Introduction

In Chapter 3 we traced the past and the present of the politics of language and identity in Hungary and the Czech Republic. In order to demonstrate that the present-day policies on language, multilingualism and national identity at different political levels do not exist in isolation from one another, we will show in this chapter how they are linked vertically with discourses at the EU level as well as horizontally with the discourses on foreign cultural policy in Germany and Austria. Therefore, we focus here on the complex layering of language policies by exploring the multiple levels at which they are formulated as well as the tensions between them. All such policies represent interventions in the otherwise unregulated practice of language use, but our aim here is to show the points where the different interventions intersect one another in the context of the discourses in which they are formulated.

In this sense, this chapter addresses the question of scale referred to in Chapter 2, and it is connected in this way to the following two chapters (5 and 6), which deal with individual experiences and the formation of social identities.