Rethinking Multilingual Democracy: Towards a Generative Relational Theory of Governance amid Relational Plurality and Heteromorphic Values

Theories of multilingual democracy treat linguistic diversity principally as a problem of communication, of representation, of linguistic rights, or of recognition. Each addresses a real difficulty, and together they leave one thing unexplained: political disagreement in multilingual polities has not diminished in proportion to the very large improvements in translation that recent decades have produced. This paper examines a possible reason. A thought experiment supposes translation to be perfect and asks what would remain, and what remains is the coordination of values that were generated within different relational histories and that no rendering of sentences makes commensurable. The survey concedes that this conclusion is established: anthropological work on ontological conflict has argued at length that disputes of this kind concern worlds and not words, and translation theory has argued that rendering is a value-constituting operation. What that literature has largely left aside is the institutional question, and the specifically multilingual case. Against those gaps the paper advances a graded thesis, that linguistic and cultural communities embody partially distinct relational structures which influence how values are articulated, prioritized, and institutionalized without determining or exhausting them, and derives from it two governance functions that a polity under such conditions requires. It meets the objection that the notion of separate conceptual worlds is incoherent, and concedes that the resulting picture of democracy stands close to an existing account of constitutionalism amid diversity. The account supplies no institutional design, its central thesis is entered as a hypothesis, and the closing questions are held to be the more valuable half of what is offered.