The latest failure to demand official status for Catalan in the European Union leaves us with a list—apparently dynamic and evolving—of member states in favor and against, as well as those who seem to be limiting themselves to expressing doubts, and also a most grotesque episode: the efforts of Feijóo's Popular Party to torpedo this recognition by pressuring several conservative and far-right European heads of government.
Certainly, we don't know too many details, based on the doubts expressed by some foreign ministries. Economically, the Spanish government The Spanish government has already stated that it will cover the cost of implementing the official status of Catalan, Basque, and Galician, estimated at €132 million. Legally, the issue clearly amounts to a simple reform of Regulation No. 1 of April 15, 1958, which establishes the linguistic regime of the European Economic Community (now the EU). In principle, this does not seem to affect the treaties or require their reform. However, among those who have expressed doubts on this matter are Sweden and Germany, and the legal services of the Council of the EU seem to have made some observations in this regard. Therefore, the Spanish government should provide greater clarity on all these points.
Article 1 of the Regulation is key: it establishes that the official and working languages of the Union's institutions are the official languages of the Member States. But the State's plurilingual nature is beyond doubt, both sociolinguistically and legally: six of the 17 autonomous communities have official status regimes that include languages other than Spanish. It's another matter that the Constitution's linguistic model provides that the official status of these languages—which are not even mentioned—is limited to certain territories, where they are native, and where Spanish enjoys equivalent recognition because it is official throughout the State, and even greater if we consider the duty to know it and the monolingualism of these languages. Therefore, as important as, or even more important than, the use of Catalan in the EU is modifying the state framework that penalizes dual official status, whether in the judiciary or the administration, and guaranteeing the presence of the language in general bodies, as is already the case in the Congress of Deputies. But what is relevant for EU purposes is that Spanish domestic law considers all three languages to be official.
Incidentally, it hasn't gone unnoticed that the PP has linked the issue of official status in Europe with what is the mother of all battles: the 25% requirement for Spanish in schools. The Spanish right is aware that the education system is the key to restoring Catalan's survival at a time when its social use is faltering, regardless of whether it wants to seize any victory from Pedro Sánchez and blow up the bridges with Junts by derailing one of their main agreements. But let's not fool ourselves; such an extreme position once again reveals an atavistic misunderstanding of Catalan that stems from a supremacist conception of Spanish. Let's not fool ourselves; there is a Castilian-centric conception of the world and of life so deeply rooted that it has led those who have ruled us for centuries to postpone and even ban Catalan.We will reduce Catalan to an obscure dialogue between peasants"The Falangist ideologue Giménez Caballero sums up this sentiment very well. The same does not apply to the Basques, whom they fundamentally consider angry Castilians, nor to the Galicians, given the institutional minority status of this language and the unequivocal Spanishness of the region.
Given this situation, the best safeguard we Catalan speakers have against the dogma of the inexcusable parity of languages is to fully respect the effects derived from the legal recognition of Catalan's official status and status as a distinct language, such as the preference for its use in public administrations in Catalonia and the maintenance of the positive discrimination inherent in linguistic normalization. But above all, and this is very important, at least in the Principality, two out of three Catalan speakers consider Catalanness to be primarily a linguistic or cultural identity, as a survey by the Platform for Language revealed some time ago. Not a legal or administrative condition. The link between language and collective identity remains strong, contrary to some attempts to relativize social bilingualism with Spanish.
