In a previous blog, I wrote about the determination of the origin of migrants through linguistic analysis. Since then, the refugee influx has become more significant by the day, now reaching major crisis proportions. Unfortunately it is no sort of solution to anything, but a few further reflections on linguistic aspects of this crisis come to mind.
English speakers
First, there has been much misinformation as to why so many migrants who have been camping in Calais wish to enter Britain rather than staying in France. Although the government would have us believe that it is because of our “over-generous” benefits system, in fact it is largely for other reasons, notably the fact that many of them speak English and not French.
Britain has benefited hugely in the past from English being a world language (although this is largely due to the power and influence of the US rather than that of Britain itself). Now, the status and ubiquity of English have, as it were, come back to hit us in the face.
Language lessons
Secondly, you may have read recently that the German government is offering 600 hours of German language lessons to the migrants settling in Germany. Scandinavian governments also have been offering language lessons to newly arrived settlers for many decades. This is a highly effective measure: learning a language is probably the best method for understanding the relevant culture as well as allowing suitable adaptation and integration in the host country. As an added bonus, it provides work for an army of language teachers, a fact which people reading this blog should appreciate.
IELTS exams
A third recent news item also provides food for (linguistic) thought. The Home Secretary Theresa May, desperate to cut down the number of migrants to the UK in order to fulfil election promises, plans to impose a higher IELTS English language requirement on prospective students from non-EU countries than the one demanded at the moment.
As someone who teaches students of many different mother-tongues, I agree that insufficient English language skills can be a problem. But on the whole our international students can express themselves quite adequately in oral discussion.
The problems arise with academic essay-writing, on the basis of which their university performance is graded. The difficulties there are less to do with incorrect English as such, and more to do with understanding what type of discourse is expected in such an essay – a complex linguistic and cultural question, though one which can of course be taught.
The IELTS language exams are not designed to measure these types of academic skills, so the university itself has to try to fill the gap by providing academic English and study skills training. But this is often too little and too late.
In fact, the proposal by Theresa May has nothing to do with academic motives – nobody really even pretends that it does. It is purely a way to legitimate the exclusion of one cohort of migrants and so make the overall immigration figures look better.
Excluding university students is, to put it mildly, a strange choice, since the government has elsewhere explicitly committed itself to accepting skilled, as opposed to unskilled, migrants. In purely financial terms, it means that the UK will benefit less from the overseas students’ fees – never mind the loss of goodwill which will result if we no longer allow overseas students to be educated in the UK.
In each of these news items, the linguistic issues are only part of the picture and political solutions are by far the most pressing. Still, the part played by language in day-to-day problems is evident. Applied Linguistics may not be able to solve the world’s problems, but it is important as the discipline which allows the related linguistic issues to be addressed in a scientific and well-informed manner.
There’s a massive coming wave of shake-ups to HE finance, both research and teaching, implemented through a Teaching Excellence Framework
Critiques of the REF have backfired as they are used in a deft rhetorical move to cut state funding for research through QR
This is all just my reading of the speech. It doesn’t represent my employer’s views and it is speculative.
On TEF
Even while decrying REF as “bureaucratic and burdensome to academics”, Jo Johnson wants a TEF. There’s so much talk of “deregulation” in the speech, even while the crux of it is to introduce a massive top-down regulatory mechanism. The core of TEF is financial, though, regardless of what Johnson says about “teaching quality”. It is to be incentivized by allowing institutions to raise their tuition fees:
there will be financial incentives behind the TEF, with those offering high quality teaching able to increase fees with inflation
Another way of putting this is from the flip side: there will be real-term cuts to the funding of institutions that do not fare well under this system. Since assessment will presumably be relative from a single budgetary pot, this is a zero-sum game in which some universities are to be slowly de-funded.
There’s also the problem of private providers for the government.These were fairly disastrous before. TEF gives a way to control this expansion, though. It seems that the government wants to decouple fee increases from social mobility while at the same time controlling the expansion of private provision according to teaching metrics. The end point looks likely to be to cut all public support for teaching outside the fee loan system and to squeeze the loan system to drive up competition (while getting rid of social mobility regulators like OFFA). Lots of universities won’t survive that kind of move, but will be replaced by new teaching providers.
On REF and Research Councils
The current modelled spending cuts in BIS are unlikely to leave research funding untouched. The Minister for HE used a deft rhetorical elision to couple academics’ critiques of the REF with removal of state funding for teaching and research:
“To deliver our ambitions, we also plan to reform the higher education and research system architecture. […] Our regulatory regime is still based upon a system where government directly funds institutions rather than reflecting the fact that students are the purchasers. […] It is also clear to me that there are many in the sector demanding a process for assessing the quality of scholarly output that is less bureaucratic and burdensome to academics.”
These critiques, of course, were of REF as a reductive quantifying procedure. They were not meant to justify the removal of QR, just the removal of the process by which it was assigned.Be careful what you wish for. REF was the way that QR was saved. Regardless of whether you like REF or not (I hate the procedure, but want universities to continue to receive state funding for research), QR gives institutions the freedom to allow their researchers and teachers to fulfil both roles. It is naive to think that this government would continue to fund universities in this way without a procedure like REF. So, I don’t like REF, but I accept it as the pragmatic/political compromise negotiated with a centre-right government to continue funding. This is my view of a messy political compromise, not my pure ideal.
The problem is that there are now several different ideologies competing here and the government must weigh its alleigance to each before deciding what route to pursue to achieve its aims. While Johnson says that he is “committed to the maintenance of dual funding support”, i.e. Research Councils and QR, something has to give. So, the ideologies competing are:
The REF assessed the outputs and impact of HEI research supported by many types of funders. In the context of £27bn total research income from public sources in the UK over a six-year period, the £246M total cost for REF 2014 is less than 1%. In the context of dual support, the total cost amounts to roughly 2.4% of the £10.2 billion in research funds expected to be distributed by the UK’s funding bodies in the six years, 2015-16 to 2020-21. This compares with an estimate of the annual cost to the UK HE community for peer review of grant applications of around £196M or around 6% of the funds distributed by the Research Councils.
So there’s a drive to maintain REF and QR for cost effectiveness.
But REF/QR has been massively slammed by academics as “bureaucratic and burdensome”, so it doesn’t fit the ideology of deregulation (however contradictory). Furthermore, REF/QR can’t be directed, as can Research Council funding; institutions can spend it on whatever research projects they like.
So the government has to work out what it really wants. If there is to be state funding for research, does it value a cost-effective route (REF.); a de-regulated route (maybe Research Councils? Or just cut REF but keep QR? Yeah, right.); or a route that it can control (Research Councils)?
Finally, the Research Council rejection rate is massive. Only a small number of applications go through. If we’re all forced to apply for funding via this route because there is no QR, then this will get even worse. Research funding will only be available at a very small number of places as concentration rises. This protects the golden triangle while exposing everyone else.
In conclusion
Johnson said, in his speech, that he has “no target for the ‘right’ size of the higher education system”. However, we can infer from this that he does not believe the size to be “right” at the moment because of all the changes he wants to make. Indeed, he said that we need changes to ensure “that more [people going to university] does not mean worse [quality of education]”, which presumably is what he thinks happens at the moment. Ispeculate, from reading this talk:
that the government continues its policy of protecting prestigious institutions while sharpening severe financial competition among all others.
that TEFisa financial move, not a teaching quality move, even if you think that teachingshouldbe better rewarded in the academy.
that real-term de-funding of existing institutions through TEF will be the way in which the expansion of private providers is regulated.
that as long as the student loan system stands, the government can have it both ways: it can claim that it does not fund universities and that this is private income, even while having a regulatory say over them because taxpayers “underwrite” the RAB charge.
that REF/QR and the Research Councils are up for debate but the government is to use academics’ calls for its abolition as a justification to cut QR.
that there are several competing motivations for the government’s actions in the research funding space that it must weigh.
that the stability of operation for many institutions is to be upset.
that the talk of de-regulation here is only possible by the introduction of massive new regulatory bodies.
Dr Martin Eve
None of this is new, of course. I haven’t here, also, gone into liberal humanist defences of the university, of which we will surely see many in the light of this talk. I find myself supportive of the goal to get a more diverse student body – I can’t argue with that, just the methods by which it might be achieved. For instance, while there are talks of supporting those who don’t go through a “traditional route” to HE, the government’s recent policies on funding led to aperiod of severe financial difficulties for institutions like Birkbeck that cater exclusively for those non-traditional students. So, again, the rhetoric is confused.
But now we have it from the Minister and I suspect we will see action on the ground very soon.
This post was contributed by Dr Julie Peakman, honorary fellow at Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology. Dr Peakman is currently in Leros, Greece, on a research trip for her next book, but is also volunteering at the port police, offering help for refugees.
Leros is currently experiencing a huge influx of refugees – mainly Syrian and Afghan – arriving on its shores. Here, Dr Peakman writes for Birkbeck Blogs about her volunteering activity and the situation on Leros.
Refugees gather in Leros, Greece (picture courtesy of Anne Tee)
Yesterday morning when we arrived at the port police, there were three-hundred refugees waiting in the hot sun in Lakki police station without food or water.
They had been given no food last night and the only thing they had eaten was the croissants and biscuits volunteers had given them the morning before. It is a tinderbox waiting to be lit.
The police say they have no money to pay the restaurants so the restaurants will no longer supply food as they have not been paid (only five euros per refugee, but it was something). There are only a handful of port police struggling to cope with the situation. The government has no money to send the police. Even the simple basic of water is not being supplied by the authorities.
The water tank for the refugees has not been filled for days and we wonder why this has not yet happened. The police had to take the water which volunteers had bought down to Lakki port over to more refugees in Xerocampus, at the other side of the island. These poor people are lying in the streets with nowhere to sleep while a building stands empty waiting for plumbing to be connected. This would take a couple of hours.
There is one young woman from the United Nations who says she only gives verbal advice to the refugees to tell them their rights. When I asked her why the United Nations Refugee Council are not doing anything to send food, water, shelter or clothes, she said the United Nations has not declared the situation a humanitarian crisis and she said that is the policy made in Geneva.
Refugees gather in Leros, Greece (picture courtesy of Anne Tee)
Meanwhile, my wonderful friends, Chris Angiel, Stella H Perlman and Patrick Muldowney made 200 sandwiches to give out to those who had no money and could not leave the station as they had not been ‘processed’.
Donations of juice, milk, nappies, soap, clothes and new flip flops were given out to as many people as we could. A wonderful Dutch couple have collected clothes from all their fellow yachties to give out to refugees. After four hours working with Patrick and a stalwart of the action Anne Tee in cramped and hot conditions, most of the refugees had at least been fed and watered. Anne goes down every morning and evening.
I am afraid I welled up when one of the people who spoke English came over and said on behalf of everyone there they would like to thank me and the other volunteers for our help. I felt very humble. The miracle worker behind all this organisation is Martina Katsiveli who is struggling to get a building opened for the refugees so they can have showers and toilet facilities. At the moment, they have one toilet.
This post was contributed by Andrew Youngson, media and publicity officer for Birkbeck, University of London
Natalie Dormer stars as Lady Seymour Worsley (C) Wall to Wall Productions Ltd – Photographer: Laurence Cendrovitz
In summer 2011, a book written by author and historian, Hallie Rubenhold, arrived at playwright and Birkbeck lecturer David Eldridge’s door.
‘Lady Worsley’s Whim’ (as Rubenhold’s book was known before being republished as ‘The Scandalous Lady W’), told the nigh-unbelievably-dramatic story of Seymour Worsley, an 18th century British noblewoman who was at the centre of a scandalous court case.
In 1782, when Lady W’s husband, Sir Richard Worsley, brought a ‘criminal conversation’ case against her lover – George M Bisset – it backfired. In retaliation, Lady W disclosed to the court and the media many shocking details of her marriage with Sir Richard – including the 27 lovers she had kept in total, in large part to satiate the voyeuristic desires of her husband.
It was a court case which wouldn’t look out of place in the pages of today’s tabloids, but for the time, it was incendiary stuff.
David received Hallie’s book through a circuitous route, with his old professor from Exeter University recommending him to her as a playwright of real talent, and who, alongside his own original work, was ever on the lookout for works to adapt for the stage and screen.
“The morning after the book arrived, I was meant to be doing something else,” David explained to me as we sat together in his office at Birkbeck’s School of Arts where he lectures in creative writing.
“I began to read and I couldn’t stop. It was brilliant. It was just a fantastic story. One of those stories that felt genuinely extraordinary and unique. I keep thinking my memory plays tricks, but looking back through archived emails, I see I did write to Hallie that evening: ‘I’m enjoying your book hugely. I’ll be in touch’.”
Four years later, Seymour Worsley’s story is set to be told to a fresh audience, this time in the form of a 90 minute BBC drama, ‘The Scandalous Lady W’, starring Game of Thrones and The Tudors actor, Natalie Dormer.
In the run up to the drama’s transmission date of Monday 17 August at 9pm on BBC 2, I spoke to David about the gripping real-life story, the process of bringing it to the screen, and what lies ahead for the prolific playwright and screenwriter.
Hi David. What was your main aim in writing this piece and how does it link to Hallie Rubenhold’s book?
The aim was just to tell the story really well in dramatic form. One of the things that’s very interesting about Hallie’s book is that she’s done something quite unusual in terms of its narrative: she withholds information, which is really a fiction writer’s trick.
For example, in the court trial which is at the centre of the story, there’s a big reveal. Hallie tried to find a way to replicate that in her history book. That’s not the kind of thing a historian would usually do in a nonfiction book. Normally you just set out the facts in chronological order. So I thought that was very interesting, and something I could develop in the script.
What did you want to achieve in writing about the central female character, Seymour Worsley?
One of the things that appealed to me was that Seymour Worsley acted in a very modern way for the time. It took great courage, because she was trying to fight a legal battle, but also overcome the expectations of polite and fashionable society of the time.
I’ve done a lot of research into the work of Henrik Ibsen, and I saw Seymour in this same light. Like Ibsen’s heroines she’s very complex. She was used by her husband in terms of his sexual peccadilloes, but she also revelled in her own sexuality. She wanted to live an unconventional way of life with her husband – although it was hidden from view – and also wanted to break out of that and to have her freedom to live as a ‘Modern’. But on the other hand, she also wanted the conventionality of a marriage with George Bisset.
So she’s a very complex character. She does some things in the course of the story that are hard to admire. You can admire her courage and chutzpah, but then she really did humiliate her husband, and also left her three-month-old daughter at home. And I think that’s where a lot of the tension is in the film: you really do admire her, but equally there are moments when you question her.
(L-r) Aneurin Barnard as Captain George Bisset, Natalie Dormer as Seymour Worsley, and Shaun Evans as Sir Richard Worsley (C) Wall to Wall Productions Ltd
The press coverage in the run up to the film’s broadcast has focused a lot on the sex and scandal of the story. How does that sit with you?
I think it’s right, because that’s what it’s about. It is about sex, scandal and divorce, though of course it’s about other things as well. But she did after all have – including Captain Bissett who she eloped with – 27 lovers. And her husband did have voyeuristic tendencies. But also, the way that the press has covered it, I don’t think that’s obscured other elements. They have talked about common law and ‘criminal conversation’ at the time. I don’t think those things have been ignored.
What role did you play during the production process itself?
Although I wasn’t executive producer, I was treated a bit like one. I was involved in all of the creative decisions that were particularly relevant. In TV, one of the things that’s very different than writing for theatre is that it’s about working with the practical circumstances of the shoot, both in terms of budget and locations. As writer, I did four set visits during the three weeks of shooting.
But your role is more about being at the end of the phone or email. For example you might need to rewrite something if it’s going to be too expensive to shoot, or if a particular location allows you to do something much more with it. As a writer you are responding to the practical issues of making the film. Screenwriting is always an artistic process, but it’s an incredibly practical and pragmatic craft.
You must have been delighted that Natalie Dormer was cast in the lead role. What has she brought to it?
First and foremost, she’s perfect for the role. She’s really brought the impetuousness, sexiness and naivety, but also a really principled core which is really important to this role. She’s absolutely a team player and she really believes in the character. She’s really passionate about the themes of the film and what they say about the role of women at that time.
Is it strange hearing the words you have written spoken out loud?
Not anymore, no. When I first started, when I had my first plays on back in the ‘90s, it was very strange. But it’s part of the joy of it now. It’s what it’s all about. I write the script, but it’s not a drama until it’s embodied by a performance.
What’s next for you?
There are a couple of things I can talk about. I’m adapting (Birkbeck colleague) Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellweather Revivals, for BBC films. It’s a really great book. And I’m also adapting a contemporary novel for the West End, for a show with the Michael Grandage Company.
David Eldridge (C) Photographer: Keith Pattison
That sounds exciting. Is the ideal situation for you to be constantly alternating between writing for the stage and screen?
I’d like that, yes. I’m the kind of writer who does maybe one completely original piece every 18 months, but I have a lot more energy for writing than that. So the question is, ‘what do I do in the meantime’? The answer has been in ‘found stories’ – things I read about, true stories, and novels I would like to adapt because they would make good dramas.
Lastly, how does your teaching role at Birkbeck fit into the broader picture of your career?
I’m about to start my fourth year as a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck, but I’ve always done a lot of teaching throughout my career. It’s very important to me in my own practice and craft. The very act of teaching and communicating leads me to reflect on my own practice and to change my own ideas with what works and what doesn’t.
Plus it’s wonderful for the student too.
One of the things that’s really great about the teaching staff on the creating courses here is that we’re all professional writers who are making work now. It’s not a programme taught by washed-up writers who have decided to go into education. I think it’s really important that our students are benefiting from being taught by lecturers who are doing in the real world what we are asking them to do in the seminar room.
The Scandalous Lady W will be aired on BBC 2 at 9pm on Monday 17 August
Last month, you may remember, while Mr Cameron was giving his views in the news on the crucial matter of fox hunting, Greece was on the brink of financial meltdown.
I was in Greece and with the banks closed and the prospect of worse to come, the sentence I kept hearing from friends and relatives was ‘I can’t sleep’. The local baker, who was lucky enough to be selling his bread to hotels, did not have the liquidity to pay his flour supplier, a small farmer. As a tourist, when you paid your bills with cash, people were abnormally grateful, though much too proud to say why. It seemed that a whole country was holding its breath while a roomful of people in Brussels decided their fate.
Such momentous decisions depend, like so much else in our lives, on language – on a group of people talking, in an airless conference room. How do their minds – and their meanings – meet? Sometimes with difficulty.
You need only read the pronouncements of the – now disgraced – Minister of Finance, Yanis Varoufakis, to realize how culturally inappropriate rhetoric can exacerbate a crisis. It was not so much Greek bravado in his case – though that was present too. His upfront Australian – trained braggadocio went down like the proverbial bag of sick with the Brussels bureaucrats.
He should perhaps have taken lessons in how to imply things without spelling them out in enormous capital letters from Christine Lagarde, who went on record for saying that the negotiations could only get anywhere if there were adults in the room. Hmmmm…
Relay interpreting
Spare a thought also for the fact that these meetings would have been conducted with what is known as a ‘full regime’. This means that each country had interpretation from and into their own language – there are 23 languages.
So while some people would have been speaking and listening to, say, English, the majority would have been speaking another language and having their words translated into 22 languages. They would also, of course, have been listening to the words of the main protagonists through interpreters.
Furthermore, when there is no interpreter who is able to translate from Greek directly into, say, Italian, the Italian interpreter listens to, for example, the English interpreter, and then translates the English into Italian. This system is known as ‘relay interpreting’.
Occasionally, double relay has to be used: for example if the Dutch interpreter does not speak French, she or he has to listen to someone in another booth, say German, who is themselves getting the Greek translated by someone in the French booth. It does not take much imagination to appreciate the inevitable loss of accuracy, of nuance, and of metaphorical ‘tone of voice’ – three things which really matter in such delicate negotiations.
Cross-linguistic, cross-cultural talk
As a former interpreter, I wonder how the interpreters coped with the German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble telling the head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, that he was ‘not an idiot’. They would have been caught between the ostensible need to be accurate and the need to avoid being the cause of a diplomatic incident – the latter concern being part of their DNA, if not a specific part of their professional training.
And what of the order by the Head of the European Council, after 14 hours of unsuccessful talking, ‘Sorry, but there is no way you are leaving the room’. How did that come out in Finnish, in Slovakian, in Spanish, in Danish…and in Greek?
The cross-linguistic, cross-cultural talk in that room would truly be worthy of analysis – what a PhD that could make! For the time being though, I am just glad that the messages got across well enough, and tactfully enough, so that my baker can pay for his flour again.
On the 8th of July, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce his summer budget, and with it the next stage of cuts.
The latest official estimates indicate that the Government will announce an additional £30bn of austerity measures, with substantive cuts in FY 2016 and 2017, to stabilise in 2018 and rebound in 2019. Although the impact of such cuts will largely depend on how they are allocated across UK Government departments, the Chancellor has already signalled that £12bn of these cuts will come from welfare spending.
This should, if delivered, be sufficient to meet the George Osborne’s own key fiscal targets i.e. to have debt falling as a share of GDP in 2016-17 and to achieve a cyclically adjusted current balance in 2018-19 without having to resort to tax rises.
This trenchant commitment to eliminate the deficit by the end of the decade echoes the pledges made in the Conservative Party manifesto, which set out to “balance the books” and to have “the government taking in more than it is spending for the first time in 18 years.”
UK recovery
This is an ambitious task, considering other manifesto-related spending commitments, such as the doubling of the free childcare allowance, Dilnot reforms, extension of income tax breaks for those on minimum wage, and a freeze on VAT, income tax and NI contributions. An additional constraint is the subdued nature of the UK recovery, which so far has meant that growth in tax receipts has been slower than the UK Government anticipated when it set out its fiscal consolidation plans in 2010.
The current macroeconomic outlook is seemingly benign. Aggressive monetary policy has done its job of stimulating demand in the UK and, as tail risks fade, we can continue to expect growth around 2.5% at low inflation, supported by strong tailwinds of cheap oil and weak euro.
The situation in Europe
At the same time, the Chancellor must be keenly aware of the situation – both economic and political – in Europe. Despite the fact that relations between the United Kingdom, the EU and the City of London have become more fraught since 2008, much of the EU’s economic agenda overlaps with United Kingdom’s. What happens in Europe is and will continue to be vitally important to Britain’s economic interests.
We may bear witness to the fact that the moderate recovery in the Eurozone is ongoing, buoyed by the OMT programme, while QE, oil and the euro should continue to add momentum. The latest macroeconomic projections from the staff at the Eurosystem – the monetary authority that is made up of the ECB and the national central banks of the EU Member States whose currency is the euro – indicate that the euro area will see its annual real GDP increase by 1.5% in 2015, 1.9% in 2016 and 2.0% in 2017.
The global economy
So far so good? Not quite. Perhaps economists are by nature pessimistic, but one cannot escape from the fact that recent growth numbers for the global economy have been disappointing. The details of the growth figures should give pause for thought, too. Lost trend output is not regained, not least in developed economies; growth dynamics, in emerging markets and elsewhere, have dampened; ECB could have done much more to stabilise confidence and demand.
The fact that the UK has seen its growth rate shrink does not augur well for prospects of a full recovery. To make matters worse, it has become patently obvious that the lower crude price is less of a driving force for the global economy than had been previously anticipated. Perhaps, against this background of disappointment, the optimists should start to wonder whether a slowdown is under way.
Critics of the Chancellor’s plans say that the scale of the spending cuts set out in the previous Budget significantly exceeds what is required to meet the UK Government’s own fiscal targets. We shall need to wait and see if the summer budget heralds the return of animal spirits.
About EFS: Birkbeck Economics & Finance Society promotes informed discussion of economic questions. We aim to be a source of educational and networking opportunities by providing access to high calibre speakers, industry intelligence and leading edge ideas. To become a member, to view the full list of events or to register for a talk please visit our society website at www.BirkbeckEFS.org
This post was contributed by Barbara Warnock, third year PhD student in Birkbeck’s Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, who is currently researching the work of the League of Nations in Austria in the 1920s. The title of thesis is ‘The Significance of Austrian Financial Reconstruction 1922-1926’.
As negotiations between the ‘troika’ and the Greek government continue, the Austrian Chancellor, Werner Feymann, has adopted a more sympathetic line than many European leaders in relation to Greece’s current predicament stating in early June: ‘I stand on the side of the Greek people’. His sentiments call to mind events more the ninety years ago when it was the plight of the Austrian people that was a cause of international concern.
The world’s attention this week is on Greece, but in the early 1920s, it was the newly founded republic of Austria that received the attention of the international community, in what was the first ever comprehensive international bailout and structural adjustment programme, orchestrated by the League of Nations in 1922.
Greece’s present problems around debt, collection of taxation and an excessively strong currency mirror aspects of Austria’s crisis after the First World War. Back then, Austria too had difficulties around debt and taxation. The issue with their currency, the Krone, however, was rather different, in that its value was collapsing.
Austria had been one of the states most badly affected by the First World War. The defeated country was shorn of empire, monarchy and to a large extent, identity. Austria was beset by a multitude of difficulties including desperate shortages of food, trading problems and the uncertainly caused by the imposition of reparations (although these were never actually collected). Confidence in the very viability of the country was scare, and the Krone became ever weaker in value. Inflation turned into hyperinflation and the government struggled to finance its expenditure. Obtaining foreign loans to help the country meet its obligations became impossible.
In this context, in 1922, the Financial Committee of the League of Nations – a precursor to the IMF – designed a rescue package for Austria. This entailed League assistance in obtaining foreign loans, which were underwritten by the governments of Britain, France, Italy and Czechoslovakia in return for a commitment that the country would not seek to unify with Germany, and measures to fix the value of the Austrian currency. The programme also included the ‘reconstruction’ of Austrian state finances, which entailed large reductions in the numbers of civil servants, cuts to government expenditure and restrictions on the salaries of state employees, all to ensure a permanently balanced government budget.
Much of this may sound very familiar to those living in Greece (or even Britain) today, and the similarities go further. Austria also had to submit to the control of a version of the modern ‘troika’, (the IMF, European Central Bank and the EU), operated via the League of Nations. A League Committee of Control (representing interested League members); the League’s Financial Committee (composed of bankers, financiers, and treasury representatives); and a League-appointed ‘Commissioner-General’, Alfred Zimmermann, all provided monitoring and oversight.
Zimmermann was dispatched to live in Vienna to enforce the terms of the deal and control the expenditure of the foreign loans. This kind of control was, like that of the troika, a source of humiliation and enormous resentment in Austria. Zimmermann, like the troika, frequently condemned the lack of progress on ‘reform’ made by the Austria government.
Another striking similarity between the work of the League and that of the current troika in Greece is the lack of real consideration on the part of those bodies overseeing such programmes for the effects that their schemes have on living standards and on the political climate. Rigid adherence to economic dogmas, as practiced by the troika, as Greece has found, can have disastrous consequences.
In Austria, the League’s programme did deliver foreign loans for the country, and produced a stabilised currency. However, it also resulted in high levels of unemployment and the reduction of government social support. Furthermore, the programme undermined the already shaky stability of Austrian banks and increased political tensions within the country.
The League essentially withdrew their control from Austria in mid-1926, only to become involved again during Austria’s economic difficulties in the 1930s. By 1933, parliament had ceased to operate in the Austrian Republic. In 1934, the Social Democratic movement was smashed, and in 1938, the country was incorporated into the German Reich.
The problems of interwar Austria were manifold, but the contribution that this inaugural attempt at an international bailout made towards creating a viable future for the country is debateable. As others, including Paul Krugman, have remarked, the apparent lack of awareness of the troika of the problems that interwar deflationary policies caused is one alarming aspect of the Greek crisis.
One of the serendipitous joys of studying grammars is the occasional discovery that the seemingly duller bits of language often turn out to reflect underlying processes with wider implications for how grammars and languages work.
Negation doesn’t seem like an auspicious point of departure for a journey into the hidden life of language. It has, seemingly forever, provided an opportunity for those with prescriptivist or fascistic tendencies, combined with a taste for spurious logic, a stick to beat the rest of us with for our ignorant and wanton use of supposedly deviant and/or ungrammatical forms such as ‘I never did it’[=’I did not do it’], or (the Mark of the Beast, this one) the double negative ‘I didn’t donothing’[=’I didn’t do anything’].
But negation left to itself -as it should be – does have an unsettling tendency to change form, and an equally unsettling tendency to make its point using expressions ranging from the comparatively mild (John Wayne’s ‘the Hell I do!’[roughly = ‘I most decidedly do not’), to the taboo ‘the f*** I will’ [unequivocally = ‘I will not under any circumstances’].
How negative constructions evolve
Nearly 100 years ago, Otto Jespersen proposed the Jespersen Cycle, a model of how negative constructions evolve. Jespersen described how changes in negation arise from a tension between expressive means and expressive needs.
Jespersen puts it like this: ‘the incongruity between the notional importance and the formal insignificance of the negative marker may… cause the speaker to add something to make the senseperfectly clear’ (Jespersen, 2017: 4-5). If we take French as an example, the original marker of negation was ‘non’ (itself originally Latin, and still alive and well as the French for ‘no’). Over time, ‘non’ became ‘ne’ – in Jespersen’s terms, losing formal significance – a little word easily eclipsed by bigger words, but still having a big job to do.
To reinforce ‘ne’, the word ‘pas’ was introduced to the negative construction. ‘Pas’ was (and still is, when it’s not doing a bit of negation on the side) an ordinary noun meaning ‘step’. Over more time, ‘pas’ itself begins to become the negative marker. This would be of limited interest if it only happened in French, but the same process is found in other languages. In Egyptian Arabic, for example, negation is marked by ma… sh. ‘ma’ is the negative marker proper, and ‘sh’ is a vestigial form of the word shey ‘thing’. And in Egyptian, too, there are indications that ‘sh’ is encroaching on ‘ma’s’ territory.
Squatitatives
Jespersen did not discuss the role of taboo words in negatives such as ‘He doesn’t knowsquat/f***/s***[=absolutely nothing at all]’, but he would undoubtedly admit that they are a clear case of the speaker adding something to make the sense clear. Horn (2001) dubs these forms ‘squatitatives’, which start life as minimising negatives, with the taboo element subsequently becoming a negative item in its own right, semantically equivalent to ‘(absolutely)nothing’, as in ‘He knows squat’. Squatitatives are not negative markers as such and we can be reasonably confident that the ruder emphatics will not be taking over responsibility for negation any time soon, but like the reanalysis of French ‘pas’ and Egyptian ‘sh’, they are instances of how words originally selected to perform an emphatic role lose their original meaning and take on a grammatical function.
Horn, L (2001): Flaubert Triggers, Squatitative Negation and other quirks of grammar. In Hoeksma, J. H. Rullman, V. Sanchez-Valencia and T. van Wouder (2001): Papers on Negatives and Polarity Items. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Jespersen, O (1917): Negation in English and Other Languages. Copenhagen: A.F.Host and Sons.
Few topics elicit as many passionate discussions among multilinguals as the question whether a switch of language includes a switch in personality. Some, like Ilan Stavans, the Mexican-American author of Jewish origin, feel that every language they speak allow them to be a different person and are proud of their hybrid multilingual self:
Changing languages is like imposing another role on oneself, like being someone else temporarily. My English-language persona is the one that superimposes itself on all previous others. In it are the seeds of Yiddish and Hebrew, but mostly Spanish…But is the person really the same?…You know, sometimes I have the feeling I’m not one but two, three, four people. Is there an original person? An essence? I’m not altogether sure, for without language I am nobody. (Stavans, 2001: 251).
Is this feeling of difference when switching from one language to another just a myth? What proportion of multilinguals experience this difference? Is this linked to anything particular in the person’s background?
John McWhorter, a great American applied linguist, made a relatively off-the-cuff comment towards the end of his 2014 book The language hoax, attributing the fact that many multilinguals feel different in their different languages to the fact that they started learning the foreign language (LX) later in life and that a lack of proficiency in the LX limits their ability to express their full emotional and pragmatic range. While this explanation sounds perfectly plausible, McWhorter provides no evidence, nor any references to back it up.
Reading McWhorter’s assertions, I wondered whether he was right. Do multilinguals really feel different when switching to a language acquired later in life? Is it because they may still retain a foreign accent, or not be as fluent as the native speakers? I did not like the attribution of difference to a sense of deficit. François Grosjean and Vivian Cook have argued convincingly that it is wrong to see a multilingual functioning in an LX as a failed native speaker of that language. LX users (myself included in English) are legitimate users of the language.
A couple of years ago, I collected a large database on communicating emotions from multilinguals around the world with my friend Professor Aneta Pavlenko. It included an open question: ‘Do you feel like a different person sometimes when you use your different languages?’ which was coded according to the degree of agreement with the question.
A total of 1005 bi- and multilinguals provided feedback. This seemed like a perfect database, and opportunity, to test McWhorter’s hypothesis. An analysis of the distribution of the answers showed that close to half of the participants had answered with an unqualified “yes!” to the question, over a quarter had said “no!”, with the remaining participants having a more nuanced answer.
It turned out that feelings of difference were unrelated to age of onset of acquisition and levels of oral proficiency. In other words, participants who had started learning the LX later, and were not highly proficient in it, did not feel more or less different than those who had started earlier and felt more proficient.
A comparison of those who started learning the LX early (between birth and age 2) and late (after age 2) showed no difference in feelings of difference. Context of acquisition of the LX, the degree of multilingualism and gender were also unrelated to feelings of difference.
However, more highly educated, and older participants reported higher levels of feelings of difference. Foreign language anxiety was also positively linked with feelings of difference: those who felt more anxious in their L2 and L3 were more likely to feel different when switching to these languages. Feelings of difference seem directly or indirectly linked to personality traits (Ożańska-Ponikwia, 2013; Wilson, 2013).
Participants’ reported that their own self-perceptions did not necessarily match those of people around them. Perceptions were often presented as being dynamic, varying over time and differing between switches to specific languages.
Participants mentioned variation in both verbal and non-verbal behaviour: feeling less funny in the LX because of lack of vocabulary, being more taciturn in one language, raising voice pitch, covering the mouth, avoiding looking interlocutors in the eye, adopting a different body language, sticking to linguistic or cultural norms of the L1 to stand out in the L2 or vice versa. Some participants reported possessing different persona in their different languages.
The debate on the causes of these intriguing differences is likely to continue forever.
McWhorter, J. H. 2014. The Language Hoax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ożańska-Ponikwia, K. 2013. Emotions from a Bilingual Point of View: Personality and Emotional Intelligence in Relation to Perception and Expression of Emotions in the L1 and L2. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Stavans, I. 2001. On Borrowed Words. A Memoir of Language. New York: Penguin. Wilson, R. J. 2013. Another language is another soul. Language and Intercultural Communication, DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2013.804534
As a newly elected Prime Minister, you wait around for one European problem then two come along at once. While David Cameron is trying to deal with his EU referendum promise, another ‘European’ problem has reared its head in the Queen’s Speech. The Conservatives promised to repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and replace it with a British Bill of Rights-see this full fact analysis for background. The Conservative manifesto stated that:
The next Conservative Government will scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights
The Conservatives would draw up a new Bill of Rights that ended the controversial link with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, treating their rulings as advisory and giving power back to the UK’s Supreme Court. But it looks like the commitment has at least been slowed down – to a promise to consult rather than, as was suggested, to have proposals ready in the first 100 days.
What’s caused the re-think?
The Human Rights Act is surrounded by layers of myths and half-truths. The claim is that the Act creates a set of new rights (it doesn’t, it just adds them to UK law), that it allows judges, and particularly judges from the European Court of Human Rights, to challenge and change British law (it doesn’t really, just lets them declare it ‘incompatible’) and undermines Parliament’s power (which is actually preserves)-see this famous speech by Lord Bingham. This guide to the Act concluded ‘the Government also acknowledged that a series of damaging myths about the Act had taken root in the popular imagination’.
However, the Human Rights Act has become a symbol of ‘European’ interference in ‘our’ politics and abuse of laws designed to protect us. So David Cameron is trying to change something because of what people think it is doing rather than what it is.
So why has Cameron slowed down?
Like any good politician, Cameron has looked across the battlefield and foreseen what could happen. Let’s run a little thought experiment and imagine that he and Michael Gove can draw up a new Bill of British Rights and Responsibilities, one that better reflects British values (putting aside whether it breaks any treaty obligations etc). They can send it, at least in a draft form, to Parliament and repeal the Human Rights Act. At this point, the fun would begin.
In the House of Commons, his own party is deeply divided-and even invoking the classic ‘what would Winston Churchill say’ line hasn’t helped. Some Conservatives oppose any ‘reduction’ in human rights, with one ‘senior’ politician this weekend rumoured to be considering resigning and a group of influential conservative MPs ready to oppose anything they see as a ‘weakening’ of rights.
On the other side, his Eurosceptic [or Euroexit] MPs are keen for something very different that ‘breaks’ the ‘formal link’ with the ECHR and reflects UK values. So the new Bill would have to be a masterpiece that balances these two viewpoints – different from the old Act but not giving less protection.
The truce is fragile
Dr Ben Worthy
Cameron’s party, for the moment, is holding off rebellions but the truce is fragile and one issue they do like rebelling about is Europe. Just to make things more tricky for a Prime Minister with a small majority, opposite his own party the new block of 56 SNP MPs, 8 Lib-Dems and the whole of the Labour party are all firmly against scrapping the Act.
Then we get to the House of Lords. Technically the House of Lords cannot block anything promised in a manifesto-but in this case it isn’t so clear cut. The government can’t rush them to any decisions and the Lords can block legislation for some time and even ‘filibuster’ (talk until legislation is dropped).
In the House of Lords the Conservatives do not have a majority and there’s a big healthy dollop of Labour and angry Lib-Dems (there’s only 8 Lib Dem MPs but 104 highly engaged Lib-Dem Peers). Added to this, it’s full of lawyers and experts who see themselves as protectors of civil liberties. The second chamber has already issued warnings that any repeal or new bill won’t get through.
Cameron’s headache may become a migraine
So, piloting this through the House of Lords and House of Commons is very tricky. It’s at this point that Cameron’s Human Rights headache may become a migraine. The Human Rights Act 1998 is deeply tied up in the devolution settlement to Scotland, Wales and, especially, Northern Ireland, where it is embedded in the peace process.
Legally, as Mark Elliot points out, it seems Westminster can just about push a new Bill of Rights across the UK. But politically it will be extremely difficult and it’s possible that Scotland may refuse to co-operate. The ultimate danger is that, as pointed out here, a British Bill, opposed in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, could become an English Bill.
So what could Cameron do? Playing for time seems a good idea. How about a referendum?
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
