Who fears to speak in the new Europe? Plurilingualism and alterity

Introduction

In 1905 Douglas Hyde, the future President of Ireland, went on a fundraising trip to the USA. The purpose was to raise monies for the Gaelic League which he had co-founded with Eoin MacNeill in 1893. As part of the high-profile tour he paid a visit to the US president, Theodore Roosevelt. Entertainment was not lavish, and after a simple main course they proceeded to a dessert of apples and green grapes washed down by a cup of tea and a glass of sherry. Roosevelt was in garrulous form and was no stranger to strongly held opinion. He revealed to his Irish guest his own vision of the multicultural:

He was of the opinion that there was still too much ‘colonialism’ in America, that it was a nation made up of a lot of other nations and because there were so many Irish in the country, Americans should take anything that was good or worthwhile or interesting in the Irish and make it into their own. (Hyde, 1937: 15)

Roosevelt’s primary concern was to construct a national community, but a community that would make a virtue of appropriative diversity. In order for this post-colonialist society to emerge he was, like Hyde, greatly preoccupied with the question of language. However, his concern was not to see minority languages triumph, but to see English, the dominant host language of the USA, prevail. It was English that would allow for ‘anything that was good or worthwhile’ to be assimilated into the body politic. In a statement to the Kansas City Star in 1918 he offered a précis of his thinking on the issue: ‘Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country’ (Roosevelt, 1921: 143). A year later, in a letter to the President of the American Defense Society, he declared, ‘We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people’ (Pearson, 1920: 19). In staking a claim for the hegemony of a national language and wanting to take in anything that was ‘good or worthwhile’, Roosevelt followed a well-established path towards imperial translation practice (see Robinson, 1997).

How does this practice play out in contemporary debates around a European multiculturalism putatively in crisis, and what can the attitudes of politicians, policymakers and the media to language alterity reveal about migrant identities in a changing Europe? This article will examine the repeated preferences of national governments for host-language integration and the repeated construction of language difference as an obstacle with scant regard for the role of language in the construction of migrant identities. The aim is to contest these representations through a reappraisal of the role of time, polylingualism and conflict in the emergence of contemporary plurilingual and pluriethnic societies. In the context of cultural studies, the approach is informed by the work of Susan Bassnett and others who have pointed to what they judge to be the ‘translation turn’ in cultural studies: namely, the bringing to bear of perspectives from translation studies on the nature of social and political phenomena in pluriethnic and plurilingual societies (Bassnett, 2002).

Language integration

In order to explore the tensions inherent to language diversity, I want to begin by examining the public pronouncement of a successor to Douglas Hyde as President of Ireland, Mary McAleese. Addressing the Immigrant Council of Ireland on 4 October 2007, she argued that:

[The] single most important, cross-cutting, life-transforming area is language training … If Ireland is to benefit from the extraordinary potential offered by our transformed population, then we need to enable all of our population to realise their full potential and ensure that no one is excluded by a factor as fundamental, as basic as language. (McAleese, 2007).

A former prime minister of Ireland, Garret Fitzgerald, agreed with the president in an article published in The Irish Times entitled: ‘It is in our own interests to teach immigrants English’ (Fitzgerald, 2008). Research conducted as part of the Anti-Racism Plan in 2007 identified language as the ‘biggest barrier to integration’ (Fitzgerald, 2007), and a report funded by the Clondalkin Partnership published in 2008 pointed to the ‘language barrier’ (Mac Cormaic, 2008) as the greatest challenge in the operation of multi-ethnic schools. So, time and again, when language and immigration are raised as issues it is almost exclusively in terms of integration into the dominant language of the host community, as envisaged by Roosevelt almost a century earlier. As the editorial put it in The Irish Times of 6 October 2007, ‘Use of a common language is the most potent tool in facilitating integration within any society’ (The Irish Times, 2007) However, it is not only political elites or policy impresarios who articulate the necessity of host language knowledge as a means to improve living conditions for migrants. Thuraya Belasher, a Libyan migrant living in Galway, spoke of the pitfalls of language isolation:

I didn’t know anybody spoke like me and I didn’t speak English at all, I know just simple words, sometimes when I would like to go outside I need time to take a decision what I have to do (stay at home or go outside). It was a difficult decision because if I stay at home I feel bored, or if I go out I feel afraid … I couldn’t push myself to learn English or make relationships with my neighbours because I can’t communicate with them without English. (Belasher, 2008: 74)

The Austrian artist Rainer Ganahl points to the market value of language learning and the close fit between knowing a language and knowing your rights: ‘a migrant worker’s poor language skills in the dominant language of the host country result in and supposedly justify his or her miserable living and working conditions’ (Ganahl, 2001: 30). In an extensive study of the language and literacy needs of Irish asylum-seekers, Ward notes the particular vulnerability of asylum-seekers who are unable to handle the dominant language of day-to-day institutional interaction: ‘Asylum seekers without communication skills in English will experience difficulties trying to carry out very basic actions, for example, providing a medical history to a doctor, filling out forms and dealing with officials’ (Ward, 2002: 72). The awareness of the primacy of communicative competence as a means of economic integration and social survival is the rationale behind the organization of language classes for immigrants, and the stress on acquisition of the dominant language as the key to successful integration.

However, irrespective of the difficulties that might be faced by migrants in acquiring fluency in the dominant host language, suggestions that speakers of the non-dominant language might have language rights or entitlements are presented as subversive and self-defeating. Writing in The Sunday Times in 2006, Zia Haider Rahman sees all ‘hope of escape lost in translation’:

It’s a shocking figure: more than £100m was spent in the past year on translating and interpreting for British residents who don’t speak English. In the name of multiculturalism, one Home Office-funded centre alone provides these services in 76 languages … The financial cost is bad enough, but there is a wider problem about the confused signals we are sending to immigrant communities. We are telling them they don’t have to learn English, let alone integrate. Worse, by isolating them linguistically, we have created communities that are now incubators for Islamo-fascism. (Rahman, 2006: 27)

Language difference is perceived as a threat to the polis, not only in Ireland and Britain but elsewhere in Europe – as pointed out, for example, by Milani (2008) in the case of Sweden. This difference undermines the integrative thrust of civility and the very fact of translation testifies to the unsettling presence of the linguistic Other. Thus it is not surprising, for example, when the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance documents increased incidences of racial profiling in the Netherlands, it includes language alongside ‘race’, colour, religion, nationality and ethnic origin (European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, 2008). If terminology often has recourse to sight for discrimination, as in ‘visible minorities’, there is a no less powerful exclusionary zone around the ear in what we might term the ‘audible minorities’ of European cities (for the British case, see Blackledge, 2009). It is significant that in the Irish case language difference is construed repeatedly as a ‘barrier’, ‘obstacle’, a stumbling block on the road to the ever-receding goal of ‘integration’. There is, of course, a wholly different way of configuring language pluralism, and I want to consider this strategy in the context of the specifics of a predominantly Anglophone country with a recent history of significant migration: Ireland.

The existence of more than 160 different languages in Ireland as a result of unprecedented inward migration (Cronin, 2004) would appear to point to a unique historical opportunity for Irish society to take full advantage of this radically new linguistic diversity. However, the important question that is rarely asked is if there is another kind of language barrier, in effect, that never gets talked about: that is, the barrier to seeing other languages as worthy of interest, engagement and nourishment. It has become somewhat commonplace to remark that over the last decade, Ireland has become one of the most globalized nations on earth. The A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy Globalisation Index ranked 62 countries (representing 96% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) and 84% of the world’s population) for 14 variables in four groupings: economic integration, personal contact, technological connectivity and political engagement. Ireland emerged at the top of this index as the most globalized country in the world for three years in a row: 2000, 2001 and 2002 (Gillespie, 2004). A feature of economic globalization in the period was the presence of Irish businesses and entrepreneurs in many different parts of the world. This dimension to Irish economic success in the late 1980s and 1990s was facilitated by the contribution of modern language and business graduates to expanding Irish markets in Europe and to understanding that, given a choice, buyers generally prefer to buy in their own language (Sweeney, 2007). Given that Irish firms and businesses and international firms based in Ireland must operate for their economic survival in an increasingly globalized environment where producers and consumers speak any number of different languages, valuing employees who speak the languages of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Far East and Latin America would appear to be a decided advantage. For example, Philip McDermott has demonstrated how high levels of proficiency in native languages and English among the Indian community in Northern Ireland have enhanced their social and economic participation in the community:

The removal of a language barrier as well as the increased community confidence afforded by the maintenance of one’s own linguistic heritage has a role to play in societal participation. Surely, then, it is no coincidence that the Indian community is viewed as being the most successful minority ethnic community, both professionally and economically in Northern Ireland. (McDermott, 2008: 495)

The Swiss playwright Max Frisch once remarked about migrants to Switzerland, ‘we wanted workers and we got human beings’ (cited in Nickerson, 2006). Therefore, it is important in considering migration and language to consider not only economic and instrumental perspectives and to think about the broader dimension to the arrival of speakers of new languages in the society. Each language that is brought to Ireland carries stories, songs, histories, literary, philosophical and political traditions in its wake. Each language is, by definition, an invitation to discover the rich, complex and nuanced world inhabited by its speakers. An openness to, and the active acquisition of, any of these new languages involves a level of engagement which goes beyond the well-meaning bonhomie of ‘smorgasboard multiculturalism’. That is to say, as elsewhere, too often the multicultural face of the new Ireland is presented in terms of superior shopping experiences: the growth in ethnic eateries, specialist boutiques, world music racks and exotic drinks (Titley, 2009). The shiny surfaces of credit card consumption may present a picture of cosmopolitan effervescence, but without any substantive and prolonged involvement in the language and culture of others, it is doubtful whether ‘Rainbow Ireland’ will be much more than a marketing cliché masking a culture of general indifference.

Language, pace and time

In a sense, what underlies the visual icons of the multicultural (often ironically presented as the media-friendly antidote to the ‘crisis’) is the elision of time itself. It is time which, of course, crucially inflects how place and space are to be understood. In detailing the responses of European Union Member States to the question of language diversity among migrant populations, the question of the time invested in language acquisition is a constantly repeated theme (Hélot and Young, 2005; O’Rourke, 2010). This tension between time and place in the context of language has been usefully highlighted in contemporary popular culture. When the character of Richard in Babel (dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006) desperately seeks help for his wife, Susan, who has been inadvertently shot, he shouts out the English word ‘Help!’ to a Moroccan motorist who, bewildered and alarmed, speeds off. The visual promise of the holiday is undercut by the linguistic reality of his surroundings. The inability to translate foregrounds a cultural blindness on the part of the traveller who finds that they are not so much an empowered citizen of the world, as the unwilling inhabitant of a place. In this sense, what the failure to translate does is to reinstate the importance of a particular kind of time in overly spatialized and visualized models of the global. The importance of instantaneous time is repeatedly emphasized by commentators on globalization who see the availability of cheap, ubiquitous computing as the portal to a flat world of instant, limitless connectedness (Friedman, 2005). This standard time–space compression thesis lends itself effectively to panoptic ideals of global simultaneity where the variousness of the world can be captured on a multiplicity of screens. However, this perception is in marked contradiction to the intensely local, place-bound existence of the majority of inhabitants on the planet. For example, Geraldine Pratt and Susan Hanson argue that:

Although the world is increasingly well connected, we must hold this in balance with the observation that most people live intensely local lives; their homes, work places, recreation, shopping, friends, and often family are all located within a relatively small orbit. The simple and obvious fact that overcoming distance requires time and money means that the everyday events of daily life are well grounded within a circumscribed arena. (Pratt and Hanson, 1994: 10–11)

Of course, this is not to argue that place cannot be shaped by influences from elsewhere, even if people do not move. On the contrary: from the spread of Buddhism in China to the initiation of rural electrification projects worldwide, local lives can be dramatically transformed by developments which have their point of origin many thousands of kilometres away. What the prevalence of local lives does mean is that local languages have a reality that resists the easy sweep of the comparative cartographic gaze.

A further implication is that an idea of durational time must be invoked alongside the more commonly represented notion of instantaneous time. That is to say, any notion of an understanding of another culture, many of which in a multilingual world involve another language, implies a potential three-phase level of translational interaction which is at the constituent core of dwelling. Phase 1 interaction is heteronomous translation, which involves relying on someone to do the translation for you, whether it is the interpreter in an outpatients’ clinic or a Polish personal assistant negotiating with local suppliers in Warsaw for a foreign businessperson. Interpreting, no matter how proficient, takes time and already there is a sense in which time is beginning to ‘thicken’ in phase 1 translation exchange. Phase 2 is the shift towards semi-autonomous translation, where subjects want to begin to learn the language themselves and, in a sense, do their own translation. They begin to invest a certain amount of time in the process so that the durational reality of time begins to take precedence over the instantaneous. In Learning the Arts of Linguistic Survival (2007), Alison Phipps describes the experiences of ‘tourist language learners’ in a Scottish context and demonstrates how tourists’ perception of time and place alters with the shift to semi-autonomous translation. The place of escape mutates into the time of discovery. Phase 3 is full-autonomous translation, where subjects become fully functioning bilinguals or plurilinguals whose competence involves extensive expenditure of time either as a result of circumstance (being brought up in bilingual/multilingual environments, working and living in a foreign country) or acquisition (formal language study). All three phases involve the acknowledgement of the state of dwelling with the shift from the heteronomous to the autonomous modes of translation, indicating a gradual shift from recognition to implication. All three phases equally imply the restoration of durational time as a dimension to the experience and understanding of space. It is this durational time that is the backdrop to policy concerns about mother tongue language maintenance. In an empirical study on raising multilingual awareness about parents, pupils and teachers in a primary school in inner city Dublin, the issue that teachers and school management most frequently referred to as an obstacle to the promotion of linguistic diversity in school settings was curricular time (O’Rourke, 2010). Therefore, it is worth emphasizing that durational time is not there to favour one form or one direction of translation shift. Stuart Hall (2002) has argued that the most notable shift in societies in many parts of the globe in the latter half of the 20th century has been the rapid, internal differentiation of societies. In other words, whereas formerly the foreign, the exotic, the Other, was held to be over the border, beyond the mountains or over the sea, now the Other is next door, across the street or in the same office. Globalized patterns of migration and the creation of supranational structures such as the European Union have meant that a great many places in particular, but not only cities, are host to peoples with many different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. So if Hall’s notion of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Hall, 2002: 30) is linked to the reinscription of durational time into notions of the multicultural, it implies that reciprocity of contact involves the long now of the linguistic.

Assimilation

The translation paradigm underlying the comments mentioned earlier, which see integration into the English language as the only viable linguistic future for migrants to Britain and Ireland, is fundamentally an assimilationist paradigm. This model sees all newcomers as aspiring to or being coerced into translation into the dominant language of the host community. It is a unidirectional, binary conception of translation that adjudges the nature of translation to be either one thing or the other. Either everybody speaks the target language, or is condemned to the fractured solipsism of source languages, Rahman’s ‘incubators for Islamo-fascism’. Such a translation scenario is ultimately grounded in the worldview of monoglossia, which can only conceive of difference as oppositional. In other words, if the target language is to be dominant, then the very existence of source languages is a threat to the hegemony of the One. Arjun Appadurai, in his exploration of large-scale violence against minorities in Eastern Europe, Rwanda and India in the 1990s speaks of the ‘anxiety of incompleteness’. His argument is that numerical majorities can become violent, even genocidal towards ‘small numbers’ when minorities remind majorities of the ‘small gap which lies between their conditions as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole, a pure and untainted national ethos’ (Appadurai, 2006: 8). As noted in the introduction to this article, such movements become particularly prevalent in times of rapid change where national economies and welfare systems are made fragile by the globalization of financial and market relationships. States which are invited to open themselves to the flows of western capital and the ministrations of transnational corporations compensate by acting out dramas of national sovereignty in the cultural arena. Hence, the prevalence of moral panic around foreign migrants, customs, beliefs and languages.

In positing the notion of plurilingualism as an opportunity rather than further evidence of the putative failure of European multiculturalism, I am arguing for a different paradigmatic representation of translation and language. The fundamental move is to see translation as an analogue, both/and praxis which allows for both the instrumental utility of target language translation, and the pragmatic and cultural necessity of mother tongue maintenance. Obviously, translation can be used to allow for the circulation of meaning between a dominant host community and different minority language groups (translation into target language), but it also can be used as a means of legitimizing language alterity and social accommodation (provision of translating and interpreting services in minority or community languages). To take just one example, it is fallacious to contend that ‘integration’ is all about English or nothing else. As the evidence of countless countries throughout the world attests, it is perfectly possible for human beings to operate in more than one language at any number of different levels (Edwards, 1995). In this respect, due attention to the practice of translation and the encouragement of language diversity in societies is to do nothing that is particularly exceptional in global terms, but it is to do something that is deeply enriching in local contexts. What is more, extensive research has shown that the surest way to enhance second-language acquisition is to pay careful attention to mother tongue maintenance (Baker, 2000; Cummins, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000).

Reconfiguring the presence of plurilingualism in migrant societies means arriving at a different basic understanding of the relationship between language and society. Implicit in the analogue concept of translation that I am advocating is polyglossia rather than monoglossia. If multilingualism suggests a serial image of discrete units, polylingualism implies a more open, networked form of language relationships. Translators are, by definition, polylinguals, but in the repeated representations of cities as sites of serial monolingualism, the role of polylinguals is minimized or forgotten. The reformulation of public space in urban centres as primarily a translation zone has the potential to present a model of social cohesion which promotes the inclusion rather than the elimination of difference. So in everything from small local theatres presenting translations of plays from different migrant languages, and new voice recognition and speech synthesis technology producing discreet translations in wireless environments, to systematic client education for community interpreting to translation and language learning workshops as part of diversity management courses in the workplace, the possibilities for a more dynamic and less hegemonic conception of urban centres from a plurilingual perspective are numerous.

Conflict

If a crisis of multiculturalism is posited with the well-orchestrated evils of language fragmentation, the collapse of civility and the rise of the ghetto, an underlying assumption is that the conflictual, oppositional, ostensibly or radically different represent a significant threat to the well-ordered house of self, language and community. However, surely it is time to begin to question the almost canonical aversion to conflict?

A substantial chapter of bookshops in many richer countries is given over to self-help manuals. Implicit in these manuals is the notion that there is an ideal self that is somewhat out of kilter because it lacks confidence, vitamins, the ‘X factor’ or has failed to dejunk its life. ‘I am not myself today’ implies that there is a unitary, consensual self which is the desirable default value for the good life: that is, reading the right book, taking the right therapy or buying the right product will lead to the finding of a ‘true self’ beyond disharmony or conflict. This psychologized consensualism finds its correlative at a political level in the notion that representative democracy consists of a collection of points of view which are all equally valid. The viewpoint of the workers’ representative where 2000 jobs have been delocalized is as valid as that of the corporate vice-president who has engineered the ‘rationalization’. So everybody gets to have their say. However, what those in authority are saying is that real conflict is no longer acceptable. In reality, points of view are irreducible as speakers are situated very differently, both materially and structurally. However, the false symmetrization of the mediasphere conceals the very genuine conflict of interests through the irenic fiction of the representative soundbite (Negrine, 2008). Each person gets to have their say, so democratic duty has been discharged, but not everyone speaks from anything like the same position of power or influence.

In another version of the tyranny of compliance, when social movements oppose government measures, such as penalizing public sector workers for the financial irresponsibility of the private sector, government spokespeople and stockbroker economists talk about a ‘communication deficit’: if only the people understood what they were doing, they would realize it was ultimately for their own good, and opposition can be conceived of only as cussedness or stupidity. No allowance is made for the fact that there are grounded material interests and structural conditions which make opposition not only inevitable, but vital (Benasayag and del Rey, 2007).

As even the most rudimentary exercise in the study of others soon reveals, understanding is above all an initiation into unsuspected complexity. The simplest of situations involving other humans turns out not to be as straightforward as one thought. What this schooling in complexity reveals is the radical insufficiency of cultural shorthand: the cultural categorization of society as made of recognizable types designated by labels, ‘dyslexic’, ‘epileptic’, ‘Paddy’, ‘gay’, ‘Muslim’, reduces the multidimensional complexity of humans to one defining trait. Once a person is described using one of these labels, it is suggested that this is all you need to know about them. They become transparent. For example, what gay rights activists and the women’s movement in various parts of the globe and at different times have attempted to do, is to restore multidimensionality and complexity to the lives of human beings who were deemed to be instantly intelligible as ‘gay’ or ‘women’, gender or sexual orientation revealing all that was necessary to know about a person (Benasayag and Schmit, 2006). So shifting a fractal perspective from place to person means opening up the infinite, internally conflicted, shifting desires, ideals and interests of complex human beings in the lifeworld.

As we have noted, implicit in the more differentiated understanding of humans is the inevitability – indeed, the necessity – of conflict. As Miguel Benasayag and Angélique del Rey (2007) have pointed out, part of the work of mourning for humanity is the acknowledgement that there will never be perpetual peace. They note that each time there is a ‘war to end all wars’, which aims at bringing about the reign of everlasting peace, the scale of destruction and human suffering is greater than ever before. This observation is crucial, as an attention to the local, the micro, can lead to a kind of consensual smugness in the present or a censorious nostalgia with respect to the past, when no false note was to be heard and everyone lived happily in the green houses on the prairie. Local community does not entail an end to dissent. Much of the disappointed reaction of post-1968 activists was partly to do with an overly benign notion of community. Having overly idealized the small community, they could not tolerate the inevitable and indeed desirable persistence of difference and conflict. The notion that having found the larger group difficult, it is possible to retreat to the haven of your ‘own’ – fellow speakers, unitary, secular republic, peer group, buddies, family – and expect the comforts of uncomplicated, consensual intimacy, is to invite the counter-movement of disappointment. However, it is important to move the notion of conflict beyond the binary logic of specular confrontation, where entities with fixed identities face up to each other in a zero sum of binary opposition. Conflict from the viewpoint advanced here is not confrontation; it is conflict as engagement with the multidimensionality of human beings, their histories, social conditions, gender, languages and cultures. It resists the culturalist versions of contemporary biopower which, in the name of avoiding a ‘clash of civilizations’, presents all conflict as confrontation through a binary stereotyping of Us and Them. As Benasayag and del Rey (2007) have pointed out, the ultimate triumph of dictatorships is to present their opponents as pure adversaries. Confrontation from this perspective leads almost logically or invariably to elimination.

An agonistic conception of human community in an era of global migration, which runs directly counter to the beatific visions of universal understanding underlying many public pronouncements on the topic of the multicultural, takes as a basic premise the ultimate unknowability of the Other: human interaction is not simply the revelation of what is already there. The reason is that in the movement to engage with the complex being of others, in the creation of some form of shared sense or degree of commonality, the operation is not one of uncovering a universal substrate, waiting to be revealed in its pre-formed state, but the contingent construction of ‘bottom-up’ commonality. It is useful in this context to invoke the distinction made by the Sinologist and philosopher, François Julien, between the Universal, the Uniform and the Common. For Julien, the Universal is the Universal of scientific reason: the claim, for example, that the atomic composition of water does not change wherever it is studied on the planet. Universal reason cannot suffer exceptions, there cannot be two hydrogen atoms in water in the USA and three in Australia, otherwise the claim is not universally valid. The uniform is a kind of perverse double of the universal, a phenomenon which has universal impact not because of the necessary implications of reason, but because of a skilfully engineered ease of access. One obvious example would be global fast food chains. When it comes to defining the Common, Julien characterizes it as fons, not fundus. What he means by this is that the Common is not what is left at the bottom (fundus) once everything has been taken away and all the differences have been removed; rather, it is the source (fons) of what could be shared through mutual intelligibility (Jullien, 2008). A group can work out what it has in common, what are common interests and concerns, but this work is processual: the working out is not the mechanical application of a predefined prescriptive agenda but the constructed emergence of shared ideals, preoccupations and values. The Common, then, is best understood not from a building perspective as the ready implementation of a blueprint, but as a form of what Tim Ingold (2000) would call ‘weaving’: the negotiated, imminent emergence of sense through interactivity. As becomes all too apparent in travel elsewhere, being similar to someone (for example, sharing the same nationality) does not mean that one necessarily has anything in common with them.

Of course, the danger is that the commonality which allows for communication across differences becomes the shared and exclusive property of the group, who literally ex-communicates others. As stories of romantic love invariably show, the more intense the commonality, the more exclusive the affection. Traditionally, one of the functions of the universal has been to avoid excessively defensive local allegiances and to ensure that the potentially infinite capacity for inclusion of the Common does not mutate into the actually infinite ability to exclude. However, this critical universal must be understood within the context of human commonality not as some ahistorical, transcendent truth, but as an incomplete and historically contingent operation, constantly subject to revision.

Conclusion

A necessary part of the acceptance of the internal multidimensionality of human beings is that in their mutual encounters it is different levels, selves and identities that will come into play at any given moment and alter the grounds and conditions of negotiated interaction. As William James once observed: ‘A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him’ (2007: 294). This feature obtains as much within as between communities. Admitting the necessity of the ontological dimension of conflict for the emergence of identity also involves accepting that there is no final, definitive reconciliation of opposites; rather, that any arrangement is provisional, an unstable equilibrium, which does not rule out further conflict in the future. In short, it is this understanding of conflict which can provide a way of thinking about contemporary multilingual and multicultural societies in a manner that moves beyond revealed universalism and schismatic relativism.

This understanding of the multidimensionality of self also underscores the misleading nature of the ‘one world’ myth that Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert refer to in The New Individualism (2006). This is the notion that the alleged contemporary ‘crisis’ in multiculturalism means that peoples should now return to the pre-migratory ‘one world’ of shared ethnic identity which was so cruelly disrupted by the advent of unassimilable newcomers. Not only does historical evidence discount the validity of this ‘one world’ ever existing for countless communities around the globe, but the internal and external plurality of self and the constructed and negotiated nature of the common means that just as there are any numbers of potential and actual selves, there are also (and have been) any number of potential and actual selves and worlds. Drawing on the work of Victor Segalen, Christopher Prendergast claimed that we ‘are never “closer” to another culture (and hence liberated from the traps of ethnocentrism) than when we fail to understand it, when confronted with the points of blockage to interpretive mastery’ (Prendergast, 2004: xi). The real failure to understand is that living subjects and their cultures are infinitely complex and conflicted. Plurilingualism in contemporary societies is evidence of both the infinitely complex and the indefinitely conflicted. However, if anything ‘good or worthwhile’ is to emerge from the translation zones of Europe’s towns and cities, then a new model of civility needs to be formulated – a model whose ‘sole loyalty’ will be to the infinitely receding horizons of constructed commonality.