Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalisation Debates

Peter Ives

Political Studies, 2010, vol. 58, issue 3, 516-535

Abstract: While it is commonly agreed that language standardisation was an integral feature of the historical formation of the modern nation state, current debates on globalisation and its effects on the nation state rarely address language issues in more than a superficial fashion. Yet the quadrupling of the number of English speakers in the last half‐century and other changes associated with ‘global English’ would seem to have more substantial political implications. Particularly in the recent wave of discussions of cosmopolitanism, language questions seem to lurk below the surface but are rarely addressed explicitly or comprehensively. Important exceptions to this neglect of current language issues include Daniele Archibugi, who addresses these questions head on, and Nancy Fraser's most recent attempt to rethink Habermas' critical theory of the public sphere. This article agrees with both Archibugi and Fraser that language is an important, even central, aspect of political responses to processes of globalisation, specifically cosmopolitanism. However, I argue that Antonio Gramsci's approach to the politics of language in the early twentieth century highlights the insufficiency of Archibugi's reliance on the metaphor of Esperanto as well as the intractable nature of Fraser's critique for any critical theory of global public sphere(s), despite her attempt to advance such a theory. I do this by looking at Gramsci's critique of Esperanto from 1918 and his later prison writings concerning language politics in Italy. Gramsci, I argue, provides a much more adequate approach to contemporary questions of the politics of language, which includes an understanding of the continued role of the state which is most often obscured both by cosmopolitan perspectives and by much research on global English in fields outside political science.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00781.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:polstu:v:58:y:2010:i:3:p:516-535

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0032-3217

Access Statistics for this article

Political Studies is currently edited by Matthew Festenstein and Martin Smith

More articles in Political Studies from Political Studies Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().