The galling rise of English

Date: 01/03/03

The European Union is becoming an English-speaking zone

FROM his desk at the European Commission's office in Warsaw, Bruno Dethomas has been gloomily monitoring the decline of his native French within the European Union. “When I left Brussels in 1995,” he remarks (in perfect English), “70% of the documents crossing my desk were written in French. Nowadays 70% are in English.” In Brussels Mr Dethomas was chief spokesman for Jacques Delors, the powerful and charismatic French head of the European Commission who stepped down in 1995. Until that year the sole working language in the commission's press room was French, but it was already clear which way the wind was blowing. “Quite often,” says Mr Dethomas, “I would give the official briefing in French, and then I would have to give a second briefing in my office in English.”

The rise of English as the EU's dominant working language was given a decisive push by the Union's last expansion, in 1995, when Austria, Finland and Sweden joined the club. Officials from all three countries, especially the two Nordic ones, are much more likely to be fluent in English than French. The Union's public voice is increasingly anglophone. For a brief period earlier this year the spokesmen for all three major institutions in Brussels - the commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers - were British. Jonathan Faull, the commission's chief spokesman, will be replaced this month by Reijo Kemppinen, a Finn. But for French-speakers the change is a double-edged sword. The good news for them is that this high-profile job will no longer be held by a Briton; the bad news is that Mr Faull's French is rather better than Mr Kemppinen's.

The fact that the key EU institutions have bases in francophone cities - Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg - means that lots of French will continue to be spoken in the EU's corridors and meeting rooms. But the grip of English will tighten still more next year, when the Union will take in ten more countries, mainly from central Europe. The commission is planning to recruit over 3,000 Eurocrats from the former communist block. The best guess is that some 60% of them will speak English as their second language; for only 20% or so will it be French.

The shift towards English within EU institutions reflects what is happening in the wider world. A recent study by the EU's statistical arm showed that over 92% of secondary-school students in the EU's non-English-speaking countries are studying English, compared with 33% learning French and 13% studying German. Despite recent avowals of undying Franco-German friendship made by the two countries' governments, fewer and fewer French and German children are learning each other's languages. The trend is the same in the countries about to join the EU. The only place where more secondary-school students are studying French than English is Romania, though German runs English close in several central European countries. English is also increasingly Europe's language of business.

But the rise of English within EU institutions particularly alarms the French elite because for many years the Brussels bureaucracy has been a home-from-home, designed along French administrative lines, often dominated by high-powered French officials working in French. Moreover, the emergence of English as the EU's main language gives an advantage to native English-speaking Eurocrats. As Mr Dethomas notes: “It's just much easier to excel in your own language.”

Some French officials argue that there are wider intellectual implications that threaten the whole European enterprise. In a speech at a conference in Brussels on the French language and EU enlargement, Pierre Defraigne, a senior official at the commission, argued that “it's not so much a single language that I fear but the single way of thinking that it brings with it.” When French was Europe's dominant language in the 18th century, French ideas were the intellectual currency of Europe. Voltaire was lionised at the Prussian court; Diderot was feted by Russia's Catherine the Great. These days, however, ambitious young Europeans need to perfect their English and so tend to polish off their education in Britain or the United States, where they are exposed to Anglo-Saxon ideas. For a country like France, with its own distinct intellectual traditions in economics, philosophy and law, such a trend is understandably galling. The commission's Mr Defraigne worries aloud whether “it is possible to speak English without thinking American.”

Tongue-tied

The desire to protect and promote its language is a thread that runs through France's policy in the Union. For instance, longstanding efforts to develop a common EU patent-law have been stymied because France cannot accept English as the sole language for patents; and if French is made valid for EU patents, then the Germans, Italians and Spanish insist that their tongues should also be included. France has also consistently fought to prevent the EU gaining control of trade policy relating to “cultural industries”, lest this impede efforts to protect French-language films and music. And the French government has keenly championed Romania as a candidate to join the Union because the French consider that country, however bizarrely, to be part of “la Francophonie”. One reason why Jacques Chirac, France's president, recently singled out Bulgaria and Romania for particularly biting criticism of their pro-American foreign policies may have been irritation that, despite those assiduously nurtured cultural links, the Romanians have not proved reliably francophile after all.

The more realistic French officials acknowledge that however much cash and energy are put into the promotion of French within the Union and elsewhere, it is a losing battle. “This is a real trauma for France,” says Mr Dethomas. “Our only revenge is that the English language is being killed by all these foreigners speaking it so badly.”

Major feature on the rise of the English language within the EU Institutions and elsewhere in Europe.

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