The Helvetic System: Prototype or Victim of Europe’s Language Policy?

This paper aims to discuss the interdependences between the Swiss official language regimes and the European approach to language policy. The Swiss political system is based on three public spheres specific to each language region, which are interconnected between each other through translation and receptive bilingualism. The transposal of this ‘Helvetic system’ to a consistently designed European polity built around a Franco-German core is regularly evoked. Although such an evolution cannot be discarded from a merely conceptual point of view, it does not correspond to the institutional nature of the current treaty union. Hence, our model is based on the hypothesis that the Union can remove obstacles to cross-cultural communication flows, but cannot remove the strong linguistic interdependencies between Europe and the rest of the world or impose a specific language regime to the member states or associated states like Switzerland. This entails an increasing discrepancy between the enduring prevalence of the Helvetic system in the protected public sector, and its replacement with less structured language regimes in the liberalised sectors. This trend is consistent with liberal principles in political theory, but is firmly criticised by proponents of republican and communitarian solutions. In order to narrow this gap and address these critiques without undermining the freedom of language and the freedom of movement, we suggest a solution based on financial incentives to attend the goals of protecting ethnolinguistic attributes and promoting personal multilingualism.