Professor Dr. Wawrzyniec Konarski
President of Vistula University, Warsaw, Poland
DOI: 10.23918/ICABEP2019p2
(Full Paper)
Abstract
The revitalisation of ethnicity as a term associated with politics has been a meaningful social and cultural fact since the late 1950s and early 1960s. This process began at that time in Western Europe and was extended furthermore towards other regions of the world. The increase of the power of ethnicity had also a dramatic effect in Africa and Asia – in the Middle East in particular. In the 1990s it exploded literary in some of the former Eastern Bloc states to quote Yugoslav federation and/or the Caucasus. An important part of this revitalisation is played by the language policy which has a significant influence on sociopolitical realities of many statehoods. Its success, both from the point of view of the interests of the state and of the group distinguished through language, depends on the legal and political culture of both these parties. The initiative should, however, be on the part of the state. In turn, the actions of the authorities negating the importance of the language – often the main identity factor of a minority group – foster an uncontrolled growth of the ethnos. This may lead to the increase of the ethnically motivated separatism destabilising both separate states and whole regions but also stimulating new entities’ establishment. Thus, language is used in the ethnopolitics as a starting point either for obtaining political and legal results or for maintaining the ones already achieved. In either case evaluation of these activities depends on the expectations of the involved parties. Generally, it is possible to distinguish three ways of perceiving language as a factor influencing the existing political-legal and cultural order, namely: 1) a real threat; 2) approved means of support, or 3) postulated opportunity for a beneficial change.
ICABEP2019
International Conference on Accounting, Business, Economics and Politics
ISBN: 978-9922-9036-3-7
