The supranational level or domain

The last chapter, concerned with ethnic and language activist organizations and individuals whose goal is to persuade bodies with authority, at whatever level of government, to undertake specific language management activities in favor of the language they support, was a continuation of the exploration of the national domain. These organizations try from time to time to manage the language choices of individual speakers or members of language-related ethnic groups, although it is not uncommon for the ideological goals of the activists to be somewhat ahead of the language proficiency of their members. There was also a not uncommon overlap with religious organizations. In this chapter, before we go on in the next to describe and analyze the organizations and bureaucratic structures charged with the implementation of government language policies, we move to a domain which in a sense constitutes a new level of authority, namely, the supranational organization. I wrote “in a sense” advisedly, for in spite of a widespread belief that twenty-first-century globalization marks the end of the power of the nation-state, devolution and partition of multilingual and multiethnic states into smaller ones constitutes a reaffirmation of the power of the nation-state, and supranational organizations regularly respect the sovereignty of the individual nations which constitute them. Commonly, international policies are expressed in treaties, declarations, or charters which only come into effect when ratified by a certain number of nations and which only bind those nations which ratify them.