The authors end their study of the four keywords by reflecting on the consequences of recent events relating to Europe and the increasing need for us to find shared keywords in the global world. Having begun with Raymond Williams’ definition of keywords and taken on board a multilingual approach to keywords as ideological concepts, the authors review the ways the people has taken on radical forms in Britain, France and Germany, while at other times it has been heralded as the motor of history in Chinese and Czechoslovak communist rhetoric. The adoption of Western keywords such as citizen and individual proves to be just as political, the authors conclude. And Europe is no less political, whether it is a question of celebrating it as an ideal, defending it as a project, or attacking it from without or from within. The authors conclude with the hope that they have managed to move beyond national prejudice and beyond reductive stereotypes. The model their corpus-based research provides is one in which three levels of complexity must be taken into account. Each tradition is complex and changing in any linguistic or cultural exchange, and the migration of meanings between any two cultures proves equally complex. By seeking to represent the various ways Chinese authors respond to the diversity of European conceptualizations of the four keywords, the authors hope to have taken readers beyond East-West models, and Communist-Capitalist models, simplistic oppositions which break down as soon as we consider how individual authors express themselves in any given language at any given moment in history. This book is about words, and what happens when meanings migrate, but it is also about worldviews, and how we live within them, learning to express ourselves with words.
16. A multilingual approach to the history of Standard English
