The European migrant worker, the ‘camouflage’ of local-language acquisition, and global interference effects of thought and communication

Richard Witt

Email: wittsend@gmail.com

 

ABSTRACT:

In the sense of the EC/EU Treaties of the previous two decades, and especially under the stimulus of recent European expansion, workers have increasingly sought employment in member-states not their own. There they face difficulties of orientation and emplacement which are partly relieved by acquiring an ad hoc knowledge of the local language and of commonest expression patterns of the local culture. However, global effects of thought, language and communication offset, interfere with, or override this ad hoc ‘camouflage’. How far does this situation make for a change in the unstable balance between ‘local’ and ‘global’?