Eduardo González
The Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU will have its last chance today to include in the agenda of the General Affairs Council (GAC) the debate on the official use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the EU, a commitment of the investiture of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, with the Catalan pro-independence Junts that, according to the European Commission, would involve a cost of 132 million euros.
The Council, which will take place in Brussels, “will discuss Spain’s request to amend Regulation No. 1 of 1958 to include Catalan, Basque and Galician in the EU’s language regime,” according to the EU. Unlike the General Affairs Councils of September and October, which were attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, to defend the co-official languages, on this occasion (with the investiture already won) Spain will be represented by the Secretary of State for the European Union, Pascual Navarro, as sources from the Ministry indicated to The Diplomat.
Bearing in mind that this is the last GAC of the Spanish Presidency, it will also be the last opportunity for the government of Pedro Sánchez to put this matter on the agenda, even though it knows that it will not be put to a vote. On January 1, Spain will hand over the baton to Belgium, a country that has already shown its doubts about the officialization of three new languages without the relevant assessments on their financial impact and without a reflection on how this would affect the functioning of the European Union.
During the press conference he gave yesterday in Brussels at the end of the EU Foreign Affairs Council, Albares affirmed that during this week’s GAC “the provisional conclusions of the report” will be presented and “will again stress an issue that is important for some States, the fact that this cannot be a precedent that can be invoked”, taking into account “the unique specificity of the co-official Spanish languages”.
According to the Minister, “the Spanish proposal is being adapted more and more to the different comments made by the different countries” so that “the Spanish proposal will be adapted so that one day it will be the proposal of the 27”. “We are making progress: the proposal that on September 19 was a Spanish proposal is, increasingly, a proposal of the 27,” he said.
“We have to wait for the reports that the different States are presenting on the financial impact or the material impact, and there is also a dialogue with the legal services to present a proposal that is legally solid and can be inserted within the European linguistic framework,” he continued.
Albares removed iron to the accusations of “fraud” presented yesterday by Junts against the Government for not having achieved a vote in the EU on the co-official languages., “The fact that tomorrow (today) it will not be taken for adoption is a classic form of how the EU works; the important thing is not to take it, and take it, and take it for adoption, the important thing is to take it for adoption and that one day it will be adopted,” he declared.
Preliminary report
At the moment, the preliminary report of the General Secretariat of the European Commission -which is part of the information that the Government of Sánchez will present to its partners in the GAC today and which was picked up this past weekend by the digital newspaper Aquí Europa– has estimated the cost of the officialization of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the community institutions at 132 million euros.
The study is based on the financial estimate made by the European Commission in 2005 for the inclusion of Gaelic in the official language regime in the EU, at the request of Ireland (a measure that was finally implemented in 2007). At that time, €37 million was estimated for each language, but the figure has risen to €44 million (€132 million in the case of three languages) by annual inflation indexation to the present day. However, the Brussels report makes it clear that this is a preliminary estimate and that, once the EU Council formally accepts the proposal, a firm proposal would have to be drawn up, which would take about six months to complete.
On October 24, the GAC followed up on Spain’s request with a commitment to “continue to deal with this matter” pending the Commission’s analysis of the economic implications of the Spanish request, “in cooperation with the other EU institutions”, and the submission of a subsequent “adapted proposal”.
In order to try to move forward with the Government’s initiative and circumvent the rejection of countries such as Latvia and Lithuania (and the doubts of many others), Albares presented that day an “adapted” proposal by which Spain undertook to assume the costs of translation and interpretation of the three languages in the EU (after evaluation of the Commission’s reports) and which established that “the proposed reform is limited exclusively to the case of Spain”, taking into account “the specificity of Spain due to the series of conditions that Catalan, Basque and Galician meet and that make them a unique case in the EU”, and, therefore, that “other languages will not be able to benefit from this reform if the Member State does not wish to do so”.
The following day, Albares admitted that it was not going to be possible to bring the initiative before the investiture debate in Spain, which took place on November 15 and 16 and which resulted in the renewal of Pedro Sánchez as President of the Government. However, he warned, “the Government has complied with the agreement to take this matter to the General Affairs Council”, but “the times of Europe are not the times of national politics”. At the GAC last November 15 (in the midst of the investiture debate), the Spanish Presidency limited itself to “updating the ministers on the situation of the Spanish request”.
