The road to incorporate Catalan, Galician and Basque to the list of official languages of the EU is full of obstacles. The precise measurement of the unanimity of the 27 Member States requires a change in the regulation and opens the question of how the million-dollar bill will be defrayed. If consummated, Spain would go on to hold four languages in the European institutions, while, for example, Luxembourgish, official in the grand duchy, does not even have such status.
The issue of languages is a very sensitive issue in the community capital. In 2005, Spain and Italy put up a fight after the decision of the European Commission to reduce translations. A movement that they read as a victory for the hegemonic trilingualism of English, French and German prevailing in the Schuman neighborhood. Twelve years later, the French commissioner Pierre Moscovici boasted that French would be the official language of the post-Brexit EU.
With the departure of the United Kingdom, English continued to be one of the 24 official languages of the community bloc. Shakespeare’s language is also the national language in Malta and Ireland. And to eliminate it, as well as to incorporate a new one, it is necessary to reform Regulation 1/58 and have the support of the rest of the European partners.
What are the precedents? What the acting Spanish government is proposing outlines an unprecedented case in the EU from many angles. Brussels started building its Tower of Babel in 1958 with four languages (French, German, Italian and Dutch). The rest have been incorporated gradually, coinciding with the entry of the countries into the community bloc. The only exception is Irish, which was not studied after Dublin entered -in 1973-, but in 2005. Although it was not until last year that Gaelic obtained full status due to lack of resources.
Irish, like Maltese, are national, not regional, languages. Therefore, the Spanish petition is a sui generis case. According to data from the European Commission, around 60 minority and regional languages are spoken in the EU as a whole. Incorporating some of them threatens to open an unappetizing European Pandora’s box in many capitals. Countries like France have no interest in a rebound effect. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has worked hard to defend the supremacy of the French. A few years ago, when he passed through Corsica, he settled the debate on the aspirations of co-officiality of the Corsican: “There is only one official language, sediment of our nation.”