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Cosmopolitanism and Global English: Language Politics in Globalisation Debates

While it is commonly agreed that language standardisation was an integral feature of the historical formation of the modern nation state, current debates on globalisation and its effects on the nation state rarely address language issues in more than a superficial fashion. Yet the quadrupling of the number of English speakers in the last half-century and other changes associated with ‘global English’ would seem to have more substantial political implications. Particularly in the recent wave of discussions of cosmopolitanism, language questions seem to lurk below the surface but are rarely addressed explicitly or comprehensively. Important exceptions to this neglect of current language issues include Daniele Archibugi, who addresses these questions head on, and Nancy Fraser's most recent attempt to rethink Habermas' critical theory of the public sphere. This article agrees with both Archibugi and Fraser that language is an important, even central, aspect of political responses to processes of globalisation, specifically cosmopolitanism. However, I argue that Antonio Gramsci's approach to the politics of language in the early twentieth century highlights the insufficiency of Archibugi's reliance on the metaphor of Esperanto as well as the intractable nature of Fraser's critique for any critical theory of global public sphere(s), despite her attempt to advance such a theory. I do this by looking at Gramsci's critique of Esperanto from 1918 and his later prison writings concerning language politics in Italy. Gramsci, I argue, provides a much more adequate approach to contemporary questions of the politics of language, which includes an understanding of the continued role of the state which is most often obscured both by cosmopolitan perspectives and by much research on global English in fields outside political science.