Towards peace in Europe: on legal linguistics, prosperity and European identity – the European Reference Language System for the European Union

Abstract The European Union is a legal community of hundreds of millions of people, established in a single market through European law. This is tied to language and translation into 24 official languages, each with equally authentic status. However, this leads to considerable legal differences between Member States and underscores the dominance of English, at the Court of Justice that of French (monolingualism), both of which have no legal foundation. Rule-of-law order (Rechtsstaatlichkeit) is created by the European Reference Language System (Europäisches Referenzsprachensystem), which is presented here as a tool for the urgently required reform of the language laws in the European Union: Not having a hegemonial focus on a single language (and thus on a single legal world) or on the exclusivity of some few languages, it offers a legal-linguistic basis of communication with all treaty languages of the European Union for a clear European law and prosperity. The official languages of the Member States thus preserve the mother tongue reality of the citizens in the sense of the subsidiarity principle (multilingualism). In this way, the citizens and their Union acquire a legally valid voice and identity. This seems necessary in the face of the present restructuring of the world, in order to maintain peace for the people in Europe and to continue promoting their well-being. The basis is legal linguistics (Rechtslinguistik).