Language, Culture and Policy

A pair of posts on language in Europe offer the latest on one of the less purely political (but nonetheless, structural) elements of EU integration. One defends French language, lamenting its diminution and the negative effect this has on francophone clout in EU affairs:

"The choice of language has wide repercussions... If a meeting is held solely in English, the follow-up report must be written in near-perfect English and so the responsibility will go, he says, to an English-speaking expert rather than a French-speaking one. Or had it been agreed that the European patent would only be in English (as opposed to English, French and German, as is currently proposed), the influence of a British approach and English jurisdiction would have been greater..."

Also see a recent video interview from Presseurop of Androulla Vassiliou, the EU Commissioner for Education, Culture and Multilingualism (how different these Europeans are -- the US government would never budget for a "language tsar" of any iteration.) In contrast with the first speaker above, Vassiliou seems to suggest that one should not take on a stiff resistance to learning other languages, because language learning constitutes "learning the culture of others" and serves as a "very good means of communication," as well as the considerable economic implications of language, and culture more broadly, within EU economic affairs. Vassiliou claims that the European cultural products sector (television, film, etc.) grosses more than the European auto industry... Can anyone verify this?

French vs. English, Sarkozy, NPR, etc. etc.

The working-language battle continues in Brussels... See these three posts from the excellent Kovács & Kováts blog, which chronicles the Hungarian presidency of the EU. 

Looks a little like this old EurAmerican post, a throwback from all the way to last August. The post mentions Arthur Goldhammer, the guru behind the blog French Politics, who talked to NPR this week about French President Nicolas Sarkozy's new muscular foreign affairs posture.

French vs. English and the EU

Blogger and Harvard professor Art Goldman has added this post about the wan status of French language in EU policy circles. The following is from a New York Times article on the announcement of European foreign policy chief Lady Catherine Ashton's plans to take French courses this summer.

"French was once the unchallenged lingua franca of European integration. Until 1995, French had the monopoly in the European Commission press room, where Anglophone journalists had to address their questions to English spokespeople in French. 

"That position became unsustainable when Sweden and Finland joined the bloc in the mid-1990s, followed by 10 East European countries in the last decade. In many of these countries, English is the second language, with French well down the list. 

"According to the European Commission, the number of documents it sent for translation with English as the original language was 72.5 percent in 2008, the same as the year before. The proportion of original texts in French dropped to 11.8 percent in 2008 from 12.2 percent in 2007. (...)"

These and other indicators suggest a clear decline of French in official spheres. In what seems a tellingly robust display of counter-measures, the Permanent Representation of France in the EU has an entire web page devoted to representing the strength of French language in Brussels and other European capitals. But just in case, Brussels policymakers can still sign up for free French courses geared specifically for them. And for the rest of us mortals, there's always the Alliance Française.