case described here, the expert group established to make recommendations on an emerging policy theme interpreted its remit far more broadly than the limits of Commission competences and put forward political arguments as well as more ‘technical’ recommendations. Arguably, expert groups like this could play a role in a strategy to maximize the scope for action by the Commission in spite of limited formal competences. This case study concerns a consultation on multilingualism, an issue likely to become a surrogate for wider public debates about identity and integration in Europe, since ‘multilingualism is a value’ (HLGM 2007: 17) and how it is understood and defined has far-reaching implications for how Europe itself is constructed. For example, it can be defined in terms of individual abilities to speak more than one language or in terms of the coexistence of different language communities in the same space. Such choices have practical implications (whether to prioritize language learning or translation/interpretation/intermediation services, for example) but above all they have political implications because they affect fundamental political issues such as social cohesion (one of the key themes of the Lisbon strategy). Moreover, multilingualism is seen as a prerequisite for active citizenship at European level (European Parliament and Council of the European Union 2006: 13) and is part of the response by the EC to the ‘democratic deficit’ because it is identified as a key enabling factor in the creation of a ‘European public sphere’ whether by means of transnational public service broadcasting or by means of transnational e-participation (HLGM 2007: 13, 17). Therefore political attention to multilingualism itself signals a shift to a more participative mode of governance.

Although an active European policy to promote multilingualism within the education sector can be dated from the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, it was not until the advent of the Barroso Commission that the first comprehensive framework was developed, gaining momentum after 2007, when multilingualism was made a separate portfolio (HLGM 2007: 5).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.