Globalization and Europeanization as challenges to linguistic homogeneity and homogenization

In many European countries, recent debates and policy reforms pertaining to immigration and integration regard language skills. More and more states have adopted language tests for admission to the country, permanent residence, and/or citizenship. The debates about these language skills and the arguments they articulate at the individual level  emancipation, employability, integration) and at collective level (national identity, social cohesion) are reminiscent of earlier policies of linguistic homogenization linked to nation building projects. Nevertheless these ideas now coexist uneasily with the acknowledgement of multilingualism and its importance for European integration and more specifically the role of English as language of global communication. The paper compares these complex configurations of language promotion in different Member States in as responses to the diverse challenges of Europeanization and globalization in the light of the differences and similarities in the  institutional history of their linguistic regimes.