MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Title: Do thriving democracies need to be monolingual and monocultural?

In order to form a thriving political community, do we need to be a people, a nation, defined by a common culture and therefore also a common language? If so, how can this be reconciled for countries, and especially cities, with increasingly diverse and fluid populations? If not, what else is needed for a workable democracy? These questions will be addressed with special reference to Brussels, Belgium and the European Union.

Bio: Philippe Van Parijs is a guest professor at the Universities of Louvain and Leuven and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute (Florence). He was the founding director of Louvain’s Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics and a regular visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of Oxford. He coordinates (with A. Housen and N. Foster) the Marnix Plan for a Multilingual Brussels and (with P. De Grauwe) the Re-Bel initiative. His books include Cultural Diversity versus Economic Solidarity (Brussels 2003), Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World (Oxford 2011), Basic Income (Harvard 2017, with Y. Vanderborght) and Belgium: Een utopie voor onze tijd (Brussels & Antwerp, 2018).