The Diplomat
Queen Letizia presided yesterday in San Sebastian the inauguration of the Annual Meeting of Directors (RAD) of the Instituto Cervantes, during which the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, defended “the consolidation of Spanish as a language of strength and prestige in international diplomacy, in international relations and in the international economy”.
During three days, from December 20 to 22, the more than 70 Cervantes directors will address the strategy for the international promotion of the Spanish language and culture in Spanish, take stock of the 30 years of the Institute’s existence – an anniversary that will be celebrated in 2021 – and analyze issues such as cultural management, the teaching of Spanish and the co-official languages, certification and advances in digitization. The sessions (most of them behind closed doors) will take place almost entirely at the Tabakalera building in San Sebastian.
During the press conference prior to the start of the meeting, José Manuel Albares declared that the celebration of this meeting “reaffirms the cultural vocation of the city of San Sebastian”. “San Sebastian “is the ideal setting” to host the 30th anniversary of the institution because, in addition to being a “city of culture”, it is characterized by “its diversity, with two co-official languages, Basque and Spanish, and the Cervantes Institute is also committed to promoting these languages”.
He also assured that the Government has assumed “the responsibility of optimizing the potential of Spanish, a language that has an international presence”, and, for this reason, “throughout 2022 we are going to establish a strategy that will strengthen the mechanisms for teaching and disseminating Spanish abroad” and its use “as a diplomatic tool in international organizations and to detect how and where to act in the future”. In this task, he added, the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes is “essential” in the “consolidation” of Spanish “as a language of strength and prestige in international diplomacy, in international relations and in the international economy”.
For his part, the director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, recalled that one of the mandates of the Cervantes Institute is to “defend and disseminate the languages and cultures of all the nationalities of Spain” and warned of the need to “remove the language from identity fanaticism and defend the values of understanding and cultural wealth”, assuming “diversity as a wealth” and advocating the “brotherhood” of Spanish languages.
Afterwards, the director of the Instituto Cervantes presented and moderated the panel of directors 30 years of the Instituto Cervantes: evolution and future prospects, where the directors of the Cervantes Institute of Casablanca, Tokyo, New York and Brussels intervened. Queen Letizia was also accompanied at the event by the Secretary of State for Ibero-America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the World, Juan Fernández Trigo; and the Minister of Culture and Language Policy and Spokesperson of the Basque Government, Bingen Zupiria, among other authorities. This is the first time that the annual meeting is held in the Basque Country. The last Directors’ Meeting was held in July 2019, in El Escorial (Madrid). Last year it could not be organized due to the pandemic.
