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14 Const. F. 36 (2005)
Cultures, Languages, Nations: Conceptions and Misconceptions

handle is hein.journals/consfo14 and id is 38 raw text is: CULTURES, LANGUAGES, NATIONS: CONCEPTIONS AND MISCONCEPTIONS* Kenneth McRoberts It has become a commonplace that the nation- state is dead - or at least is in mortal danger. Its capacity as a state has been severely eroded by the forces of globalization and regional integration: supra-national organizations and global corporations have assumed powers and prerogatives which, within the nation-state ideal, belong to the state. But the nation-state has lost more than its state; it has also lost its nation - in part because of these very external forces. Whereas the nation- state ideal presumed that a single national language would prevail throughout its territory, languages with deep historical roots have reappeared within the same state. In some cases, this has involved the revival of long dormant languages - as in Wales or Scotland - but in other cases it has meant the return to public space of languages that had been excluded, indeed banned, as was Catalan under the Franco regime. In some settings immigration has served to break the national language's monopoly by reinforcing other languages, as in the United States, where Spanish has gone from being a marginal, and essentially private language, to a major one that is increasingly intruding into the public realm despite the erstwhile efforts of some English-only advocates to keep it out. The nation-state was supposed to have a single national culture. Yet, virtually all of the self-styled nation-states, whether France or the United States, are increasingly preoccupied with the cultural diversity that manifestly exists among their citizens and are actively debating formulas such as multiculturalism, interculturalism and so on. Finally, direct challenges to the very title of nation have emerged from within nation-states, whether from indigenous peoples, as in the United States or Mexico, or from longstanding populations which never had accepted the pretensions of nation-state but are now better placed to make their opposition known, such as the Basques or the Catalans. In short, after dominating so much of recent Western history, the notion that states should be nations and, as such, should have a single language and a single culture, seems to have lost most of its driving force. For its part, Canada managed to avoid this ill- fated struggle to construct a nation-state - at least until recently. Coming late to the struggle, it has tried to build a nation-state with a difference - one with two national languages. Yet, for all its originality, this effort has been no more successful than the others. Indeed, in the case of Canada it has served to bring the state to the brink of collapse. Historically, Canada did not qualify as a nation-state and most Canadians seem to have accepted that. Clearly, Canada did not have a single national language. At the time of Confederation in 1867, about 70 percent of the population spoke English and 30 percent French.' In the new province of Quebec, people of French This article is largely based upon Cultures, Languages and Nations: conceptions and misconceptions, paper presented to the Sixteenth Annual London Conference for Canadian Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, February 26, 2000. According to the 1871 census, 60.5 percent of Canadians were of British origin, with 3.1 percent of French origin and 8.4 percent from other groups (Charles Castonguay, The fading Canadian duality in John Edwards, ed., Languages in Canada (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) at Table 2.1). (2005) 13:3 & 14:1 CONSTITUTIONAL FORUM

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