Multilingualism and Community-Building Among Brussels Based Civil Servants and Lobbyists: Perceptions, Practices and Power Positions

This presentation explores the multilingual and multicultural aspects of community-building, networking and communication in the EU's political and administrative system with special attention to the effects of a multilingual and multicultural working environment on the actors’ identities. In order to track these aspects we investigated the networking and communicative preferences of EU civil servants and lobbyists based on broad-scale survey data (277 surveys completed) and thematic interviews (17 hours of recorded materials). We argue that the power dimension of the linguistic choices among EU bureaucrats is especially important, since as Mamadouh (2002) observes: Language(s) regulate(s) access to political, economic, and cultural resources. Language matters to access the supranational political arena (for example, to acquire a position in an EU institution or a policy network), as well as to control political representatives and civil servants at the EU level.

 The findings indicate that although multilingualism appears on various levels in the different social contexts investigated, all of these contexts are heavily dominated by (Euro-) English. It also appears that in their professional routines our respondents are highly aware of the relationship of language(s) to power and they prefer the usage of more power-neutral language policies even if this comes with the cost of mutual intelligibility. It also seems that the current availability of some of the alternative languages used in the Brussels context might be somewhat more to do with political status/historical reasons than with practical considerations. Yet, the findings imply that multilingualism plays a less significant role in the social and working lives of Brussels based civil servants and lobbyists than previously assumed. Furthermore, the respondents’ social identities are rather influenced by new signifiers related to economic globalization and competition and their institutional positions than their linguistic backgrounds or the multilingual practices they take part in.