It was like the ”first day at school”, said a beaming Romano Prodi, surveying the European parliament yesterday as new boys and girls from Lithuania to Slovakia gave a foretaste of the future of the continent.
With just three weeks to go before the EU’s biggest expansion is sanctioned, the parliament’s great chamber in Strasbourg echoed to the excited babble of unfamiliar languages — the sound of Europe in 2004.
Like other EU leaders, the Italian president of the European commission was visibly moved by what someone called a ”dress rehearsal” for political life in a democratic Europe.
”Bring your story and give some new lift and light to our soul,” Pat Cox, the assembly’s Irish president, urged 200 visiting parliamentarians from 12 of the 13 applicant countries. Turkey was unrepresented.
He held up a fragment of barbed wire, snipped from the iron curtain and fastened with a ribbon in the colours of the Hungarian flag.
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta will be fielding candidates for the European elections in June 2004, a month after they join.
With simultaneous translation available in a record 23 languages, the applicant country observers were able to speak their native tongues in the plenary debate. Several used American-accented English — to the annoyance of the French, who are long resigned to having lost their once unassailable linguistic dominance.
The unprecedented scale of the expansion, to be finalised at the Copenhagen summit next month, means the EU will immediately have to adopt nine new official languages, raising the total from 11 to 20.
Malta — population just 400 000 — has helpfully followed the examples of Luxembourg and Ireland in agreeing that its language, a mixture of Arabic and Italian, be used only in treaty texts. Otherwise it will get by in English.
Turkish is already going to be needed for Cyprus’s Turkish community, whether or not Turkey ever manages to join.
The European commission and council of ministers will continue to manage with English, French and German as working languages.
But parliament is a special case, because elected representatives cannot be expected to have the linguistic abilities of professional diplomats and civil servants.
So arrangements are being made for a situation where the increase in possible language combinations — more than 500 — becomes a problem more complex than Rubik’s cube.
It will be solved by the so-called ”relay” system, in which a more obscure language — say Slovene or Estonian — will be rendered into French or English, and then into Danish, German and Spanish etc.
Parliament is also recruiting 200 new interpreters on top of the 250 already employed.
Babel it wasn’t. Everything went well yesterday, though because the Strasbourg chamber has room for only 15 interpretation booths, interpreters for different languages were forced to share space.
”It was a great relief,” said one official.
Cox, known for his occasionally gushing rhetoric, hit the high notes about enlargement, talking of the ”glittering prize which awaits success”.
But Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and current holder of the EU presidency, was more down to earth, warning of tough talks ahead on budget contributions and farm subsidies before the deal could be done at Copenhagen.
Evidence was provided by discordant noises from some of the new intake.
”We want to be full and equal partners in the EU,” insisted Andrzej Lepper, leader of Poland’s populist Self Defence party ”I am warning Brussels, I am warning Strasbourg, there is a danger that a membership on unequal principles could be the beginning of the end of the EU.”
But a majority was clearly excited by the prospect of EU membership. ”We are like before a marriage,” said Lubomir Zaoralek, speaker of the Czech lower house of parliament. ”We feel uncertainty and joy.” – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001