Subsidiarity breeds contempt: How decentralization of policy decision-making favours a monolingual Europe

When the principle of subsidiarity was introduced into Community law in 1992, it was hailed as a triumph of diversity over the previous uniformity of an excessively centralised European Union. It was generally believed to be an infallible way to preserve the cultural and linguistic heritage of each Member state, as it meant that responsibility for the design and implementation of educational, cultural and linguistic policies lay with the Member States. However, this transfer is not producing the desired results. On the contrary, it is helping to consolidate a monolingual tendency already observed in the EU since the United Kingdom joined the EU in 1973. In this context, the article examines the defensive strategies based on subsidiarity adopted by France and Germany and briefly assesses the outcome of these strategies.