Comparing deliberation in monolingual and multilingual publics
Linguistic differences, according to most political theories, represent an obstacle to democracy in increasingly globalized, multilingual polities. Likewise, in studies on democracy in Europe, linguistic barriers are thought to pose obstacles to deliberation at the level of policy-makers taking delicate decisions, and at the level of citizens who want to mobilize European-wide protest. However, we know little about the empirical conditions that might allow for democratic inclusion in linguistically pluralist polities. What impact does linguistic difference have on democratic deliberation? Under what conditions might political deliberation include heterogeneity in a democratic manner?
These theoretical questions lie at the heart of the European Union's (EU) public sphere and the emergence of a ‘demos’ in the EU. To turn them into empirical questions, I studied the European Social Forum (ESF) process. The ESF is Europe's largest transnational democracy forum to be founded by grassroots activists and social movement organizations to debate alternative visions of EU politics beyond a perceived neoliberal variant of European integration and globalization (della Porta et al., Reference della Porta, Andretta, Mosca and Reiter2006). The central decision-making bodies of the ESF are its European preparatory assemblies, used by social actors to mobilize campaigns on specific issues such as the European Constitution, the Bolkestein Directive,Footnote 1 and the recent financial crisis (della Porta and Caiani, Reference della Porta2009; Parks, Reference Parks2009).
One major challenge facing transnational communication and grassroots deliberation within the European preparatory meetings is linguistics. Reflecting the heterogeneous and unequal foreign language skills of EU citizens (Gerhards, Reference Gerhards2010), two thirds of the participants in the ESF have difficulties with foreign languages, and 10 percent do not speak English (Doerr, Reference Doerr2008). Activists and organizers involved in the ESF preparatory process therefore hold their regular European (preparatory) meetings for ESF summits using a self-organized practice of multilingual (face-to-face) translation.Footnote 2 Multilingual translation is possible through the involvement of the non-commercial translation network ‘Babels’, composed of voluntary translators and activists who specialize in providing simultaneous interpretation and translation (Boéri and Hodkinson, Reference Boéri and Hodkinson2004). The multilingual translation provided by this group has enabled the participation of a significant number of activists from Central Eastern Europe and Turkey who lack an active command of Western European languages (Andretta and Doerr, Reference Andretta and Doerr2007).
In this paper, therefore, I link the large theoretical debate on democracy and growing linguistic diversity in the EU to the novel bottom-up practice of translation used by activists in the multilingual Social Forums. Using a comparative approach, I have studied the extent to which democratic discussion, in the sense of an inclusive deliberative debate, may or may not occur within the multilingual and Europe-wide preparatory meetings in the ESF process. These small preparatory meetings and other national social forum preparatory assemblies, which take place before and after the larger Social Forums, co-decide on the same issues and bring together similar groups and organizations (Maeckelbergh, Reference Maeckelbergh2009). Comparing activists’ deliberative practices in these European preparatory meetings with social forum preparatory meetings at the national level in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, I arrive at a surprising result: linguistically heterogeneous European meetings reflect higher inclusivity within deliberation compared to the national level. I will discuss this puzzling finding after a brief review of the literature on the consequences of linguistic diversity on civic participation in Europe's multilingual public sphere, and of theories of deliberative democracy and inequality more generally.
Europe's multilingual public sphere, and deliberation in heterogeneous groups
Multilingualism can be conceptualized as one basic cultural feature of democracy and civic participation in the EU, one that is not going to disappear with economic and institutional integration (Nanz, Reference Nanz2006). The ongoing politicization of EU politics has increased scholars’ attention to the role of language barriers as an obstacle or trigger for different kinds of political mobilization in a multilingual and socially heterogeneous Europe. While the lack of civic engagement in transnational debates on EU politics is often attributed to the ‘language problem’, empirical studies to date have mostly focused on survey and mass media analysis (Risse, Reference Risse2010). Conversely, social movement scholars have shown that discussion of European politics in the media remains primarily the privilege of social and political elites, while non-institutional actors are rarely present (Imig and Tarrow, Reference Imig and Tarrow2001; della Porta and Caiani, Reference della Porta2009).
While social movement activists have begun to integrate multilingualism into their participatory democracy practices, scholars of the debate on the ‘public sphere’ deficit of the EU have considered national language barriers mainly on the basis of two paradigmatic positions: first, the ‘sceptical’ position claims that the active participation of citizens in a transnational European public sphere is impossible due to the lack of a common language (i.e. idiom) at the European level (Offe, Reference Offe1998; Gerhards, Reference Gerhards2000). According to a second, more ‘optimistic’ position, the criteria needed for a democratic European public sphere are fulfilled if the same (European) topics are discussed simultaneously and according to the same interpretative frames of relevance in different national media (Eder and Kantner, Reference Eder and Kantner2002; Risse, Reference Risse2003; Kantner, Reference Kantner2004; Van de Steeg, Reference Van de Steeg2006). The first approach has been criticized for projecting an idealized picture of a homogeneous and unified national public sphere at the European level (Kantner, Reference Kantner2004; Nanz, Reference Nanz2006). Yet, it remains an open question as to whether active participation might also be possible in direct multilingual face-to-face arenas involving ordinary citizens in transnational public deliberations ‘from below’.
This article applies a ‘bottom-up’ view on the European public sphere that proceeds using a within-case study of the ESF process. It assesses whether, and to what extent, linguistic diversity is a barrier to democratic inclusion in a deliberative forum involving ‘real’ citizens. The Social Forums are a good example to explore when it comes to the democratic potential of deliberative democracy in the broader context of the crisis of representative democracy and the ‘democratic deficit’ at the EU institutional level (Manin, Reference Manin1995; Pizzorno, Reference Pizzorno2001). The ESF, unlike the European Parliament (Kraus, Reference Kraus2004) or multilingual citizen forums created by the EU (Wodak and Wright, Reference Wodak and Wright2006), is open to EU citizens and migrants, refugees and Turkish citizens, and often includes over a dozen national language speakers in its regular European meetings. In practice, a good half of the participants in the ESF preparatory meetings are members of left unions and party associations, while the other half identify themselves primarily with ‘new’ social movements, and/or with global justice groups (Doerr, Reference Doerr2009). The ESF preparatory meetings constitute a grassroots experiment in radical democracy in which participants take all decisions through consensus, while voting is rejected (della Porta, Reference della Porta2005a). This decidedly ‘prefigurative’ character of participatory democracy can be understood as rooted within a wider tradition of ‘deliberative talk’ within past and present Left libertarian and emancipatory civic movements (Polletta, Reference Polletta2002). Given their hybrid organizational background, their multilingual character, and their deliberative practices, I read the ESF process as a critically inspired attempt to create a transnational public space, and in so doing to provide opportunities for grassroots deliberation on global and European politics (Fraser, Reference Fraser2007; Habermas, Reference Habermas2008).
Thus, with respect to broader questions of deliberative democracy and difference, the ESF is a particularly useful case for understanding the potential of democratic deliberation in heterogeneous and homogeneous groups given the multilingual and culturally diverse character of some of its meetings, and the novel translation practices activists use. While communitarian theorists problematize linguistic homogenization and expect multilingual democracy experiments to exclude average citizens (Kymlicka, Reference Kymlicka2001: 216), cosmopolitan deliberative democrats have promoted a lingua franca as a more desirable model than multilingual democracy (Archibugi, Reference Archibugi2005: 537). The problem with these theories is that they tend to reproduce the commonsense assumption that linguistic difference endangers democratic deliberation (Nanz, Reference Nanz2006). Feminist and sociological accounts, however, suggest the need for an explorative approach that compares the inclusivity of multilingual and monolingual deliberative meetings using in-depth empirical analysis in order to connect thinking about democracy with democratic practices. A first interesting intervention with regard to the problem of linguistic diversity and inclusion comes from feminist theorists, many of whom have questioned the assumption of a homogeneous (national) public sphere and a single language as a precondition for a democratic public discourse (Fraser, Reference Fraser1992). While feminists stress the contingent exclusion of some groups, notably women and workers, within universalist models for public deliberation (Young, Reference Young1996), sociologists contextualize the exclusionary institutionalization of culturally homogeneous monolingual public spheres within the construction of the modern nation state (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1982; Eder and Kantner, Reference Eder and Kantner2002). Multilingual settings, in emerging transnational deliberative arenas, may multiply the challenge of inequality and exclusion, if, for example, they work in a single lingua franca spoken best by global elites (Fraser, Reference Fraser2007). Yet, multilingual discursive experiments may also improve inclusivity by introducing bilingual practices (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1982). Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1982) was skeptical about the potential of a (national) democratic public sphere involving socially heterogeneous groups. He argued that the institutional codes of language used in ordinary conversation reproduce symbols of social status. Still, Bourdieu referred to bilingual situations as discursive experiments that potentially challenge participants’ familiar linguistic Habitus (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1982: 78). From this perspective, I choose an understanding of deliberation distinct from both the cosmopolitan and the communitarian perspectives that do not, in my view, sufficiently consider the culturally specific institutionalized boundaries of deliberation, nor the empirical applicability of cross-cultural, multilingual deliberation.Footnote 3
An interdisciplinary research perspective that makes these feminist and sociological insights fruitful for the empirical investigation of deliberative practices in public meetings is discourse sociolinguistics, an approach developed by Ruth Wodak in the broader theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA; Wodak, Reference Wodak1996). Students of CDA reinterpret Bourdieu's structuralist concept of the ‘linguistic market’ to the critical sociolinguistic discourse analysis of political deliberation in Europe's multilingual public sphere (Unger, Reference Unger2008; Wodak, Reference Wodak2008: 64). Bourdieu argued that a socially stratified ‘linguistic market’ directly determines speakers’ influence within political discourse, depending on their individual (linguistic) capital and capacity to switch between different idioms and sociolinguistic codes (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1982: 78; Reference Bourdieu1994: 80).
Interestingly though, students of CDA who have applied Bourdieu's concept of the linguistic market to the EU's multilingual public sphere show that the symbolic capital of European ‘core’ languages such as English and French in fact depends on institutional contexts and their specific ‘language ideologies’Footnote 4 in different national and European arenas of discourse (cf. Gal and Irvine, Reference Gal and Irvine1995; Wodak, Reference Wodak2008: 647–648). For example, the currently dominant language ideology in EU institutional arenas is ‘hegemonic multilingualism’, while common national political discourse arenas in different EU member states reproduce nationalist monolingualism (Krzyżanowski and Wodak, Reference Krzyżanowski and Wodak2010). Hegemonic multilingualism ‘implies that only selected “core” languages will (and should) remain the de-facto “working languages” of the political organism of the EU institutions’ (Krzyżanowski and Wodak, Reference Krzyżanowski and Wodak2010: 116).
Inspired by critical discourse analysts, I will explore the context-specific potential for inclusion and exclusion in different transnational and national-level public spheres. I will thus propose an empirical approach that compares the inclusivity of multilingual and monolingual deliberative meetings empirically, drawing insights from the aforementioned feminist and sociological approaches to deliberative democracy.
My analysis of the ESF process will explore the effects that a multilingual setting has on the degree of inclusivity of deliberative discussion processes via a comparison of European meetings with national level social forum meetings. From a comparative perspective, I will explore the potential boundaries to inclusion within the discourse culture, language ideology, and the institutional context of a deliberative setting (Young, Reference Young2002: 55). While the degree of inclusiveness within linguistically heterogeneous and homogeneous meetings is certainly not the only relevant dimension of deliberation to assess, it is theoretically relevant to discuss grassroots attempts to create emerging transnational publics as alternatives to potentially more exclusive, institutionalized, and mediated deliberative spaces at the supranational level (Fraser, Reference Fraser2007: 18–21). I expect inclusiveness of voices in public discourses to represent a core value of the practice of deliberation as ‘adopted and adapted’ by movements (Young, Reference Young1996; della Porta, Reference della Porta2005a: 340–341). Their desire to create inclusive settings led activists to choose a multilingual arena in the ESF, and the relative public accessibility of their meetings distinguishes the ESF from other, more institutionalized ‘deliberative settings’ closely related to international organizations (see e.g. Nanz and Steffek, Reference Nanz and Steffek2004). Moreover, the abovementioned emphasis on inclusiveness among the actors in the cases studied is relevant to the democratization of EU politics given the low inclusivity of supranational deliberative arenas that invite citizens to discuss the future of the EU (see, e.g. Wodak and Wright, Reference Wodak and Wright2006; Bozzini, Reference Bozzini2009).
Thus, with respect to multilingualism, a specific aspect that my empirical analysis will highlight is the role of the listener – and in particular the listener's creative, ambiguous, and potentially empowering position that makes for mutual understanding (or misunderstanding) in an intercultural political debate (Nanz, Reference Nanz2006: 131). Moreover, sociologists show that the problem is not so much that traditionally disadvantaged groups ‘cannot speak’ on their own in a deliberative forum; rather, culturally distinct ‘habits of hearing’ ensure that the latter groups are not taken seriously, regardless of the content of their arguments (Polletta, Reference Polletta2006: 26–27). Listening thus confers a key function to inclusive deliberation in the context of transnational social movements, which Donatella della Porta defines as follows: ‘Deliberation (or even communication) is based upon the belief that, while not giving up my perspective, I might learn if I listen to the other’ (Young, Reference Young1996, emphasis added; della Porta, Reference della Porta2005a: 340–341). Departing from this definition, my analysis will compare deliberative processes in national and multilingual European meetings in order to explore to what extent the arguments of less privileged participants will effectively be listened to, so as to change the preferences of more privileged participants in meetings, and hence be included in decision-making, or not.
I compared national and European preparatory meetings for the ESF summits I attended as a participant observer from 2003 to 2006. As a vital part of the ESF process, a number of these European preparatory meetings take place six times a year, and gathering up to several hundred activists from across Europe (Maeckelbergh, Reference Maeckelbergh2004; Andretta and Doerr, Reference Andretta and Doerr2007). It should be noted that national and European meetings often co-decide on the same issues, such as, in the period I studied, the finances of the ESF, the ESF host-city, the agenda, relevant discussion topics, and speakers to invite to the ESF.
Based on the research focus on deliberation and inclusion, two questions guided me: first, how inclusive was deliberation within within the European preparatory meetings for the ESF as compared to meetings at the national level? Second, to what degree did the power of arguments made by potentially less privileged actors with fewer resources effectively count in the discussion (see Young, Reference Young2001)? Behind this lies the question of whether the arguments of ‘potentially less privileged participants and members of traditionally disadvantaged groups’ will effectively be included within public deliberation and eventual decision-making (Polletta, Reference Polletta2006). I define as ‘potentially disadvantaged participants’ activists with limited material resources and people with a working class background, ‘ethnic minorities’ and/or women, traditionally at risk of being excluded by the mainstream codes of deliberation. Those groups were continuously mentioned by the Social Forum organizers as important to include in the process of decision-making.
Departing from these research questions, I studied deliberation through a triangulated, multi-method approach derived from the perspective of discourse sociolinguistics and CDA (Wodak, Reference Wodak1996: 23). First, I analyzed the perceptions of the actors of democratic deliberation and inclusivity, using a survey and interviews. In order to operationalize deliberation in the survey and in-depth interviews, I asked activists to compare European and national preparatory meetings, based upon (1) how transparent they perceived European meetings as compared to national preparatory meetings; (2) the opportunities for all participants to make a claim in European as compared to national meetings; (3) how they perceived attention from the facilitators at each level; and (4) their impressions of the equality of mutual listening and response within the European and national meetings. Second, I compared these data with actual communicative practices in the meetings. Elsewhere, I have analyzed the detailed transcripts of meetings relying on discourse sociolinguistics (Doerr, Reference Doerr2007). Here, I restrict my presentation of these findings to applying the theoretical framework of CDA to the analysis of interviews and field notes from participant observation. In other words, I will explore power imbalances within formally open and inclusive discursive practices in the linguistic interactions between the (often informally influential) facilitators of the meetings with other participants (Wodak, Reference Wodak1996: 17–19).
Methods and case selection
As a participant observer interested in the practice of discourse rather than an active participant, I tried to combine my analysis of transcripts and recordings of discussions in meetings with the perceptions of participants, facilitators, and translators in the meetings. I collected three types of data: (1) field notes on the preparatory meetings at the European and national levels; (2) recordings as well as in-vivo-transcripts of the discussions within the sessions; and (3) the perceptions of the actors themselves about accessibility and democratic discourse through a survey and in-depth interviews. In the participant observation of multilingual meetings, I transcribed the plenary discussions in the original language version of speakers, relying on simultaneous translation by the ‘Babels’ activist–translators for those languages that I could not understand.Footnote 5 The survey (N: 130) and the qualitative in-depth interviews (N: 80) are both built on a balanced sample based on activists’ political orientation, organizational background, gender, nationality, time of participation, and age. The questionnaires were distributed in the preparatory meetings taking place at the European and national levels, where most of the interviews were conducted with activists, facilitators, and translators.
At the domestic level, I selected the cases of the German, Italian, and British national level preparatory social forum meetings – three monolingual national-level settings that I compared to the multilingual settings of the European preparatory assemblies. These domestic cases were selected for their differences in terms of higher or lower degrees of conflictual interrelations between the individuals participating, movement groups, NGOs, unions, and parties, which I expected to produce different results regarding the potential inclusivity of deliberation in national level meetings. I assumed the Italian Social Forum process to be a comparatively more highly inclusive arena, with many radical and moderate groups involved (della Porta et al., Reference della Porta, Andretta, Mosca and Reiter2006). To a lesser degree, the German domestic social forum process involved fewer radical groups and grassroots activists (Rucht et al., Reference Rucht, Teune and Yang2007). The German national level social forum preparatory meetings studied represented a relatively cooperative practice of communication between different groups compared with the more conflictual British national level preparatory assemblies (Doerr, Reference Doerr2009). British national level ESF preparatory meetings reflected the cleavages of recent decades between left-wing movements and radical left micro-parties that characterize the domestic scene (Rootes and Saunders, Reference Rootes and Saunders2005; Kavada, Reference Kavada2007).
Findings
Unlike previous theoretical accounts of communitarian and cosmopolitan theorists, my empirical case study on the ESF does not confirm the negative impact of multilingualism on democratic inclusion. Comparing linguistically heterogeneous and homogeneous social forum meetings at the European and national levels, I found that multilingual European meetings proceeded in a more inclusive manner than preparatory meetings at the national level – despite the considerable linguistic pluralism and asymmetric language skills of participants. With respect to the debate about civic engagement in Europe and the EU, this does not mean that we can neglect linguistic differences. To the contrary, I will argue that activists’ novel practice of translation as used in the ESF process illustrates a way of deepening democracy and civic participation in both national and European arenas of political deliberation.
European meetings as comparatively more inclusive and dialogic arenas
A first relevant result from my comparison is that participants perceived European preparatory meetings to proceed in a more ‘democratic’ and ‘transparent’ manner than preparatory meetings at the national level. I asked activists participating both in European and national preparatory meetings to give their opinion on potential barriers to internal democracy within meetings, comparing European meetings with the national level. I found that the majority of activists perceived discussions and decision-making in the European meetings as more inclusive, dialogical, and transparent than in national preparatory meetings. In the survey, 66 percent of the respondents who participated in meetings at the European and national levels perceived decision-making in European meetings as more inclusive of all the voices present as compared to national meetings. Just over half of the respondents (59 percent) perceived decision-making in European meetings as more transparent than at the national level, while 27 percent were of the opposite opinion (see Table 1).
Table 1 Percentage of answers to two questions on democratic decision-making procedures
a‘In which of the following places (European preparatory assemblies or preparatory assemblies at the national level) do you have the impression that people do care more about the fact that decisions are made together by all of the participants?’
b‘In which of the following places (European preparatory assemblies or preparatory assemblies at the national level) do you have the impression that the process of decision-making is more open and transparent?’
Interpreting this evidence, the potential risk of non-response bias must be noted: the majority of the participants who responded to these questions had already made their way to European meetings. I therefore relied on interviews to get at the perceptions of grassroots activists from resource-poor organizations and/or local social forums, which I present below. In the survey, I also asked participants what distinguished the atmosphere of decision-making in the European as compared to social forum assemblies at the national level. Derived from my theoretical focus on the dynamics of mutual listening in deliberation, I found it helpful to ask whether participants perceived European meetings and/or national preparatory assemblies to be more oriented towards a discussion style that allowed all voices to be ‘heard’ and included in decision-making processes, or not. Answering this question, a majority of respondents (52 percent) perceived the discussion and decision-making in the European meetings to proceed in a listening-oriented, dialogical style Footnote 6 compared to meetings at the national level, perceived as dialogical by only 32 percent, and as dominated by a style of hard political negotiatingFootnote 7 by 68 percent of the respondents.
Interpreting this evidence, a first question to ask is whether the ‘hardest’ political debates did in fact take place at the national level. This was not necessarily the case however: recall that the European meetings served as the central arena for decision-making on both European and national political and financial issues on behalf of the organization of the ESF (Maeckelbergh, Reference Maeckelbergh2004; Haeringer et al., Reference Haeringer, Haug and Mosca2009).
Indeed, the interviews help to understand why the vast majority of grassroots activists and members of resource-poor social movement organizations saw European level meetings as more prone for conflict based on heterogeneity and perceptions of difference, but also more ‘democratic’ as compared to national level social forum meetings. First, interviewees who belonged to potentially disadvantaged groups emphasized that this was due to ‘listening oriented’ culture of discussion located primarily at the European level. As one participant said:
In the European assemblies you will listen more than in an assembly at the national level. There are more conflicts in the European assemblies than at the national level. However, the goal in the European assemblies is to do it together. Not like in the UK or in Germany where two groups who discuss with each other break up and leave.Footnote 8
Second, grassroots activists and members of resource-poor groups saw ‘group talk’ among in-groups and the exclusionary decision-making practices this entailed as a particularly striking problem for democracy, and such problems as predominant within the national level preparatory meetings. An anarchist activist from a local social forum in the United Kingdom described the second aspect:
If you ask about the atmosphere within the meetings I have to say that the national meetings are less democratic. In the UK this has to do with internal cleavages. Power games are more acute and meetings are not at all participative. The European level is more complex, diversified and in this sense more public.Footnote 9
The above interviewee relates the perceived ‘less democratic’ and participatory atmosphere of preparatory meetings at the national level to the antagonist way ‘internal cleavages’ were dealt with – a frequent comment among activists from the United Kingdom that shows the expected impact of negative relationships among British social movements and radical left parties (Kavada, Reference Kavada2007). Different to the situation in the United Kingdom, the Italian case provided a culture of constructive interaction between parties and movements involved in building the national social forum (della Porta and Mosca, Reference della Porta and Mosca2007). However, in Italy too grassroots activists interviewed blamed a tendency on the part of professional activists to talk exclusively among delegates from the largest national organizations while neglecting voices from local Social Forums and more ‘radical’ groups. In the words of a grassroots activist from the Genoa Social Forum:
Leadership has been getting more and more elitist over years, also in Italy. The social forum process is organized less and less from below, from the movements. It is always the same people who “decide”. Only bureaucrats have remained, who hold positions in organizations and tend to prefer talking amongst themselves and not with people who do not speak for a big organization.Footnote 10
The German national social forum preparatory meetings had neither the conflictual nor the cooperative histories of interaction that characterized the British and Italian cases (Rucht et al., Reference Rucht, Teune and Yang2007). As shown in the Italian and British cases, however, professional activists in the German preparatory meetings intensified in-group talk between leaders of big movement organizations such as the Attac network, the Left party, and unions, leaving local leftist groups and grassroots organizations outside in the cold. Grassroots activists from local social forums blamed the informal practices of decision-making this entailed for a decrease in transparency and democracy. In the words of an activist from a local Attac group in Southern Germany: ‘In the telephone conferences, X. [a unionist acting as facilitator] just did not let the other person answer, manipulated everything. We, who are a part of the participants in the German ESF preparatory assemblies, don't want such power structures’.Footnote 11
This cross-national comparison shows that national social forums provided cooperative or conflictual settings for democratic discourse – depending on place-specific contexts and histories of inter-organizational relations (Wodak, Reference Wodak1996: 20). However, compared to the European meetings, the grassroots activists interviewed stressed that the problem of exclusive practices of decision-making amongst a few professional leaders was more significant at the national level. While interviewees agreed on the high level of conflicts about ideology and identity at the European level and within particular national Social Forum settings such as in the United Kingdom, something about the multilingual European meetings seemed to encourage novel listening habits in dealing with such conflicts. The evidence from the survey and the interviews, then, suggests that contrary to previous assumptions, multilingual transnational deliberative settings may serve grassroots deliberators more than similar monolingual national settings do.
Why were European meetings seen as more inclusive and transparent?
In discussing the salience of these results based on the interviews and questionnaires collected in national and European preparatory meetings, it is important to be prudent. True, the issues debated and rules guiding decision-making were similar at both European and national level social forum preparatory meetings (Maeckelbergh, Reference Maeckelbergh2004: 3). However, given, for example, that the composition of the participants in the European meetings was more homogeneous compared to the meetings at the national level, this could explain why deliberative discussions in the European meetings were perceived as more dialogical and inclusive: the real conflicts were perhaps taking place at the national level in meetings with more pluralist groups. Such an expectation could hold if the participants in the European meetings came largely from the same political organizations and/or if they were institutional insiders and professional activists from the biggest organizations, used to entering into dialogue with one another.
This was not the case. The evidence from the questionnaires I collected in the European and national preparatory meetings show a similar composition of participants in organizational and political terms. The evidence suggests that there is no notably higher number of particular political groups or organizational elites in European level meetings as compared to those at the national level. The potential organizational elites of social movements, in the sense of professional activists working as delegates for parties, unions, or NGOs, were a constant though relatively small group of 4 to 5 percent of all participants in both national and European preparatory meetings. Furthermore, the political composition of groups was similar at both European meetings and preparatory meetings at the national levels. In all of the cases studied there was a slight overbalance of activists who described themselves as members of unions, organizations, and political parties associated with the ‘Old Left’. Specifically, 55 percent of participants in European meetings, 58 percent of participants in Italian meetings, 60 percent in British preparatory meetings, and 60 percent at the national level in Germany, were members of an organization or group associated to political parties or unions of the Old Left. The remainders were members from various ‘new’ social movements and other ‘newest’ groups and networks working on global justice issues.Footnote 12 These results are based on the results of my questionnaires distributed at the European and national preparatory meetings of the ESF. They are complemented by participation lists collected within national and European preparatory meetings.
These findings indicate that the participants in the European meetings were not comparatively more homogeneous in organizational or political terms than participants in national preparatory meetings, nor did they represent a majoritarian elite, for example, that of professional activists from large social movement organizations, NGOs, or political parties. In sum, activists perceived the European meetings of the ESF process to work with comparatively more inclusive discussion rules and dialogical, transparent practices of decision-making than the national level of social forum meetings. This finding reflects a profound change within the practices of democracy in the scale shift from the national to the European level of meetings, discussed further in the following section.
Dynamics of multilingual deliberation: increased requirements for attentive listening
Interviews with different groups provide converging evidence for an important perceived effect of multilingualism in the ESF process, and one that helps explain my findings. Multilingual debates, due to what participants perceived as an increased risk of conflict caused by misunderstandings, strongly induce participants to listen attentively to statements made. What a multilingual deliberation changes, in particular, is participants’ culturally embedded habits of listening. Above I discussed how listeners’ habits of hearing, within a deliberative forum, may restrict the ability of disadvantaged groups to gain an audience independently of their distinct ways of speaking (cf. Polletta, Reference Polletta2006: 26–27). In line with these suggestions, I will argue that the movement insiders’ habits of hearing explain why potentially disadvantaged groups or newcomers perceived national social forum meetings as exclusionary spaces, yet felt themselves included in European meetings.
As a first finding in this respect, participant observation confirms that within plenary discussions in the European meetings, facilitators made concerted efforts to listen carefully, await translation and make sure a consensus had been reached and effectively agreed upon by all language groups to produce efficient decisions – and pre-empt the (perceived) high risk of decisions creating new conflicts through cultural misunderstandings. Amongst the participants in the European meetings, it was newcomers especially who expressed their need to adapt to the higher listening requirements of multilingual communication. One newcomer said:
Right now within this European assembly we need a lot of time at the beginning of every discussion in order to carefully find out what exactly is the position of the others. I think this has to do with all the different languages and backgrounds. Here within the European assembly everything is discussed so that it is really ‘democratic’. In the national preparatory meetings it is definitely less complicated. First, because there are no linguistic communication problems; second, because there are no cultural problems.Footnote 13
This newcomer described the plenary discussion in a European meeting as similar yet different to national level meetings in Germany in terms of a (perceived) higher requirement to listen carefully to ‘the position of the others’, something he links to the cultural heterogeneity of the European meetings with their ‘linguistic communication problems’. Note that this interviewee, himself belonging to the comparatively privileged group of activists who had a fluent command of two Western European languages, such as English and French, was frustrated about the ‘complicated’ character of deliberation in such a multilingual setting.
Thus, in providing a micro-perspective on Bourdieu's work on the linguistic market, these perceptions among participants in the European meetings show that the distinct institutional setting created by multilingual translation did not reproduce the hegemonic market value of European ‘core’ languages such as English and French (Krzyżanowski and Wodak, Reference Krzyżanowski and Wodak2010). Rather, the aforementioned ‘Babels’, voluntary translators who performed simultaneous translation in the ESF, worked at extending the number of languages in the European meetings rather than restricting them to a number ‘official working languages’ as practiced in EU institutional arenas (Boéri and Hodkinson, Reference Boéri and Hodkinson2004; Krzyżanowski and Wodak, Reference Krzyżanowski and Wodak2010). In public speeches, Babels stressed the participatory character of their translation practice, recruiting translators among the bilingual activists and students of simultaneous translation; that is, among the participants themselves.Footnote 14 Unlike professional simultaneous translators, the Babels were not paid for their work. This network of several thousand volunteers has, from the beginning of the ESF process, advocated for greater awareness of linguistic exclusion among the ESF organizers. For example, Babels pushed for an increase from 4 to 25 languages to be translated in ESF, including small group meetings and large plenary assemblies (Boéri and Hodkinson, Reference Boéri and Hodkinson2004). A Babels founding member explained that the activist translators understood themselves as political actors who had created their network in order to institutionalize linguistic and discursive inclusion within and outside meetings:
The idea to found Babels came up when in an international meeting a woman from a Human rights organization in Kirgizstan made a statement. She noticed that nobody could understand her. She became more and more desperate […]; all listened but nobody understood. That is why we as students of simultaneous translation created Babels.Footnote 15
Note, in the above quote, how important the activity of attentive listening is as a normative principle in this story of the foundation of the Babels network ‘(A)ll listened but nobody understood. That is why we…created Babels’. More experienced participants, and in particular those who had recognized in themselves or in others the risks of linguistic marginalization, had adopted the Babels’ radical democratic ideology of translation. In contrast to newcomers, the latter groups of participants had a more nuanced view of the intense listening requirements of a multilingual arena, which had the effect of equalizing participants with differentiated and pluralist foreign language skills. As an activist from a British local social forum group said, after having participated in several of the European meetings:
Different languages are problematic without translation, as they are open to manipulation. However, the main effect of multilingualism is to make everything go more slowly, which is important, because then it gets politically more balanced. The European level is more public and pluralistic.Footnote 16
Finally, over several years of participation in European meetings with multilingual working practices, participants show signs of having developed preferences for treating ideological differences more inclusively within situations of decision-making and conflict resolution, which they contrast to the less dialogical logic of national monolingual meetings:
In the European meetings, I only speak up to say something if I really have to. What happens in the European meetings is not negotiation, nor is it compromise. It is consensus. You cannot say exactly what consensus means, but people are satisfied with it. Newcomers do not understand what it is, that is typical. It is a kind of exchange. That you can have several positions in the same public space, the search for a true terrain, of coexistence, that is really deliberative, a forum. In the international meetings – it really counts what you say.Footnote 17
The above quotes from interviewees circumscribe different aspects that all center around a key element of multilingual deliberation in the ESF process: its potential effect of changing participants’ habits of listening and their normative view of consensus itself. Individual learning processes through multilingual deliberation, as shown in these examples, could help explain the result of the (perceived) highly dialogical and inclusive discussion climate of the European meetings. Having internalized the Babels’ politics of translation, participants show signs of having learnt to include linguistic and non-linguistic differences, such as differences of ideology and identity, better.
An important doubt, however, exists as to whether ‘more pragmatic’ movement elites may simply push aside these new social norms of inclusive consensus during more routinized moments of decision-making outside plenary assemblies, when it is necessary to take strategically important decisions in little time. An alternative explanation for the inclusion-oriented style of the European meetings could be uncertainty. As shown, the national meetings were pervaded by a culture of insider talk among professional activists. Conversely, interviewees described the character of European meetings as ‘pluralist’. Thus, it may be that uncertainty about status and authority explains participants’ more active listening habits in European meetings rather than multilingualism. I will try to answer these questions in the following, taking a more critical stance on participants’ accounts of mutual listening based on my own participant observation and on the perspectives of groups that risked not being listened to during European meetings.
Awareness of the risk of exclusion: translators’ initiatives in the European meetings
The evidence from the interviews disconfirms the hypothesis that the greater uncertainty of the European meetings explains their relatively more inclusive setting compared to the national level. Moreover, newcomers and members of potentially disadvantaged groups noted the increased exclusionary risk of transnational meetings without translation. A newcomer described the negative impact of uncertainty at one of the first European meetings she participated in, where no effective translation was provided:
In a coffee break I tried to ask one of the women from the French [ESF] organizing committee a question. […] But she said that unfortunately she did not understand me. My English is very bad. So she went away to speak with another person and left me standing there alone.Footnote 18
As illustrated in the above quote, participants’ lack of familiarity with one another and the existence of language barriers in the European meetings should in principle have increased the risk of marginalization in decision-making – as long as there was no translation provided. It is in this asymmetric context that grassroots activists and migrants created the ‘Babels’ initiative of self-organized translation.
Moreover, it should be noted that activists who described themselves as ‘working class’ and who spoke few or no foreign languages frequently problematized class-specific, or in-group, socializing among Social Forum ‘elites’, and an ‘abstract language’ used in deliberation. Interviewees with such backgrounds, however, saw these problems as more acute in national level social forum meetings, where perceived exclusionary group-specific codes were more firmly established than in the European meetings. An interviewee from the United Kingdom said:
The difficulty with establishing democracy in the social forum process meetings was not about different [national] languages. In the meetings in which I participated it was not about problems between French and English, but between working class and middle class, there were clearly different languages and codes. A part of the activists in the meetings behaved in an arrogant and upper class manner. In one [British national preparatory] meeting, they behaved with a lack of respect towards the employees who served them drinks – this was so ridiculous.Footnote 19
This interviewee reflects on the tendency of national discourse arenas to work according to a kind of unspoken, implicit, and familiar cultural logic of codes through which participants interpret each other – reproducing, as suggested here, class inequalities. Similarly, newcomers also frequently addressed the problem of familiar ideological codes, which impeded deliberative dialogue.
The perspective of migrants engaged in the national and European meetings of the ESF complements these impressions. Several studies of the ESF process note that (often older) participants from migrant and refugee networks risked being structurally excluded from deliberative practices in the ESF (Boéri, Reference Boéri2006; Kavada, Reference Kavada2007). Some of the migrants in the cases studied had learnt the language of the country in which they lived, though they knew comparatively fewer other Western European languages compared to the majority of participants in the European meetings (Andretta and Doerr, Reference Andretta and Doerr2007). Interestingly, then, bilingual second-generation migrants also viewed the mode of discussion in national level social forum meetings as stigmatising compared to the European level (Dörr, Reference Doerr2007). The British Social Forum process should in principle have offered the best conditions for migrants and the children of migrants to feel included in national level meetings, insofar as the Mayor of London explicitly wanted these groups to take part in organizing the London ESF (Boéri, Reference Boéri2006). However, in the United Kingdom too a second-generation migrant explained the practices that made her retreat from initial participation in the British social forum organizing process, perceived as dominated by the British Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP):
I left again because of their political practices in preparatory meetings: authoritarian, not inclusive, control freaks, anti-democratic, patriarchal. It was also a kind of manipulation: they must have thought: oh, this small dark woman, she cannot speak English fluently and wears the Hijab.Footnote 20
The above account shows, as already revealed by other interviewees, that culturally specific (gendered) dress codes or accents may lead to the implicit devaluation of a participant's rhetorical abilities in a monolingual deliberative arena, independently of the content of their arguments. This evidence suggests that linguistically ‘homogeneous’ national meetings featured internally diversified, hierarchical settings that reproduced inequalities of class, gender, and ethnicity – symbolized not only in the way participants’ spoke but also in their dress and skin color (Wodak, Reference Wodak1996: 12–14).
The observation that some participants, such as newcomers, socially less privileged participants, and migrants, in the national level meetings studied felt that they were not being listened to, even though they had dared to speak up, confirms that the role of institutional elites is central to inclusivity: facilitators’ listening habits seemed to reproduce structural cleavages rather than facilitate democratic deliberation in the national meetings. However, the more attentive listening habits that developed in the multilingual European meetings did not apparently change facilitators’ practices of in-group decision-making outside plenary meetings.
Interestingly, then, participants who belonged to traditionally disadvantaged groups viewed their potential to actually have a say in the European meetings more positively. Rather than in the facilitators, those participants trusted in a novel actor who could improve the inclusivity and transparency of decision-making at the European level: the Babels voluntary translators.
Most interviewees believed that the Babels’ presence made it easier for newcomers and formerly marginalized groups to be heard and included by facilitators. In the words of a local social forum activist from Britain:
It is funny, the Babels have a lot of influence on the elites in the European meetings, and I think they first were not aware of this. Translation reduces the hegemony of those who have taken part for a long time. For newcomers, access gets easier.Footnote 21
The above interviewee points to the double effects of the Babels’ distinct practice of multilingual translation: namely to ‘reduce the hegemony’ of insiders and improve access to deliberation for newcomers. On the contrary, the Babels translators were aware of the fragile position of their own group, which had no organizational weight other than the expertize of translation. As one Babels translator noted: ‘As translator, you are in a strange position: you have power and you don't have power. You are like the service woman who gives coffee. Yet, the elites who organize the ESF show respect towards Babels for our technical knowledge’.Footnote 22
Using a gendered image of ‘the service woman’, the above-quoted Babels translator alludes to a very important aspect regarding the background of this particular group of translators: Babels members knew about language-based exclusion from their own experiences as volunteers and grassroots participants in national social forum processes: some of the members of Babels I interviewed were members of migrant groups, others were media activists (Kavada, Reference Kavada2007), both groups whose members risked being informally excluded from central decision-making practices in national social forum meetings (Boéri, Reference Boéri2006). A Babels activist, herself part of a migrant network whose members felt that they were frequently marginalized at national level meetings, explained how these groups’ own multilingual skills contributed at the European level to prevent the exclusion of some groups or individuals in informal negotiations:
I grew up in France and I speak English, Arab and French fluently. I remember one European meeting before the London ESF [2004]. I was among the voluntary translators from Babels. The quality of this meeting was particularly bad. Small group meetings worked partly without simultaneous translation, but as I am bilingual I went in to these meetings to make sure that the SWP [Socialist Workers’ Party, UK] did not abuse its power. Some of the English participants tried to trick the French and Italians by playing on subtle linguistic differences within decision-making. But as I speak French and English, I told the French and the Italians what was going on and made sure that they knew that they were going to be manipulated.Footnote 23
As shown in this example, the interviews with members of the Babels indicate that the personal experiences and ongoing interventions of activist translators were an important normative resource for preventing exclusion in transnational public spaces created by activists. Because facilitators and leaders in European meetings did not always want to listen to all participants equally, translators were needed to remind them of the normative principle of including not only different languages but also different voices, which Babels members derived from their personal, experiential knowledge as participants.
What exactly did the Babels group's translation change about the ESF meetings in comparison to meetings at the national level? The evidence from participant observation shows that within the plenary meetings, participants who did not speak foreign languages had greater opportunities to participate actively in discussions as a result of translation. Not only did the Babels have the job of providing simultaneous translation in every discussion according to mutually agreed multilingual practices of deliberation, Babels members, in meetings where leaders were notorious for not listening to other participants, could spontaneously interrupt the practice of conversation to talk to leaders. Babels would then remind influential facilitators or groups trying to dominate or manipulate the debates about the discursive rules of inclusive talk and consensual decision-making.
This critical practice of translation also solved a typical problem noted at both national and European meetings that often blocked inclusive deliberation; that is, that movement elites and facilitators – in what was perceived by many participants as a fairly ‘exclusionary’ leadership style – took many important decisions during informal meetings outside the plenary assembly (Maeckelbergh, Reference Maeckelbergh2004). Earlier I showed that at the national level meetings, grassroots activists felt they had little chance of a fair hearing in deliberative practices where informal elites talked amongst each other. At the European level, however, the presence of Babels in such situations could bring in the principles of inclusivity and diversity Babels advocated and performed within their hybrid national and organizational network. Thus, Babels’ linguistic, performative, and institutional work of translation made it easier for those groups who risked being marginalized within national level meetings to have a say at the European level.
Conclusion
Most political theorists have conceptualized democracy as closely tied to the nation state and to the ideal of democratic deliberation in small idiosyncratic constituencies. But this empirical case study shows that public discourse was more inclusionary and transparent in contentious multilingual settings at the European level than at the national level.
Against conventional wisdom, my findings on the ESF process show that disadvantaged groups felt discursive practices of marginalization to be more of an issue in national social forum preparatory meetings that took place in a single language. That these groups felt more included in multilingual European meetings was due to the equalizing effect of a novel practice of translation as performed by deliberators themselves. Volunteering as simultaneous translators in multilingual European meetings, grassroots activists became aware of the exclusionary effects of decision-making among insiders performed in both European and national level meetings. By introducing a critical politics of translation at the European meetings, those activists were able to democratize the institutionalized norms of decision-making in order to empower disadvantaged groups. Multilingual deliberation with the distinct practice of translation encouraged a ‘habit of listening’ in all participants and thereby facilitated inclusive deliberation as compared to the national level.
In providing a sociolinguistic micro-perspective on Bourdieu's theory on the linguistic market (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1994), my findings show that unequal language skills and heterogeneous sociolinguistic capital do not necessarily lead to exclusive settings. By studying multilingual discursive experiments through ethnography (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1982: 78), I have demonstrated people's agency in institutionalizing a practice of translation that shows the potential for more inclusive deliberation in heterogeneous groups. My findings on the ESF clearly contrast with the assumption of the elite-bias in transnational activism, and reveal that homogeneity was an obstacle to democratic deliberation in national and transnational settings in which institutional insiders failed to listen attentively to the voices of grassroots actors with whom they aimed to take joint decisions by deliberation.
Thus, this comparative study of European and national social forum preparatory meetings suggests that while linguistic homogeneity is not a precondition for political deliberation in the EU, translation may be key to the deepening of democracy in diverse societies and multilingual political institutions. Also in other regions, translation is a critical practice successfully used by grassroots activists and disadvantaged groups to reach more effective and inclusive decisions in multilingual deliberation (Doerr, Reference Doerr2008). In the European context, social forum actors have begun to transpose the newly learnt practice of translation in order to build heterogeneous deliberative processes involving institutional actors like the European Parliament, the European Trade Union Federation, and street protesters in the member states. Future research should explore to what extent the acknowledgment of mutual heterogeneity, and initiatives for translation, could facilitate effective and legitimate decision-making not only in settings that involve actors who are already involved in politics or protest, but also participants who have no interest in debating alternative ideas.
In a comparative perspective, this multi-level analysis offers a path for rethinking the transformation of national-oriented mediated and political discourse cultures through European integration and emerging transnational social movements: if movements involved in the creation of the nation state and its media system have contributed to the institutionalization of a single national language, emerging multilingual movement activists prove the effectiveness of translation as a medium for democratic communication in a transnational, European polity. My findings support the hypothesis that the emergence of a democratic public sphere is not limited to existing multilingual national states (Van de Steeg, Reference Van de Steeg2006). Thus, with respect to the current institutional crisis of EU democracy, the bottom-up translation practices activists used open up a novel way to think about the potential for mediation through deliberative settings which include street protesters while taking their publicly expressed demands seriously (Statham and Trenz, Reference Statham and Trenz2011).
Can we expect initiatives for translation to facilitate effective and legitimate decision-making in culturally diverse settings and within European institutions? The case of translation as practiced in the social forum suggests that practitioners of deliberation in socially heterogeneous and culturally diverse settings may teach in-groups to listen more carefully to outsiders and to diverse groups in order to reach more effective decisions. In the social forums, an increased heterogeneity of voices ‘heard’ in the deliberative process fostered the outcome-legitimacy of consensus. However, this was only possible because organizational insiders agreed to cooperate with grassroots translators with different and heterogeneous backgrounds, who thus succeeded in challenging mainstream discursive practices within a multi-organizational field.
Herein lies a central problem for the relevance of the deliberative translation model to EU institutional politics: translation was a legitimated performance reflecting ESF participants’ desire to respect linguistic and cultural difference. EU institutional settings for decision-making seem less animated by the conviction that democracy can be built on the equal inclusion of difference than activist forums. Moreover, ‘hegemonic multilingualism’, as the official language ideology used inside EU institutional forums for decision-making, justifies the de facto inequality of different official EU languages in order to encourage economic competition (Krzyżanowski and Wodak, Reference Krzyżanowski and Wodak2010). Europe's democratic deficit, in this understanding, may result from a lack of deliberative translation from above rather than a lack of voices from below.
Future research should explore to what extent the acknowledgment of mutual heterogeneity, and initiatives for translation, could facilitate effective and legitimate decision-making not only in settings that involve actors who are already involved in politics or protest, but also participants who see no interest in debating alternative ideas. Another open question regards the performative dimension of deliberative settings, and the cultural and symbolic boundaries impeding equal and inclusive discourse. More comparative work is needed on the conditions under which translation provides a democratic resource not only for transnational, multilingual arenas, but also for national arenas and crossing boundaries of gender, class, and race/ethnicity.
