This house would establish English as an official language in all EU member states - moderator's introduction

What comes to mind when you hear European Union? Don’t you think of presidents who have to make a decision, but all they do is argue to push through national interests? Imagine them in a meeting desperately grabbing onto their earpieces so that they can hopefully understand what the others say by listening to the delayed translation! If you consider that no translator can be perfect, the question arises: how it can be possible for EU officials to understand each other properly? To solve these kinds of problems and finally integrate Europe this house would establish English as an official language in all European member states.

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by MJ

The technical part sounds simple. Eurostat says, 51% and 90%. Nevertheless the EU has 23! That means that requests can be sent to and must be replied by the EU institutions in any of these languages. Furthermore all the laws and regulations have to be translated into all official languages. To simplify the situation, most often only English, German and French are used as working languages. But still 1%! A pretty penny! Is multilingualism worth all this money?

There is a project of a constructed lingua franca, easy to learn for all Europeans: Esperanto! The European party “Europe – Democracy – Esperanto”, which is presently in the European Parliament, promotes the recognition of Esperanto as a working language in the EU as well as the teaching of Esperanto as a second language in schools. To present some facts, I want to mention a report written by François Grin, professor of the University of Geneva. In his study, Grin analyses the cost as well as the impact on policy and culture in three scenarios: Choosing English or Esperanto as a single lingua franca or using a three language system (English-German-French). The multilingual model currently applied in the EU has a big issue: In a meeting with 20 people speaking at least two of the three languages, the chance that at least one person doesn’t understand the working language is more than 99.9%! Is this an acceptable situation? Grin also states that adopting Esperanto as single lingua franca would be the most equal way of solving the situation. He also says that to choose English would be unfair for all non-English speaking countries in an economic, cultural and political way. Nevertheless, nothing that he has pointed out has influenced decision making in Brussels!

Facing the truth, Esperanto never had much success. Who would learn a language with no historical and cultural background and no reference of pronunciation besides some phonetics scribbled down by its creator? English is the world language! Accepting it, would give Europeans the chance to move closer together and provide them the power to speak with one voice. But would it preserve Europe’s variety of cultures? Don’t forget the motto of the EU – “United in diversity”! Establishing English as a secondary official language in all EU member states would be a serious step on the way of integration. All member states would give away some of their national power to strengthen the EU as a whole. Each culture would have to accept to become less important in order to create a more uniform European Culture. Institutions of all EU member states would have to provide documents in English. Imagine a court in Paris where only English is spoken! Everybody would have to learn English in school. Would this house set sails to such a United States of Europe?

MJ