No, non or nein? The other Brussels Brexit battle
Paris thinks EU business could be conducted in French again
Never mind the looming collision between Berlin and Paris over Emmanuel Macron’s expansive plans for the eurozone. Brexit has triggered a more emotionally charged contest. For France, there is something much more important than money at stake — it’s a matter, you could say, of national pride.
Not so long ago, the business of Brussels was conducted in French. Paris thinks it could be so again. The bloc’s rules allow each member state to designate an official EU language. Britain’s departure will leave English without a sponsor on the present list of 24. Ireland and Malta use English at home, but have nominated their mother tongues for EU business.
On the face of it, banishing English is a ludicrous suggestion. It is deeply embedded in the day-to-day work of Europe. On the other hand, there are some determined to extinguish all traces of UK membership from the EU’s institutions. Once removed from the list, English would cease to be one of the bloc’s three working languages. The language of Molière and Proust could be restored to its centuries-old primacy in European diplomacy.
The former communist states of eastern and central Europe take a different view. Pardon our Latin, but they regard English as the de facto lingua franca. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians have no intention of learning French. Nor will they embrace the EU’s other working language, German. There is too much history there.
As for the political class in Berlin, it is one thing for Mr Macron to demand a eurozone finance minister and budget, quite another to expect the continent’s most powerful nation to give French an advantage over German. Helmut Kohl might once have made such a gesture, but the days when Berlin put the European cause ahead of the German interest have long passed.
The result? A deadlock seemingly as intractable as that over Britain’s future trading relationship with the EU27. Suggestions that Ireland and/or Malta could designate English as well as Gaelic and Maltese are shot down by Francophiles. And it would be too much to expect Dublin or Valetta to jettison their own languages in favour of English.
All may not be lost. The French think the Brexit clock is on their side: that English will lose its legal status at the end of March 2019. Paris, however, may have forgotten the first rule of EU treaties: they can always be reinterpreted by clever lawyers. Officials from the European Commission say that article 342 of the treaties requires a unanimous vote of the council of ministers to change the language regime. To their mind, this means that even when Britain goes, English stays, unless ministers decide otherwise. The ghost of Britain forever stalking the corridors of Brussels? What price French pride?