Esperanto at Thirty-One: The Cost of Neutrality

When the delegates to the Meridian Convention chose Esperanto as the federal language in 1994, they were solving a problem that had defeated older federations: how to give no founding community the advantage of speaking at home while everyone else speaks in translation. The solution was elegant in principle. Every delegate would be equally disadvantaged, or equally advantaged, depending on one's disposition toward the project. The language would be learned, not inherited. Civic life would begin on a shared footing that no predecessor tongue could claim.

The elegance has held, more or less, for thirty-one years. Federal Question Time on Wednesday afternoons is conducted in Esperanto, and the sight of Prime Minister Doric fielding a question submitted in a Nord Europa Slovak dialect — rendered into Esperanto by the live interpreters of the Federal Translation Centre, answered in the same register, and published in all five working languages by the following morning — is, we think, one of the small genuine achievements of this Republic's institutional design. Director Aalto and his staff at the Translation Centre deserve more credit than they customarily receive in these pages.

And yet neutrality has a cost, and we think it is time to name it plainly. The cost falls most heavily on citizens whose regional working language is already a minority language within its own region — the Guaraní-speaking communities of Tierra Verde's interior, the smaller Scandinavian-language minorities of the Nord Europa plateau. For these citizens, the path to federal civic participation requires not one language acquisition but two: first the regional working language of administration, then Esperanto for the federal tier. The founding promise of equal footing is real, but equal footing on a steep hill is still a steep hill.

We raise this not to argue that the Convention's choice was wrong — we believe it was right, and we would make it again — but because a Republic that cannot acknowledge the asymmetries within its own founding principles is a Republic that has confused self-congratulation for self-knowledge. The Federal Cultural Affairs Ministry, under Minister Iwasaki, has a standing mandate to support minority-language communities within the regional tier. That mandate has been funded modestly and administered quietly. The thirty-first anniversary of the Federation seems to us an appropriate occasion to ask whether quietly is enough.

Professor Helena Marin of the University of Meridian observed in a lecture last spring that Esperanto's neutrality is 'a negative virtue — it prevents a particular injustice without creating a positive one.' We find that formulation precise and useful. The Republic should take pride in what the negative virtue has prevented. It should also be honest that prevention is not the same as remedy, and that the communities for whom two language thresholds stand between daily life and federal participation deserve a policy response commensurate with the distance they are asked to travel.