Frieda Steurs interviews Helder De Schutter
Helder De Schutter is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at KU Leuven. He works on issues of linguistic justice, federalism in multinational states, nationalism and nation-building, migration and citizenship, and the case for non-territorial jurisdictional authority. He also has a strong interest in 18th-century philosophy of language.
FS: Would you please introduce your academic trajectory?
HDS: I have a background in linguistics; I studied Dutch and English linguistics at KU Leuven. I wrote my MA thesis in linguistics on the sociolinguistic situation of Dutch schools in Brussels and the many problems these schools experienced in those days. After that I studied Philosophy, in order to study the underlying moral concerns connected with language policy. I discovered that in Philosophy, an important discussion was going on called the “multiculturalism debate”.
Normative political philosophers try to formulate moral solutions to societal questions, such as issues of distributive justice or the legitimacy of the power of the state. They have being doing that since Plato wrote about the ideal state. But in doing so, political philosophers have traditionally assumed the nation-state to be the box within which the answer to those questions will be implemented. So, if the question is whether we want a libertarian state or a welfare state, the assumption has been that, whatever the right answer is, it should be implemented within a nation-state internally, and not, say, at the level of the provinces of Canada nor at larger levels, such as the European Union or the world at large. But multiculturalists were part of a group of scholars, along with global justice theorists, engaged in breaking open this view. They asked the question what happens to questions of justice and democracy when a state has more than one national culture or many immigrant groups. I was interested in that paradigm, and I wrote my PhD dissertation in Philosophy on the topic of “linguistic justice” which was a field that many people in Canada were working in, in the slipstream of the seminal work of the multiculturalist Will Kymlicka. In Belgium Philippe Van Parijs wrote Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (2011), which gave a boost and a lot of visibility to this emerging field. Since then there has been a group of scholars working on these issues, united in the ‘Linguistic Justice Society’ and this has become a smaller field in its own right. So today, two of the major areas of research in contemporary political philosophy are global justice on the one hand, and issues of identity including nationalism, multiculturalism, and linguistic justice, on the other hand. These two are connected because they break open the premise of the nation-state.
FS: Is linguistic justice a relatively new field of research?
HDS: There are a few precursors to the debate. I see three phases:
In the first phase, in the eighties, there was the discussion between liberalism and communitarianism. This was not about language, but language was an element of that discussion. While liberals stressed difference-blindness and moral individualism, communitarians emphasized the inescapability of the identities of the human being and their societal relevance. Communitarians rejected the atomism they saw at work in the liberal idea. And they stressed the importance of shared narratives about living a good life.
The second phase occurred in the nineties, with the arrival of discussions over multiculturalism and cultural diversity. The focus was, as I said earlier, on the internal diversity of the state in terms of immigrant cultures, multiple national cultures within multinational states such as Canada or Spain, and indigenous groups.
I see the linguistic justice as an offshoot of this multiculturalism debate. It asks similar questions that are now focused on language. One interesting feature is that many of these political philosophers apply their knowledge of principles of justice to the issue of language without themselves having studied the object of their study – language – in detail. This is unsurprising, because their task is to be sophisticated in understanding principles of justice, which they also apply to other objects, such as, among many others, money, the prison system, or the European Union. As a result, they sometimes end up presupposing a simplified view of language as discrete, with clear boundaries between languages, and without much variation. So I believe it is important to make linguists and philosophers work together on the theme of linguistic justice.
FS: You also studied abroad: Oxford and Princeton.
HDS: Yes, I had a post-doctoral year in Oxford and worked there with David Miller. He is a nationalist. He argues that we have good reasons to stick to domestic and national communities as the main locus of justice and democracy. In addition, nationalists hold that co-nationals have moral priority over other human beings. All human beings have equal value but we can legitimately show more concern for our co-nationals. I have argued that we ought to extend the idea of shared identities to levels beyond the nation-state such as the EU. And I believe that the idea of co-national priority is morally problematic; instead I think all human beings deserve equal concern: my moral responsibility is not higher for my co-nationals than for other human beings. On this basis, I believe that the emergence of the European Union is a great opportunity of solidarity. Historically, the creation of the nation state was morally important as it enlarged the scope of justice, but now, we are in a different historical era and we should throw our intellectual weight behind enlarging it further. In political philosophy, nationalism is an intellectually powerful and very respectable theory. It is supported by many.
I first went to Princeton when I was writing my PhD thesis. I worked with a leading Canadian scholar of linguistic justice, Alan Patten.
Liberals want the state to be neutral vis à vis particular identities that people have, but for Patten, neutrality means that equal pockets of recognition must be given to every language or cultural group in a state. As neutrality is very important, in his view equal recognition follows from the liberal point of view. We should come up with equal recognition of each group in society, and this justifies granting language rights to different language groups. Patten argues that recognition should be granted on a per capita basis: we prorate the available recognition by giving each group an equal-per-capita share of the available resources for language policy. Although I strongly support Alan Patten’s general justification for language rights, and see myself as largely operating within his paradigm, I have argued, though, that the specific per-capita principle is morally undesirable because it ends up giving most of the resources to the largest group, which already enjoys unfair benefits of scale. Instead I think we should provide equal services to the various language groups. This will often entail a higher-than-per capita share, granting more resources to weaker groups.
I went to Princeton a second time, in 2013-14, as a Fung Fellow, and as part of a year-long research group with six early-career professors from all over the world, including experts of the language policy in India, South Africa and Rwanda. Needless to say, it made for an amazing year.
FS: Are you focusing in your research on the linguistic justice issues in Europe, or more in general in other continents? I can imagine linguistic justice is quite a different story for people living in post-colonial Africa.
HDS: Yes, indeed, that is true, the reality in Europe is different from that in other parts of the world; Europe has lost much of its linguistic diversity as a result of, among other things, precisely the kind of nationalism and nation-building that we talked about. At the moment, I am writing a book to bring together the different aspects of linguistic justice. I am in fact formulating a general theory of linguistic justice.
There are 3 different domains that have to be addressed in the field of linguistic justice:
- Global Linguistic Justice. This is concerned with the fact of the global emerge of English as a gobal lingua franca. Should we welcome English or in fact seek to resist it? Should we impose conditions on its acceptance? Should we plead for different Englishes and to which extent will this reduce the linguistic injustice of using the native language of some as the lingua franca? Here I argue for cosmopolitan ownership of English and for understanding English as a pluricentric lingua franca, with several L1-based standard versions.
- Interlinguistic justice: this concerns domestic linguistic justice in countries with linguistic diversity. Think about Ethiopia with over 80 languages, Belgium with 3 official languages, Bolivia with 36 official languages. Most political philosophers of linguistic justice work on this aspect. The central questions here are: (why) are language minorities recognition-worthy? And, if the answer is yes to the previous question, what manner of state recognition is the most appropriate: should we for instance apply the principle of personality, as Canada has largely done, or rather the principle of territoriality, as instantiated to a large extent in Belgium outside of Brussels and the Belgian communities with language facilities? Here I argue for a form of interlinguistic equal recognition and for the personality principle as the hallmark of linguistic justice.
- Intralinguistic justice: this concerns the just treatment of diversity within a language community. This includes for example the recognition of non-standard forms of the language, such as dialects, and the fair distribution of recognition between the standard and various non-standard forms. Intuitions may differ, here. If in the second domain of linguistic justice one preaches interlinguistic equality, should we then, for reasons of consistency, also plead for intralinguistic equality between the state recognition given to, on the one hand, the standard version of the language and, on the other hand, class-based or regional dialects? I argue that we should not: we ought to grant dialect rights, but this recognition can be less extended than the recognition granted to standard languages.
In the book, I present a picture of the moral landscape involved in issues of language policy and, in addition, I formulate normative proposals for each of the domains, working out specific principles of linguistic justice.
Now, within the very large domain of interlinguistic justice, there are three specific discussions we have to engage in: one is related to immigrants; the second is related to dyadic societies, the third one to mosaic societies. In dyadic societies, such as Sri Lanka, Belgium, Singapore, Spain, the official languages are few in number and the language groups usually in some way aspire to societal equality. In mosaic societies, such as Bolivia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and many others, the discussion is not one about equal societal positions but is about the dominance of certain society-wide languages. For example, take Ethiopia with English and Amharic as the central languages; Amharic for the organization of the state and English for education. Many Ethiopians have access to English and Amharic in addition to their own vernacular and this has implications for language planning in a mosaic state that are quite different from those in dyadic societies, for example in terms of access to cultural life-worlds and also dignified treatment. I want to look at whether these empirical differences can be normatively justified, and I spell out the conditions under which they can be.
FS: If we go back to the situation in South-Africa, we know that there are 11 official languages and now a 12th language has been added, Sign Language. Do you see any difference there in acceptance of these official languages and Sign Language?
HDS: To be honest, I have not yet fully thought through what to do with the state recognition of sign language. Everything I know suggests that the exact same moral issues are at stake that also are central to each of the domains I discussed above, and indeed I think sign language should be considered from those interests.
All language policy discussions depend on a view of the moral value of having a language and of language recognition. In the book I argue that there are four essential reasons for this moral value, which I theorize through the form of interests in language and language recognition.
The first two are instrumental interests, the other two are identity interests
1.“Opportunity access”: most opportunities in life come wrapped in language. You need a language to grasp an opportunity. For example the opportunity to attend s study, get a job, get help, read the news,…
2. Democracy. We need language to democratically discuss and resolve morally complicated societal issues. And linguistic diversity is a problem for the organization of a unified public sphere. Democracies operate more fluently and more easily in a country with linguistic homogeneity, such as Iceland. From the point of view of installing a deliberative democracy, Iceland has an easier job than, say, Canada does, or the European Union.
Now, if this is the end of the story, if we were only interested in the first two interests, then we would have good reasons to support policies that aim for linguistic homogeneity in the long run. Then we would ideally like to move to an English-Only Ethiopia, a Spanish-Only Bolivia, and, at the time of the foundation of Belgium in the nineteenth century, a French-Only Belgian society. We would of course need to install temporary compensations for minorities, and access to language training in the language that is chosen as the sole language, but in the long run we would want to aim for linguistic uniformity.
But we don’t want linguistic uniformity, because we have more reasons to care about language, or so I argue. The next two reasons are identity interests in language:
3. The life-world interest. Language knowledge is a key to a room. When you grow up in that room, you are surrounded by similar styles of arguing, and by particular ideas and pieces of information. Language-based cultural traditions emerge in such rooms. Here we understand language as opening, as disclosing, a culturally situated life world. This generates a need for access to one’s life-world. This idea goes back to scholars in the eighteenth century such as Johann Gottfried Herder, and it has been historically re-emphasized many times since then, including in the work of Humboldt, Wittgenstein, and many contemporary defenders of state support for languages and national cultures such as Charles Taylor, Yael Tamir, and Yael Peled, who emphasizes epistemic linguistic justice.
4. The last linguistic interest is dignity. If multiple language groups find their language important, yet only one or a few languages in a country are recognized, then this can create a legitimate feeling of second-class citizenship among the non-recognized groups. The state sees some language groups as “favorites” and others as inferior, and thereby sends a message of lesser dignity or respect for those others. This importance of dignity and esteem is in fact older than the life-world interest, and was stressed by early-modern vernacular humanists like Lorenzo de Medici, or Joachim du Bellay, and in the twentieth century also by Frantz Fanon, and by many of the contemporary scholars of linguistic justice such as Philippe Van Parijs, Ayelet Banai, and Sergi Morales work on linguistic dignity and non-domination.
We need to apply these interests to each of the domains discussed above, and that is how we can arrive at judgments about the moral justification of various types of language rights, and even dialect rights. If we apply these four points to sign languages, I think we will arrive at the conclusion that similar arguments are at stake. Both the opportunity access and democracy are important for the people using Sign language (and it appears to me that here a stronger argument exists for sign languages than for other languages, because linguistic homogeneity simply cannot work for those whose hearing or speaking is impaired), and the life-world and dignity interests can be invoked to justify language identity recognition.
FS: What can CIPL do to support endangered languages?
HDS: Revitalization of languages is often important, but we need to carefully understand when and where it is to be done. If for example there is a threat of impoverishment of a region, then it is important to strengthen the local or regional language so that more people can participate in society and in the economy, for reasons of opportunity access and also dignity, although the first reason points also at making people bilingual with access to the language(s) of societal advantage.
Helder De Schutter is a member of RIPPLE
About RIPPLE
RIPPLE unites the ongoing Research in Political Philosophy and Ethics in Leuven. We are interested in what happens to the traditional toolbox of political philosophy and ethics – including concepts such as sovereignty, justice, equality, dignity, indignation, truth, the public sphere, constitutions, identity, democracy, citizenship, and representation – when the nation-state is demoted to just one layer of public morality and decision-making among many others. RIPPLE’s interest in studying this new, ‘multilevel’ reality has led us to publish on post-national citizenship, constitutionalism beyond the state, European distributive justice, populism, climate ethics, federalism, sustainable development, and the rights of immigrants. Beyond these, we also have a keen interest in meta-ethics, gender justice, media ethics, the ethics of responsibility, and Wittgensteinian approaches to moral and political philosophy.
A noteworthy feature of RIPPLE is our explicit ambition to engender dialogue among divergent approaches and traditions. While some members take a critical theory angle, others engage in descriptive or hermeneutic perspectives, and still others work out moral principles. Some stress justice, others power. Several members interweave elements from multiple traditions, such as post-colonial, Anglo-American and continental theory.
RIPPLE was established in 2004 at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven’s long-standing faculty of philosophy. RIPPLE currently counts 11 senior staff members, 10 post-doctoral researchers, and more than 30 doctoral students hailing from across the globe. This makes RIPPLE one of Europe’s largest research centers for political philosophy and ethics.
The diversity of approaches, backgrounds and themes requires a specific kind of organization betraying a federal touch. On the one hand, all RIPPLE researchers get together on a monthly basis for our plenary RIPPLE research seminar, which forms the heart of our collective activities. On the other hand, a significant part of the daily life of our center is organized around three seminars, each with a distinct research approach and focus: critical theory and democracy, justice and public ethics, and ethics. In doing all of the above, RIPPLE aims to provide an inclusive, diversity-friendly and welcoming research context at the forefront of contemporary debates in ethics and political philosophy.
