From officialdom in Europe to officialdom in Spain
As expected, the European Union's General Affairs Council this Friday failed to approve the official status of Catalan, Galician, and Basque in the European institutions. Everything indicates that the request made by the Spanish government nearly two years ago has entered a hibernation phase. Realistically speaking, in the short term, the only circumstances that could improve the status of Catalan in the institutions are an agreement by the European Parliament's bureau to allow its use in the European Parliament and, above all, the signing of the Association Agreement between Andorra and the EU, which, among other things, would require the translation of a significant number of European laws into Catalan.
At first glance, the Spanish request has stalled because it still lacks unanimous support among Member States; in reality, the underlying problem is the lack of consensus underlying the request in Spain. Without the People's Party's appeals to its European partners, things would likely be different today.
The Basque president, Imanol Pradales, and the Catalan president, Salvador Illa, took the noble initiative to address the member states in support of the official status of Catalan, Galician, and Basque. Neither president believed that their maneuver, which they intended to demonstrate, was a sign of weakness. Seen from Brussels, the question was obvious: if there are six autonomous communities in Spain where Catalan, Galician, and Basque are official, how is it that the letter was signed by only two presidents?
When he declined to join the letter-writing initiative of his Basque and Catalan colleagues, the Galician president, Alfonso Rueda, stated that "the Galician Regional Government is clear that there are much more important decisions for the future of Galician than increasing its administrative use in the European Union." (We can't go into that now, but many of these decisions should be made by the Xunta, precisely.) Once the request for official status from the Union has been blocked, Rueda's reflection could prove instructive. Instead of persevering with the official status of Catalan, Galician, and Basque in the European Union, although it may sound paradoxical, perhaps what is needed now is to ensure their official status in the autonomous communities where they are official.
The Catalan authorities are aware of the problem. One of the nine "horizons" of the National Pact for Language, signed on May 13, is specifically about official status: it aims to achieve "a fully official language." de jure and de facto in public institutions, in businesses, and in services." The Pact's approach, however, has two problems. As in the case of European official status, the Pact provides for measures that do not depend on the Catalan authorities; it is surprising that the Pact aims to "achieve that the general administration of the State assumes the full official status of Catalan" without the Spanish government being one of the signatories, countering the main force opposed to the normalization of official languages other than Spanish, which right now is not the Spanish government but the judiciary.
Since the Constitutional Court's ruling on the 2010 Statute, a line of jurisprudence has been established that interprets dual official status in terms of strict equality and, within this framework, tends to condition or prohibit any imbalance in favor of languages other than Spanish. The most recent case is the Supreme Court ruling that has just confirmed the 2023 ruling of the High Court of Justice of the Basque Country, which declared null and void several articles of Decree 179/2019 on the standardization of the use of official languages in Basque local institutions, upholding the appeal filed by the political party Vox.
In a state governed by the rule of law (in principle), the only way to counter this type of judicial activism is to strengthen the legislative protection of languages. Once official status in the European Union has been shelved, perhaps work should begin on a Spanish language law that would protect, as is often said, the official status of Spanish languages other than Castilian, with the necessary rebalancing that would allow, as the Constitutional Court stated in a landmark ruling, "correct historically inherited imbalances"And all this before the main opposition party takes power in Spain and pushes through its own law to perpetuate the imbalance between the "co-official languages" and the "common official language."
