The article offers a critical assessment of the approach adopted by the European Union (EU) to dealing with linguistic diversity. On the one hand, the path to European integration has been marked from the beginning by an explicit commitment to protecting cultural and linguistic diversity. On the other hand, the credibility of this commitment suffers from the normative incoherence characterizing Europe’s actual institutional response to the challenges of multilingualism. To define rules which allow for a reflexive “processing” of diversity will not be possible without opening a proper political debate on the language issue in the context of European polity-building.