ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates ‘superdiversity’ in the context of systems theory and hybridity theory, through the lens of the case law produced by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ). Unlike other international organisations, which appear to function smoothly using only a few official languages, the European Union (EU) currently has 24 and the ECJ produces judgments in 23 of those languages . Within the complex system of ECJ case law we can observe two forces at work:
regulating forces, including ‘unification forces’ which aim at ensuring the uniform application of EU law across all 28 member states and ‘drafting and translation forces’ aimed at creating semantically identical texts across 23 languages.
‘language use forces’ relating to how language is actually used in reality.
The content and dynamicity of EU case law as a system depends on the relation between these two forces. The former is associated with stability and the latter with indeterminacy. The concept of superdiversity encompasses a system in which patterns and deviations from those patterns exist, and this can be useful in developing a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between law, language and translation, within supranational legal systems and more generally.The multilingual nature of EU case law produces some variables in terms of superdiversity which go to the foundations of the legal order. Since that case law is produced in up to 23 languages, translation plays a large role in the development of that legal order. However, the production of the ECJ case law challenges the established notion of translation because there is no clear source language–target language distinction. Furthermore the multilingualism policy challenges the principle of uniform application of EU law since one-to-one relations between concepts across languages do not exist. The EU institutions, in particular its Court of Justice, deal with this problem of uniformity by relying on a ‘new’ EU legal language, which exists in 24 linguistic forms but has the same meaning across all of those linguistic forms. In terms of superdiversity, EU law is, therefore, a borderline case: it exists simultaneously as singularity and multitude. Finally, multi-authored ECJ judgments challenge the notion of national and standardised languages because they contain hybrid expressions that exist only in this context and cannot be found in national varieties. This chapter is based on an analysis of a multilingual corpus of acquis communautaire judgments and considers these elements of language and super-diversity in the context of multilingual EU law as well as the consequent limits of a multilingual, supranational legal order.
