Dealing with Multilingualism in EU Institutions: The Implications of Enlargement from a Managerial Perspective

The European Union is a particularly complex experiment in the management of multilingualism, as compared to other international and supranational organizations, since each Member State has the right to have its own Language recognized as an official language. The 2004 enlargement proved especially challenging, with eight new official languages joining the list. The study compares the ways in which this challenge was met in different EU institutions. Good planning and differentiated managerial solutions, coherent with the mandate and constraints of different institutions, allowed the EU to manage a complex transition in such a way to balance successfully the pressure to control costs and the need to ensure democratic participation to all EU citizens, irrespective of their Language skills.