Language Choice, Linguistic Capital and Symbolic Domination in the European Union.

The Treaty of Amsterdam states that in article 8d of the EC Treaty the following
paragraph shall be added: ‘Every citizen of the Union may write to any of the institutions or bodies referred to in this article or in Article 4 in one of the languages mentioned in Article 248 and have an answer in the same language.’ [
The right of the citizens of the European Union to communicate in one of the official languages has considerable organizational and financial implications. A great number of translators is required to assure the communication with these citizens. Although EU officials at the Commission use French, English and to a lesser degree German as working languages (Labrie 1993: 111), the member states do not seem to be willing to accept one of these languages or another language as the lingua franca for the EU and to give up their national language (De Swaan 1999: 15). There does not seem to be enough political will, neither among the political elite nor the population of the EU, to reduce the number of official languages (Mamadouh 1999: 122). Language choice is a highly political issue that is avoided by the EU and results in the lack of language policy. In section 2.1 of this article I refer to Bourdieu’s publication Language and Symbolic Power (1992) in order to explain this unwillingness of member states to grant another language recognition: an official language can be considered as linguistic capital which affords its holders symbolic power (Bourdieu 1992: 50-52). Section 2.2 focuses on Bourdieu’s analysis of the mechanisms which under¬lie the process of linguistic unification during the construction of the French nation state (Bourdieu 1992: 46-48). This will enable me to consider, finally, in section 4 - after first having discussed the complexity of the current linguistic regime in the institutions of the EU in section 3 - if the mechanisms which led to the use of French as common language for France, as analysed by Bourdieu, also apply to the language choice in the EU.