To be published in Discurso & Sociedad[1]
Americanisation and Englishisation as processes of global occupation
Robert Phillipson
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
ABSTRACT
British and US imperial policies have explicitly aimed at physical and mental occupation worldwide. The critical analysis of the resultant global inequality needs to explore how it was legitimated. The myth of terra nullius, expounded by Locke, served to legitimate European colonial dominance, which was denounced by Kant. Americanisation has been exported as a cultura nullius serving to consolidate consumerism and the underlying military and economic system. Neoliberalism increases inequality that is a causal factor in dysfunctional capitalist societies. The economic and political integration of Europe has been closely coordinated with and choreographed by the US. The presence of English has been dramatically increased throughout Europe. Its active promotion worldwide is of major political and economic significance for the UK and the USA. Advocates of English as universally valid, including the current applied linguistic vogue for analysing English as a ‘lingua franca’, see English as a lingua nullius detached from the forces behind is expansion. The integration of European higher education is being coerced into a single template, ‘internationalisation’ equating with ‘English-medium studies’. Some European countries however are forming language policy to ensure that English is only used additively. Critical scholarship that seeks to increase social justice exposes how occupation, physical and mental, has been legitimated and can be counteracted.