The Real as a Narrative: Language, National Identity, and Bilingualism

This is my first reflection, somewhat cursory, on the fascinating politics of language, in particular in relation to the controversial and divisive issue of bilingualism/multilingualism within the history of different national-states that are of my personal interest and curiosity such as Spain, Belgium, France, and South Africa and others such as Canada and the United States. After centuries of warfare, civil wars, religious and racial tensions, the Nation-State has been able to negotiate these differences, guaranteeing the relative functioning of the central or federal State as the focus of power. However, today it seems as if Language, even beyond religion, appears as the main cultural factor complicating the definition of the Nation-State and National identity. The different conflicts between linguistic communities sharing the same state has encouraged me to seek a definition of language as a stage built as the means for the understanding and construction of the Real. I see Language as the system through which we enter and experience history; the beginning of history. We are what we speak, since the languages that we speak introduce us as active participants into cultural and political universes, constructed with language, that transcends geographical borders, even more so today, with the advent of new technologies in communication which allows individuals to remain constantly connected to their native communities despite the distance and time. This, in addition to the legacy of colonialism, which expanded the geographical reach of many languages, has created the possibility for the existence of transnational cultural 'states' united by a common language.

Language

Perhaps no other cultural expression unites people like a common language. Through language we fix the world around us, we define it, stabilize it; we end it by setting its boundaries. The world, its social and natural phenomena become arbitrarily attached to symbols and sounds. In essence, language is the collective task of naming or, in more cynical terms, the act of labeling the the world, but as we often experience, the labels are not as effective in defining the reality they represent. It is not only ironic, but unsettling to realize that what connects us as a community is an incomplete system of symbols characterized by an arbitrary nature. For instance, in politics language often fails to describe new or unprecedented events, forcing the centers of official discourse, such as the Press, the State and its educational system, to exploit and stigmatize words or labels such as liberal, socialist or even progressive, effectively substituting the Real, which they cannot explain, or even understand, with language itself. The referent becomes more real than the referred.
Not only words seem to be separated from the reality they represent, but they obtain, mystically or even irrationally, a life of their own. The Real is what is Narrated and mass replicated. However, language often explains nothing, it becomes a mere smoke screen between us and Reality. It is in language where we reconstruct or re-stage Reality but in world submerged in ideology, as the different pillars and institutions of power battle to possess the right to reconstruct the Real, that is, Reality as we understand it, the interpretation of facts, which is the power to establish the official truth.
Words are illusions which attempt to fix a reality that is often fluid and unstable like the sand of the desert. Reality is as complex and rebellious as our human emotions, never ceasing to defy expectations and preconceptions, leaving us with words as an inane system of empty symbols. In concrete terms, the failure of language is visible all around us. The more I study history, the contradictions keep appearing. The real practical world reduces language to an ideological imposition over Reality. For example, during the Algerian War (1954-1962) it was a Socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, who escalated the military presence of the French army in Algeria to 500,000 men. On the other hand, it was the Right wing, World War II hero, Charles de Gaulle, who brought an end to the war by betraying his 'ultra' conservative supporters, who had staged a Coup d'Etat that brought him back from retirement to head the French government in the spring of 1958. In our world dominated by ideological perception, the task of the Right is often best exercised by the Left and vice versa, which is often the result of the public's proclivity to place attention on who is performing the action and not on what the acts are in themselves. This is the nature of ideology. The examples are innumerable, it is enough to briefly revise history of certain events such as the American War in Vietnam (1959-1973) to perceive the ideological contradictions and the failure and exploitation of language.

Nation-States

Now, this detour brings me to my fascination with National-identity and language. The Nation-state, that beloved institution with its pride, symbols, and history or common narrative is far from being a stable and uniform entity. All nation-states are the product of colonialism and imperialism, continental or transcontinental. It is surprising how the nation is politically exploited as a source of identity, assumed to be uniformed, centered around a common history and culture, when in fact the nature of nations is based on an artificial uniformity, masking the origin in the plurality of cultures and peoples. Nations are pointillistic images that only appear uniformed from afar. Rarely a Nation-state is a homogeneous territoriality belonging to one people, providing them with a secure, uniform and separate identity. Nation-states are the product of conquest, expansion, and annexation by a central group which, in order to sustain the authority to rule, attempts to incorporate other groups into a single political and cultural unit. However, in other less benevolent cases, the center of power has tried to purge elements that it considers not only foreign but incompatible or non assimilable as part of the identity of the national group.
The different nation-making projects around meticulously historically specific and unique to each national context with its distinctive levels of success in unity and integration of the different pluralities, often located in the periphery. Undeniably, the origin of most modern nation-states is the product of colonialism and imperialism. The history of many modern nations reveal a process of centralization by a dominant ethnic group or nation over adjacent or even distant territories and peoples. In the case of modern transplanted societies, the nation-state was the result of a foreign group displacing a native population and establishing itself as the dominant center of power, both politically and culturally, if not economically, which the migrants, minorities, and other indigenous groups must use as a referent for assimilation. For instance, even though the United States ethnic diversity has been the norm as a nation of immigrants, recent newcomers are expected to integrate to the Anglo-Saxon cultural dominant group. The same applies to nations such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada as Anglo-Saxons nations with historic levels of immigration, founded on the displacement of indigenous populations. However, it is not discussing the past as such that interests me, instead I'm personally intrigued by how present is haunted by the past, that is, the traumatic legacy of the colonial past, which has produced a myriad of national projects with different levels of cultural division and fragmentation between descendants of the colonizers and the colonized, and the different colonial groups that were part of the national formation (e.g. South Africa as a territory colonized by two European imperial powers, the Netherlands and England).
Canada
In North America, Canada, despite its cultural and historical links to the United States as territories colonized by England, has a more complex and less aggressive construction of national identity. As a territory colonized by two different European powers, Canada has been a nation-state tormented, especially in recent decades, by the specter of secession by its largest and second most populated province, Quebec. Here is where language and bilingualism appears as the catalyst for division. While French is the unique official language of Quebec, at the national level Canada is a bilingual nation. Whereas in Quebec language policy aims at promoting the dominance of French against the cultural imperialism of the English language arriving from the rest of Canada and the US. The opponents of bilingualism see the expansion of French beyond Quebec as threat to the cultural tradition of Canada as an Anglo-Saxon nation founded by British colonists and loyalists.
Belgium
This leads me to Europe and some of its different Nation-states projects, from the decentralized federal Belgium and Spain to the centralist state of France. the Kingdom of Belgium in particular is a state that is profoundly unique and thus appealing as an object of study. Belgium is a composed nation, formed in the cultural boundary between Germanic and Latin Europe, made up of two distinctive regions, French-speaking Wallonia and Flemish-speaking Flanders. It is a nation of two peoples under one state, created after the it achieved independence from the Netherlands in 1830. As a way to prevent France from annexing Belgium, the other European major powers established a German monarch as king of Belgium, Leopold I. Belgium today is a nation not only geographical but politically divided by languages. Initially, Belgium had begun as a bilingual state in which French was the privileged language. The dominance of French continue throughout the 19th century changing the linguistic landscape of the nation as francophone migrants moved from Wallonia to Dutch speaking Brussels. By the early 20th century Brussels had been transformed into a French speaking city, due in part to the adoption of French by many Flemish citizens living in Brussels. Belgium started as a centralist state with the French aristocracy at the center of power, however, gradually the State evolved into a federation as the cultural divisions demanded the creation of fixed cultural and linguistic boundaries after 1963 between the Francophone south and the Flemish north. The capital, Brussels, which is located within Flanders, a few miles from Wallonia, was redefined as the only official bilingual region, surrounded by the Dutch language, as a political maneuver designed to satisfy Flemish nationalism seeking to limit the expansion of the French language in Flanders. The historical development of Brussels presents a fascinating image of a city surrounded by a cultural fence that evolved from being a Dutch speaking regional town into the capital of Europe where French is the main language along side Dutch and English.
Spain
Another complex nation-state formation is the Kingdom of Spain. The nation-making project in Spain reveals the truth of most nation-states as political entities created from fragments by expansion and conquest. The current rise of right wing nationalism in Europe and North America, revived by the opposition against immigrations, often pretends to erase history by denying the origin of these nations in the assimilation of a plurality of peoples. Spain due to its geographical location has witness an evolution from a territory of invasions and conquest by distant groups to a kingdom driven by internal conquest, impulse which later provided the impetus to continue its conquest beyond the Iberian peninsula, transforming itself into a transoceanic empire. Spain was a nation unified under a assiduous military campaign for 7 centuries against the elements that considered foreign territory, namely, its Muslim conquerors and Jewish inhabitants. By the 15th century the reconquest of the peninsula was completed with the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom is Spain. However, the constant fighting performed during the Reconquista and the exhaustive construction of the Spanish empire diverted economic and military resources from the nation-state project, leaving Spain as a nation composed by culturally diverse kingdoms united by the centrifugal force of a center of power. Modern Spain, unlike France, is one of the most decentralized States in the West. It is a nation-state made of 19 autonomous regions, many of which, such as the Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia have their own official language. It is in this regions where bilingualism is an issue of conflict and division as regional nationalism is seeking to reverse history and create their own independent nation-states by fostering an separate identity based almost exclusively on language. It is important to note how high levels of economic development, beyond any other motive, is what sustains and inspires independence movements.
France
France, unlike Spain, is a more successful nation-state project as the result of a centralist campaign launched after the French Revolution...