Yesterday, the European Commission accepted the request that the Ministry of Universities made last year to include Catalan, Basque and Galician within the educational platform that allows Erasmus students to learn the languages of the universities to which they travel. . This is a concession from the Government to the nationalist parties that it included at the last minute in the Organic Law of the University System (Losu). The most famous program to foster a sense of European belonging among young people legitimizes these languages in order to “promote equity and social cohesion.”
The decision comes on the eve of the implementation, next Tuesday, of the use of Basque, Galician and Catalan in all the parliamentary activity of Congress and with the doubts generated in some countries, such as Sweden, by the request for their recognition as official languages. of the European Union. To these two measures, a bargaining chip for the nationalist parties to support the investiture of Pedro Sánchez as President of the Government, is now added a community resolution that confirms that the plan to promote the use of Catalan in all institutional areas continues to advance with steps calculated and decisive: the Generalitat wants that, by 2025, 80% of the subjects in Catalan universities will be taught in Catalan.
The EC decision does not mean that Catalan, Basque and Galician will be given official recognition as official languages of the EU, but is limited to “including” them. within the online linguistic support platform Online Linguistic Support (OLS), putting “information on the free resources available to learn them provided by the regions in which it is spokenn these languages, as well as the links to these resources”. It is, in any case, a recognition with a great symbolic charge, since it places them at the same level as Spanish, English, French or German, a concession that It will predictably serve the independence supporters to legitimize new claims in relation to the language.
What was agreed yesterday by the vice president of the EC, Margaritis Schinas, and the acting Minister of Universities, Joan Subirats, meeting in Barcelona at the II Forum of Alliances of European Universities, is that these resources are available on the platform before next October, a very symbolic date for Catalan independentists.
In a communication from Schinas released by Subirats, it is said that the EC “recognizes the importance of promote linguistic diversity” and that “inclusion and diversity are part of the general priorities of the Erasmus+ program”, but it does not mention that Catalan is being used in Catalan schools as a language of exclusion, since the right of families to also learn in Spanish, the official language of the State.