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Mark Nayler
Malaga
Friday, 30 May 2025, 14:14
This week, the EU's General Affairs Council (GAC) rejected Spain's request to have Catalan, Basque and Galician recognised as the bloc's 25th, 26th and 27th languages. It's a setback for Pedro Sánchez's minority coalition, which is propped up by Catalan and Basque separatists; but the secessionists would be unreasonable to use it as grounds to withdraw their parliamentary support. The Spanish government has campaigned hard for this cause, as well as giving Catalan separatists almost everything else they demanded in exchange for their votes.
The linguistic proposal failed for practical as well as ideological reasons. If Catalan, Basque (also referred to as Euskera) and Galician were made official within the EU, every document contained in Brussels' archives would have to be translated into each language. Typically, translation and interpretation costs are covered in the bloc's seven-year spending plan, the next of which will cover the period from 2028 to 2035 and is due to be approved by the end of this year.
In an attempt to belay the bloc's concerns about the cost of its proposal, the Spanish government made a crazy promise, unprecedented within the EU - to pay for all translation and interpretation expenses itself (a proposal which would never receive parliamentary approval). It's an unkeepable pledge that has only heightened the bloc's concern about the cost of Spain's request.
Finances aside, the GAC's ambivalence about Spain's request might seem to rest on a double standard, especially as regards Catalan. An estimated ten million people speak Catalan in Spain, France, Andorra and Sardinia, compared to, say, the 20,000-40,000 people who speak Irish, which is classified by Unesco as "definitely endangered". Still, the EU happily covered the cost when Irish was made its 24th official language in 2005. It seems only fair to add Catalan to the list. Arguably, Basque and Galician, which have around 700,000 and 2.4 million speakers, respectively, should also be recognised.
This is where the ideological opposition comes in. EU lawmakers are said to be concerned about setting a dangerous precedent - i.e. that if Catalan were enshrined as a language at the EU level, Breton-speakers in France (of whom there are about 107,000), or Russian speakers in the Baltic states (just under a million) would also request linguistic recognition.
But neither of those minorities have campaigned for full independence, as Catalonia has done so noisily over the last decade; nor have Russian speakers in the Baltics ever requested linguistic recognition in Brussels. Within Spain, Galicia doesn't have an independence movement and secessionists in the Basque country are nowhere near as prominent as they once were. Could it be that the EU doesn't want to embolden Catalan separatists - the minority group with an outsized role in Spanish politics, which Sánchez himself once claimed to oppose?
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