Clinton Richard Long and Dr. Mark Choate, History Department
The purpose of my research was to figure out the purpose of the European Union’s (EU) language policy. With twenty-three official languages representing the twenty-seven member-states of the EU comes a great deal of inefficiency. Lots of money is spent on the interpretation and translation and bills take much longer to be voted on because they all have to be translated into every language. With this in mind, I wondered why such a policy exists. I questioned why the union had not chosen one or two languages to use many years ago.
Based on my research at BYU before getting my ORCA grant, I hypothesized that the reason for the language policy was equality. An organization like the EU that was formed to avoid war, encourage friendly relations between countries, and give an equal voice to everyone could not have a language policy that did not allow for equality. There was some evidence that pointed to this and it was not an exaggeration to think this, but I did not have conclusive evidence that this was the motivation for the policy. For this reason, I wanted to travel to Europe and look at documents to confirm or reject this hypothesis. I needed to get to primary source documents in order to see the motivations of the policy and find out what happened in the early stages of the EU development in order to have a better historical understanding of the language policy.
I planned on going to Florence, Italy, the site of the official archives of the EU. I also planned on going to Brussels, Belgium in order to look at the archives of the European Commission, a governing body of the EU. I had contacted both archives previously and one had sent me a list of about one hundred documents that would help me. I left for Florence in August and spent many hours in the archives. I took over four hundred digital pictures of documents there from meetings, reports, and newspapers mostly from the 1950s. The archives in Florence did not have all of the documents on my list, but the archives in Brussels had everything else that I wanted from the original list. There I took over fifty digital photos of the same types of documents.
The documents I consulted confirmed my hypothesis about the motivation of the EU language policy. It was in fact motivated by equality. The planners of the original EU (the European Community of Steel and Coal, or ECSC) looked into the options and felt that it would be best to promote equality among languages instead of choosing one. For this reason, when the EU predecessors expanded to include more countries than the original six, they brought those countries’ official languages into the official group. Now that twenty-seven countries have joined and that is how the policy has produced twenty-three languages today. It was not a mistake or a poorly-planned policy that has exploded into an inefficient language policy. It was instead a conscious decision by the EU’s founding fathers to make a plan that—despite its potential inefficiency—would represent the ideal of equality that the community was formed to promote.
For these reasons, my research turned out how I expected it to. I figured that there would be some document(s) that would help me better understand the motivations of the policy and this proved to be true. I found a great deal of information, but my research still has some holes because there seems to be a lack of information on the subject. It seems that I have found almost everything on the subject and I wish that I could find more information on the meetings and planning that went on in the 1950s. I found what I was looking for, but hoped that there would be more as well. This was the only real setback I encountered during my research. The main reason I see this as a setback is because I hoped to research the issue more and perhaps make a thesis or book based on the research. There still might be more information, but it seems as if I have found the majority of it.
After my research, I traveled from Belgium to Scotland to present my research and previous research on the topic at a conference in Glasgow. The conference was the 8th European Sociological Association Conference and my presentation went very well. The topic I have been researching is very relevant to the world in the twenty-first century. The EU is one of the most influential organizations in the world today and undoubtedly the most important in Europe today. Understanding its language policy helps us understand what the goals and ideals of the EU and also helps us understand the history, culture, and future of the European continent. I hope to continue looking for opportunities to increase my knowledge on the subject and present my work in order to contribute to a better understanding of Europe and the EU.