Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [100]
In Provence, the story is much the same. Modern purveyors of gentle Jihad are trying to undo at least certain features of a four-hundred-year-old French history and relegitimize the dialects and cultures of the ancient region of Occitan. Occitan encompassed the Provençal, the Catalan, and the Basque regions of southern France along the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, and featured “oc” (“yes”) dialects quite distinctive from the “oui” (“yes”) version of French spoken in the north. The French government, like so many harried denizens of McWorld trying to prove their traditionally parochial multicultural credentials without actually giving up their place at modernity’s banquet table, now supports indigenous languages. Perhaps it does so because it appreciates that McWorld’s global American-speak can use all the enemies it can get.
Provincial dialects may threaten French centralist culture but they also constitute multicultural France and so are at once a weapon of French nationalism and a weapon pointed at integral nationalism’s heart. Europe, France’s rival for the affection of the newly legitimized localities, is also supportive. The Western European Language Bureau, created in 1982, encourages the provinces in their cultural conceits, supporting not only Provençal and other Oc dialects in France but also, in the Netherlands, Frisian, in Ireland, Gaelic, and in other places, the linguistic flavor of the day.6 Its activities and the realities they acknowledge have led some critics to refer to the new Europe as “a new tower of Babel.”7 Others see in its work a subtle strategy of national deconstruction by which the European whole nurtures the subnational fragments, all the better to undercut the resistance to wholeness on the part of the nation-states. In holding French centralists at bay, Provence may thus welcome support from Europe.
Whatever strategies are at work, parochial culture is not much enhanced. Despite support, and the opening of new bilingual schools in Nîmes and elsewhere, Provençal has hardly become a living language. Less than fifty thousand speak Breton and only half of those can write it. The model, unfortunately, is not the Flemish spoken at Dunkirk nor the French version of Catalan nor the German spoken in Italy’s Alto Adige, France’s Alsace, or Russia’s Kaliningrad; in each of these cases, a local language survives because it is spoken by a substantial population across a proximate border. Breton and Provençal, on the other hand, like Corsican and Ladin, exist in splendid isolation, fragments of an otherwise vanished cultural legacy. Whether or not there are as many as 3 million, as some claim, who speak some words of one of the six dialects of Occitan, and whether or not the nominal Occitan dialect news programs being broadcast from Toulouse and Marseille really have listeners, the focus on Occitan revival is part of a larger campaign to vitalize and legitimize the provinces against McWorld’s Parisian center, and parallels similar efforts in Belgium and in Switzerland. In the Alps, for example, there are fewer than forty thousand speakers of Raeto-Romantsch and Ladin left in the canton of Graubünden, and despite official efforts on behalf of pluralism, surviving latinate dialects seem unlikely ever to be more than a cantonal museum culture.8
Spanish (?) Catalonia
THE INTELLECTUALS INVOLVED in the Western European local cultural revival are deeply ambiguous about what they are doing. On the one hand, they do not necessarily see themselves as enemies of cosmopolitanism and they deny that there