Philippe Van Parijs's provocative new book on linguistic justice can be read as an extended analysis of the linguistic presuppositions of a just and democratic polity. Van Parijs is not, of course, the first theorist to tackle this topic. John Stuart Mill famously argued that democratic institutions are all but impossible in a country where people speak different languages. If Mill is right, then there can be little hope that, for instance, the European Union will ever overcome its democratic deficits. Nor can we expect much to come from the various cosmopolitan proposals for some form of global democratic citizenship.

Van Parijs accepts Mill's argument concerning the importance of a common lingua franca. Indeed, he brews up this argument in an even stronger batch than Mill's. For Van Parijs, a common lingua franca is a precondition not merely for democratic institutions but for the effective pursuit of justice—and not only within Europe but throughout the world. When we share a common language, so he argues, it is much easier to incorporate others into our ethical community, much more difficult to ignore their appeals for justice. Yet where Mill dismisses the prospects for democracy in the multinational polities of the world, Van Parijs reaches a much cheerier conclusion. The lack of a common lingua franca is but a temporary state of affairs. English, so he explains, is becoming the European lingua franca and—bar “some unforeseeable apocalyptic event” (p. 29)—is likely to become the global lingua franca. The author reports these developments as a herald of good tidings. He holds that the spread of the English language—global Anglicization, as it were—is both inevitable and, on the whole, thoroughly desirable.

To understand Van Parijs's approach to a common lingua franca, it is helpful to bear in mind that political theorists tend to view language in one of two different ways: on one view—call it “the instrumental view”—language is primarily a means of communication; on the other view–call it “the romantic view”—language is the expression of a group's (typically a nation's) distinctive way of life. At least initially in this long, intricately argued and complex book, Van Parijs adopts a thoroughgoing instrumentalist view of language. Any Herderian defense of particular national loyalties is not for him. “Any honest attempt to think seriously about justice for our century,” he writes, “must downgrade nations and states from the ethical framework to the institutional toolkit” (p. 26). Nations, in short, have no fundamental or intrinsic ethical standing.

In tying the emergence of a common lingua franca to a conception of justice, the author is in effect making the strongest possible normative argument for global Anglicization. Initially, it might seem that he has little sympathy with those non-English languages that face a secondary status in this new English-speaking world. Yet somewhat surprisingly, he takes the feelings of non-English speakers—and also secondary-language English speakers—very seriously. Thus, after making a brief but convincing case for the benefits of an emergent English-speaking world, the bulk of the book is spent developing a long but rather less convincing case for compensating non-English speakers. Put in its strongest form, Van Parijs's argument proceeds in three steps.

First, the author claims that in an Anglicized world, English speakers will enjoy an “arbitrary privilege” (p. 95). Even though this privilege will disappear as everyone acquires English, in the meantime this privilege will be “understandably perceived as a serious distributive injustice by those who do not enjoy it” (p. 95). Of course, the fact that non-English speakers might experience disadvantages in an increasingly English-speaking environment does not in itself establish that they face an injustice of comparable importance to the justice-based case that supports the global lingua franca. So in a second step of the argument, he identifies a variety of different disadvantages that non-English speakers face, including various forms of unfair social cooperation, unequal opportunity, and unequal respect. The disadvantage that seems to carry most weight, however, is unequal respect. For Van Parijs, a just society ensures that all of its members receive equal basic respect (or “parity of esteem,” as he puts it). When English becomes the lingua franca, non-English speakers will face (at least in the short and medium term) a lack of equal respect.

In the third step of the argument, Van Parijs proposes a remedy for this form of linguistic injustice: namely, a territorially differentiated coercive regime. In order to understand what he means here, it is important to distinguish two different forms of linguistic territoriality. In an accommodating linguistic regime, the language choice in the territory is left up to citizens—as is the case, for example, in Wales where citizens can choose whether to interact with the state in English or Welsh, the two major languages of the territory. In a coercive linguistic regime, in contrast, the state establishes an official language and restricts the nonofficial language in that territory—as is the case, for example, in Belgium and Quebec. Somewhat surprisingly for someone who locates his arguments in the liberal tradition, Van Parijs advocates the latter more coercive territorial regime. His argument here does not turn on sociological considerations of linguistic survivability but on making it possible “for each local language to be and legitimately remain a queen” (p. 147). Only when a local linguistic community can coerce a new arrival into speaking its non-English language, in other words, are the conditions of equality of respect fulfilled.

At this point, we arrive at a rather eye-catching paradox in Van Parijs's whole argument. Having begun his book with a robust justice-based argument for English as the universal lingua franca, he concludes with a no less robust justice-based argument for coercive linguistic territoriality. At first glance, it might seem as if he has abandoned his initial instrumentalist approach to language in favor of a romantic, nationalist conception of language. But this interpretation would be inaccurate. His argument is at no point driven by nationalist considerations. It turns solely on a theory of justice that is hyper-sensitive to arbitrary privileges and their institutional remedy.

Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World is of unquestionable importance. It is the very model of applied political theory: philosophically sophisticated, sociologically nuanced, and rich in empirical detail. This book deserves to become a seminal text, the focus of academic conferences and graduate seminars. It is, however, not always easy to read. Van Parijs takes the knight's delight in advancing his argument one step forward and two steps sideways. Rather more worryingly, the luck-egalitarian theory of justice that informs the book is implausible and unattractive. This problem comes into focus when one considers the author's understanding of an arbitrary privilege and how such a privilege relates to the putative injustice of unequal linguistic respect.

For Parijs, the rise of English as the universal lingua franca bestows an “arbitrary” privilege on English speakers. An arbitrary privilege is best understood as a privilege bestowed by some agency without justification. Yet it is implausible to describe the rise of English as a lingua franca as an arbitrary privilege for at least three reasons: One, the rise of English is largely the consequence of impersonal secular forces in global society; two, the rise of English is—for the reasons Van Parijs himself points out—generally desirable, a development that is justified by a conception of justice; and three, the benefits that accrue to English speakers are benefits that accrue to those people with what might be termed the relevant or qualifying characteristics. True, the rise of English as a lingua franca alters the distribution of societal benefits and burdens; some people in the short and medium term will benefit more than others. But there is no reason to think that the rise of English entails any inequality of respect. People can legitimately protest when their state deliberately targets them for a demeaning or inferior position on the basis of an irrelevant characteristic. Such is the case when a state permits racial discrimination. A targeted disadvantage on the basis of irrelevant characteristics can support a claim of unequal respect; a disadvantage that arises on the basis of a lack of the relevant or qualifying characteristics—such as that which confronts non-English speakers in an increasingly English-speaking world—cannot.

If we can safely set aside Van Parijs's inequality of respect argument—which is the strongest of the various arguments that he offers in support of coercive linguistic territoriality—we are left with the altogether happier world where English is Europe's (and eventually the world's) lingua franca and all territories have accommodating linguistic regimes. In this world, the spread of English will sustain—for the reasons Van Parijs identifies–transnational democracy and global justice; and all citizens will be able to interact with their state in English and that territory's other dominant language (whether French or German, Flemish or Welsh).