Gabriel von Toggenburg reports on the dilemmas facing the development of the European Union as it embraces linguistic plurality in his article, “Europe’s Linguistic Plurality: Gem or Stumbling Stone?”

The toll on the EU pocketbook is heavy: according to von Toggenburg, it takes roughly 800 million euros a year to pay for the amount of translation and interpretation the law currently requires for the benefit of European citizens.

It’s not so much due to the vanity of member nations, von Toggenburg reasons, so much as it is the result of Community law, which dictates that “national parliaments cannot position themselves between their citizens and Brussels as ‘official translators’ of the law.” And the reality behind the “equality” accorded to so many “official” languages in the European Union is that the minority languages wind up “mostly ignored,” possibly due to the relatively low frequency with which they are used in official circumstances. After all, Von Toggenburg notes, “there is no constitutional principle governing the strict equality of the official languages.”

He points out that while English has become the primary transitional language within Europe, the European Union never intended to become a monolingual entity. As a result, the new European Action Plan for Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity has been launched with the objective that European citizens speak “as many languages as possible, at the very least two languages in addition to their mother tongue.”

As to the question posed by the German Constitutional Court ten years ago, regarding whether democracy is possible without a “shared open space” and a single “European discourse,” von Toggenburg refers to the working examples of India and Switzerland.

Does European democracy need a European language? The answer is no. How else would the democracies of India or Switzerland be possible? What is lacking is a European press which deals with European issues for a European readership and audience. Multilingual initiatives such as café babel are what is called for, and not just in the name of linguistic plurality, but for the love of Europe.

Fiona Wollensack translated von Toggenburg’s article from the German.