Copenhagen Summit to tackle EU's "Tower of Babel"

Secretary-General of the European Parliament, Julian Priestley(speaking for President Pat Cox), pointed to the recent "historical" Parliament meeting with representatives of the candidate countries. He said: "Last week, the European Parliament organised an exceptional event with parliamentarians from all the accession states. We had 23 working languages, active and passive, 506 language combinations. The first time ever, anywhere that this had been attempted. And it worked."

ThePermanent Representative of Germany to the EU, Dr Wilhelm Schönfelder, explained that the COREPER will send a report to the Council and the European Summit in Copenhagen on the practical improvements of the EU's language regime. He underlined that also after enlargement, all Member States' official languages would remain official languages of the EU. He said: "Despite all of the practical improvements that we are proposing, it will remain the case that all legislation is available in the languages of all EU Member States ahead of its adoption by the Council. (...) Therefore into the future, all languages will have to remain official languages".

Dr Schönfelder admitted that with respect to the working languages, there would have to be restricted languages regimes. He stressed, however, that he was not in favour of a 'single language regime', i.e. English only. France and Germany would join forces support a regime of at least three languages, he said. "There is an agreement between Germany and France, at the highest level, that we will jointly support - even in case of a restricted language regime - the preservation of at least a three languages. We have jointly insisted on this measure in the past."

All speakers stressed the importance of translating legislation into all official languages of the EU.

Dr Ingo Friedrich, Vice President of the EP, said that it was politically impossible to omit any of the smaller languages. He cited a historical incident: "Friedrich: Otto von Habsburg requested in 1982 that in the case of the very small languages not all documents be translated into all languages. In Greece, this resulted nearly in a revolution!"

In that respect,Franz Fischler, EU Commissioner for Agriculture, stressed the importance of language in bringing the European Union closer to its citizens. He said: "The European Union wants to offer a common political roof encompassing the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Member States, the foundation being a pluralist democracy. "

Finally,Christophe Leclercq, publisher of EurActiv, explained the portal's approach. Due to its private-sector approach and limited resources, EurActiv employs what he referre d to as a 'pragmatic mulitlingualism'. This includes a focus on three major languages (English, French and German) based on demand and translation into further languages via partners.