Policy and conflict

Public policies are planned responses to social problems. Initially, this involves an acknowledgment that such problems exist. It also entails the assumption that social problems harbour solutions grounded in public policy. Once the issue enters the political agenda, it is necessary to develop strategies to overcome it as well as to create tools that properly assess the success of the planned objectives. Obviously, not all social problems generate public policies either because they are not articulated enough or because intervention alternatives lack the majority consensus to carry them out (Subirats, Knoepfel, Larrue & Varonne 2008: 33).

According to this general approach, the particular case of public policies relating to the management of linguistic diversity presents all possible nuances, depending on the contextual peculiarities that define each situation of language contact. Beyond their immediate impact on citizens, medium-term language policies often generate a host of reactions ranging from general consensus at one extreme to social conflict at the other. Hence in this article, I embrace the hypothesis that social conflict increases under universally oriented policies in those communities that have failed to prioritise the issues derived from linguistically complex populations. In this sense, universally oriented policies are understood as addressing the population as a whole, particularly in the case of language education policies.

Although each language contact situation has its own peculiarities, it seems to be unquestionable that there exist, in most instances, shared features arising from the social conflicts they generate. In other words, these problems are found across all settings, characterised by varying degrees of intensity, bearing consequences that can often be generalised. In any case, owing to the absence of a contrastive analysis of such conflicts, in this paper I assume that in socio-political contexts in which the language issue may be conflictive, policy is aimed implicitly or explicitly at one of the following four objectives: avoiding the conflict, restructuring the conflict, promoting the conflict or solving the conflict.

A conflict is avoided when it is not explicitly recognised or when its existence is denied. A conflict is restructured when it is dealt with inadequately in localised instead of holistic terms, thus partially solving the issue in one domain and leaving it unresolved in another. Language policy may be designed with the sole purpose of promoting and maximising conflict.