President Jacques Chirac’s extraordinary walkout from the EU summit because another Frenchman chose to address the meeting in English is a lot more than fuel for predictably snide jibes from France’s detractors, particularly the British. It is in fact emblematic of the deep problems underpinning the European Union’s future, problems which make frankly laughable the EU’s declared aim of turning itself into the world’s most efficient trading bloc by 2010.
Chirac, who stormed out of the meeting along with his foreign and finance minister was confusing the medium with the message. Most fellow European leaders would say that it is not important what language is spoken; what matters is what is said. The EU spends close on $1 billion a year on translation, both simultaneous during meetings and on different language versions of its hundreds of thousands of documents and communication. Though it now has 25 members, the EU only has 11 official languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Dutch, Finnish, Danish and Swedish. The French, who with the Germans were the original driving force for the EU, have regularly spoken of the diversity of the Union. Indeed French politicians endorsing their president’s summit stunt defended him by saying that the French language represented just that all-important diversity. This argument however contradicts itself because it is equally diverse for one European to address others in a different language, one perhaps that is more readily understood than his own.
To Chirac’s deep embarrassment, the French voters last year followed the Dutch in rejecting the new EU Constitution, thus scuttling the initiative for now. The “No” vote was driven in part over the much-publicized idea of those “Polish plumbers” flooding the French job market, but also over concern for the national homogenization implicit in the document. In the aftermath, Chirac huffed and puffed about France’s sudden inability to influence the direction in which Europe was heading. Now it is clear what he meant. His and previous governments have always been committed Europeans as long as the Union was being formed along the French “Etatist” model. And with the advent of new East European members like Hungary and Poland committed to free-market economics while escaping state-oriented social models that crushed innovation and capital, French-style chauvinism has been compromised. A country that on the grounds of strategic interest wants to protect its businesses, even its yoghurt production, from foreign ownership, is not a convincing member of a trading bloc that wants to be the world’s most competitive in four years time.
It is clear that the massive contradictions between the free-market and protectionist instincts within the EU need to be resolved before economic coherence can emerge. In the past people have spoken of a two-speed Europe in relation to the membership of the eurozone. Now the twin speed approach looks more relevant to free market and protectionist policies. But either way, at the moment the Union does not look at all unified.
