Would Catalan open the floodgates to an EU cacophony?
EU countries say they need time to assess possible domino effects of making the language official, but Catalonia's Europe minister says it isn't comparable to other minority languages.
As expected, EU countries yesterday rejected Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s request to quickly establish Catalan, Basque and Galician as official EU languages - saying the issue needs more study of its costs and ramifications. The three would become the first regional languages to become official at EU level, making translation and interpretation necessary for each. The current 24 official languages are only the ones official at national level.
The request by Madrid is part of a deal Sanchez has made with the Catalan separatist parties, whose support he needs in order to stay in power after an inconclusive election in July. That the other EU countries would reject the request should not have come as a surprise, and there is speculation that the Council giving time to study the issue rather than rejecting it outright was a gift to Sanchez to allow him to continue government formation. Perhaps the study period will end, with a negative assessment, coincidentally right after a new Spanish government is formed.
But this isn’t just a Spanish issue, it's an issue over the EU’s linguistic future. It is forcing countries to confront an uncomfortable question: how central must nation-states be to how the EU functions?