[lg policy] blog: Latvia ’s Referendum on the Russian Language – Missing a Chance for the EU …

[Harold Schiffman]

Latvia’s Referendum on the Russian Language – Missing a Chance for the EU …

Februar 21, 2012

It is regrettable that the Latvians missed these days the chance to
open the EU in a historical sense. They have rejected a referendum
calling for Russian as second state language, parallel to Latvian. The
country has 2,3 million voters, of which about a third say that
Russian is their mother tongue.

EU policy stipulates that every language within a Member State which
is recognised as state language is an Official EU Language – we have
23 up to now. And this is fair, as the EU completely correct says that
all languages in its Member States have the same qualification to be
recognised; as the EU turns to the citizens all e. g. EU Directives
etc. must be understood and have therefore to be translated into all
official languages (other than e.g. the Council of Europe or the UN
which address only states). This costs not very much, only about
2,50-3,00 EUR per EU citizen per year, and it is the price we pay for
our cultural diversity. Once a US citizen laughed about this and asked
me, if the Europeans are crazy to do so – this costs a lot of money,
or forests to make paper, or blocks gigabytes of computer capacity …,
but I just told him that as a European I am proud of having such a
cultural diversity among our Member States. He thought a while and
said: “You are absolutely right”.

There were good reasons for both positions in the Latvian referendum,
to make it short. And even many young Latvians of Russian origin and
now Latvian citizens, the so-called “Eurorussians” who normally speak
fluently Latvian, have voted against Russian as a second official
language in the country. But after all the European Union has missed
the chance – insofar the Latvians had the clue for the whole EU in
their hands – to make Russian an official language of the Union. When
you consider the reasons of the No to the proposed changes, one has to
consider the obvious difficulties to preserve Latvian as a national
language; this is valid also e.g. in Slovenia, Estonia etc. who have
also national languages but are even smaller than Latvia.

If the referendum were accepted, this would have meant that most or
all EU documents, at least the EU Law (primary = treaties, secondary =
regulations, directives, tertiary = EU Court of Justice decisions
etc.),  would have been translated into Russian as well. This would
have opened access to EU Law for millions of Russian, Ukrainian,
Moldovan (although they have also access to Romanian texts) and
Belorussian citizens. Not to mention those from Georgia, Armenia and
Azerbaijan, or from the five Central Asian republics. With that, an
un-outspoken grassroots movement could have been made possible, which
spontaneously could have worked with these texts. This again would
have contributed to an objectivation of realistic alternatives of
policymaking, to spotchecks of the existing systems, and maybe to the
European dreams of some people within some of the countries mentioned.

If it would have been possible (what I do not know, at present), the
Latvian government  could and should have introduced Russian as second
state language without a referendum -because it interests many more
and outside of Latvia than a third of the Latvians. And this with even
coincident reasons to many of those who were against the referendum
question! Just a government decree or a simple law would have been
sufficient, securing the access to Russian texts from the EU. It would
have been possible how to finance this, without doubt.

After all, the EU has missed a chance, which was a matter of Latvia
only; the EU is not to blame for this, and we should not blame the
Latvians either. Except that some proactive creativity from the
European External Action Service (European diplomatic service) may
have been requested, to enter in talks with the Latvian government and
the Russian associations which promoted this referendum, at the
beginning of the talks about the referendum. This should have been
“sniffed” by the Latvian delegation, if not from its Brussels
headquarters. Instead of this, alas, the Europeans are now victims of
provincialism and non-creativity. Not a masterpiece of policymaking!

Gespeichert unter Blog of Hans-Juergen Zahorka

http://libertasblogs.wordpress.com/tag/eu-language-policy/

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