This Tuesday, the General Affairs Council of the EU will once again address the issue of the inclusion of Catalan, Basque and Galician as official languages of the European Union. Or rather, the issue will be on the agenda of the meeting, but more as a formality and procedural move by the Spanish Government, taking advantage of the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU than anything else. No in-depth debate is expected, there will certainly be no vote of any kind and not even the Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, will be present, who did attend in person on the last two occasions to give him a much stronger political profile.
The Government needs to keep the dossier alive, and also the fiction that it may have a short-term impact, as part of the investiture and legislative negotiations with the Catalan independentists. But the community partners have already told him, by good and bad means, that it is not a priority at all, that there are other things much more important and that before a debate at the level of ministers or secretaries can even be thought of of State in the Council, economic and legal reports are needed and a lot of work at the level of ambassadors.
Spain, in its last weeks as presidency of the Council of the EU, has assumed this reality, although it transmits permanent optimism. Until recently, the agenda listed the day as adoption, that is, as if it were almost ready for a formal decision to be made. And that irritated his partners, who let him know that it is one thing to respect the political importance of this issue for the Government, and another to abuse that understanding. “Once again, we are a little surprised to see that it is on the agenda for adoption, although there has not yet been an assessment of the budgetary implications by the Commission and neither have the working groups or the legal service been consulted. So, rather, I would hope that the discussion on the state of affairs will be brief,” a diplomatic source explained on Friday.
Hours later, this Friday, a provisional estimate from the technical services of the European Commission came to light, which estimates the cost of three additional languages at at least 132 million euros, an amount that Spain has in any case committed to paying. assume. The expenditure would actually be higher, but there is no precise estimate, and the Commission’s own report says that it would take “at least six months” to make a calculation, once the Council had made a formal request (something that has not happened) and the scope of such an ambitious decision is much better defined.
All sources consulted indicate that there will be no discussion on Tuesday. It is on the agenda because it is an absolute priority for the Government and because Spain has a rotating presidency. And inclusion, even if only a one-minute statement is read, is procedurally important. In this way, it will be possible to argue starting in January, when Belgium assumes the presidency, which is an issue that has a long history, since it has been formally at the meetings since September.
“The day there are sufficient guarantees for it, we will present it for adoption, but this Tuesday it will be part of the debate because progress has been made,” Minister Albares, present in Brussels for the meeting of his Foreign Affairs colleagues, explained this Monday. Progress, he argues, with the legal services or the first numbers of the Commission. Which makes the proposal “more and more from the EU”, in a riot of positivity that is not shared at all by the majority of his colleagues.
If it had been postponed sine die on the agenda, as logic or experience seemed to dictate, until the working groups make real progress and until there are serious legal opinions, the issue would have been completely diluted. Spain will present some new document, either at the meeting or in the near future, but the arguments are the same as until now. Now there is a partial and provisional estimate, but it is not enough and everyone knows it.
The Government will explain the state of the matter, reiterate why it believes that legally the Spanish case is unique in the entire EU, given the co-official regime of languages in the CCAAA, and why they believe that it would not establish a precedent for other countries. And a little more. No one may even intervene afterwards.
Starting in January, he will have to convince Belgium to keep the matter alive in the hope of overcoming resistance. But it is a process of years, rather than months. “If we take Gaelic as an example, which was simpler because it was already on the list of the Treaties, it took more than two years from when they proposed it until they achieved it, and during that time Ireland was not sitting on its hands. That is the path we are on and we are moving forward,” said Minister Albares. “The proposal of August 17 is increasingly the proposal of the 27 and tomorrow what is going to take place is a debate regarding all this to continue moving forward with guarantees for the day it is included for adoption,” he concluded.