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"Americanisation and Englishisation as Processes of Global Occupation: Coalition or Coercion of the Willing?"
The USA has throughout history been a warfare state (Hixson 2008; www.tomdispatch.com). It played a strong role in Europe in establishing economic and political integration after 1945 that would prevent recurrent inter-state warfare. The ‘European Union’ of currently 27 states is a joint US-European project to shape a ‘United States of Europe’ or a looser alternative. There are moves towards regional integration in other continents. International ‘dialogue’ has been largely on American terms: corporate clout, institutions of global financial management (World Bank, IMF, WTO), a military alliance nurtured by the Soviet threat (NATO, now active in Asia); political institutions (UN) that give ‘great powers’ voice and a veto. In all of these, English has a privileged, hegemonic position. Neoliberalism reinforced an unequal, insecure, ecologically unsustainable world disorder (Naomi Klein’s Shock doctrine, 2008). Europeans are now ‘occupied’ by other means than military coercion. They have internalised the McDonaldization of commerce, banking, the media, advertising, academia, and popular culture (Coca-Colonisation). An American conceptual universe has permeated languages and cultures worldwide, much of it surreptitiously. Examples: universities being run as businesses rather than as a public good, and basic education at risk; privatisation of public utilities and services in hitherto ‘welfare states’; EU complicity with US support for Israeli aggression throughout the Middle East; European support for US aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan by a coalition of ‘willing’ post-communist states and others with undemocratic ‘leaders’, Berlusconi, Blair, Anders Fog Rasmussen, et al. What role does language play in these ongoing processes? The EU supports linguistic diversity in principle (23 official and working languages) but English is primus inter pares in the running of EU affairs. The hegemony of English in EU institutions dovetails with an increasing use of English in corporate affairs, education, the media, and popular culture in continental European countries. ASEAN (Asia, 10 countries) functions entirely in English. The African Union functions mainly in English, and to a lesser extent French and Arabic. Is the expansion of English – occupation of novel space – occurring in synergy with existing languages and cultures or establishing an inequitable hierarchy? It explores some of the forms that resistance is taking to the project of establishing ‘global’ English, to its products, and to these processes of mental occupation (Phillipson 2009). As the Copenhagen climate summit showed, global power relations are unstable. |
Prof. Robert Phillipson
Copenhagen Business School |
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