Europe. Your Languages.
Germany and its neighbours

On 8. October, the conference series " Europa. Deine Sprachen." started on the topic of multilingual competence, which is at the heart of the vision of a common European education area.

The opening event took place live in the Representation of the EU Commission in Berlin and could be followed digitally at the same time. High-ranking speakers such as Michelle Müntefering and Dr Jörg Wojahn, the representative of the European Commission in Germany, emphasised the richness of European linguistic diversity.

The president of the Goethe-Institut, Prof. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, further emphasised that language is more than a tool for communication. Even if German is not a world language, it is important as a cultural carrier. However, the interest in learning German was not and is not self-sustaining. After 1945, appreciation for German language and culture had to build up slowly.

The Corona pandemic also makes it difficult for cultural institutes such as the Instituto Cervantes or the Institut Français to inspire language learners to take part in courses, as representatives explained. Yet Europe's three-language policy has not yet been implemented in any EU country. This was explained by educationalist Prof. Ingrid Gogolin. Apart from grammar schools, not even 50 per cent of children in Germany learn a second foreign language at school. It is not the length of foreign language instruction that matters - rather, longer stays in the respective country can promote foreign language competence.
 

Read also the articles on Goethe aktuell:
The German Language in Europe

An event of the Europanetzwerk Deutsch of the Goethe-Institut on the occasion of the German EU Council Presidency, in cooperation with the EU Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) and the Representation of the EU Commission in Germany. The Europanetzwerk Deutsch is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.
 

The participants in the first digital discussion clearly identified linguistic diversity as a strength of the European Union and named it as an advantage for every polyglot.

The European motto "United in diversity" reflects that multilingualism is a given in Europe, opening up many possibilities and promoting multi-perspectivity and access to other cultures.

Even if English is and remains the main working language of the European Union, it is a fundamental idea of the EU that a democratic public can also form and communicate far away from a homogeneous language. In this respect, Dr. Andreas Görgen, Head of the Department of Culture and Communication at the Federal Foreign Office, said that thinking outside the nation state is a major cultural task; the EU also promotes regional languages. Pia Ahrenkilde-Hansen, Director General of the DG Communication of the EU Commission contradicted the assumption that multilingualism in the EU is too costly - less than 1% of the budget is spent on multilingualism, which means that on average less than 1€ is spent per EU citizen per year on translation services.

With the basic narrative of Europe as a peace project in the background, according to Johannes Ebert, Secretary General of the Goethe-Institut, it is now a matter of telling many small European stories and thus creating a European public sphere and this with many different measures.

In this context, all participants attach great importance to multilingualism, especially in border regions. The role of multilingual competence in German border regions was then the subject of two further discussion events.

The participants in the discussion were

Dr Andreas Görgen
Head of the Department of Culture and Communication at the Federal Foreign Office
 
Johannes Ebert
Secretary General Goethe-Institut Head Office
 
Pia Ahrenkilde-Hansen
Director General of DG Communication, EU Commission
 
Béatrice Taulègne
Deputy Director, Legislative Affairs, Committee of the Regions
 
Lucie Brézinová
Legal Adviser at the Representation of the Czech Republic to the EU
 
Moderation:
Ralph Sina
Head of the WDR/NDR Radio Studio in Brussels
 

An event of the Europanetzwerk Deutsch of the Goethe-Institut on the occasion of the German EU Council Presidency, in cooperation with the EU Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) and the Representation of the EU Commission in Germany. The Europanetzwerk Deutsch is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.

The following panel, again in the virtual space, was dedicated to the Benelux region, which has a far-reaching tradition of cross-border cooperation. In the Benelux Treaty concluded as early as 1958, the main focus was on an economic union with the possibility of free exchange of goods, labour, services and capital. This European pioneering role of the greater Benelux region was reconfirmed and further developed in the Benelux Treaty of 2008.

According to Martin Kotthaus, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Kingdom of Belgium, this region is "the perfect practical Europe", where people live across borders.

Both Ambassador Kotthaus and Luuk von Middelaar, a Dutch historian, political philosopher and author living in Brussels, as well as Jean Graff, Ambassador of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to Germany, emphasised the richness that multilingual competence brings on a personal, professional and economic level. This is even more important because language transports more than information, it also carries culture, history and emotions. Therefore, a word can evoke completely different connotations in different languages. This is precisely why language knowledge is so important in order to make policy together - in the border and greater region as well as on a pan-European level.

If there is no common language, it makes the formation of a public sphere more difficult. The panellists discussed this using the example of Belgium, where they observed a tendency for the language communities to develop apart from one another, not least because it is primarily the regional radio and press offerings that are perceived.

And multilingualism must also be lived out institutionally: Even if residents of Brussels, for example, wanted to teach their children multilingualism, there was a lack of bilingual schools.

The participants in the discussion were

Martin Kotthaus
Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Kingdom of Belgium
 
Luuk van Middelaar
Historian, political philosopher and author, Dutch in Brussels
 
Jean Graff
Ambassador of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to Germany
 
Moderation:
Kristina Cunningham
Senior Policy Officer for Multilingualism at the European Commission
 

An event of the Europanetzwerk Deutsch of the Goethe-Institut on the occasion of the German EU Council Presidency, in cooperation with the EU Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) and the Representation of the EU Commission in Germany. The Europanetzwerk Deutsch is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.
 

Not only in the Benelux region, as the third events in the conference series " Europa. Deine Sprachen." showed but also within Germany's neighbourhood with France and Poland, multilingual competence play an important role. This was emphasised by the discussion partners at the last edition of " Europa. Deine Sprachen.".
 
Supported by several video messages from Brussels and Poland, they emphasised that it is always people who are behind cross-border cooperation - whether on a political or economic level. "Europe is created through encounters," said Christine Klos, Head of Department at the Saarland Ministry of Finance and Europe. Language competence is the key to successful cooperation. The representatives from Poland, Saarland and Norway gave impressive examples of Germany's close ties with its neighbouring countries: Poland is home to between 13,000 and 14,000 German companies, while Saarland has been anchoring Franco-German bilingualism in its institutions since 2013, for example through its education system.

The tight neighbourly relations do not stop at the front door. The Saarland now operates its representations in Brussels, Paris and Berlin jointly with the Grand Est region, and the ambassador of the Kingdom of Norway to Germany, Petter Ølberg, also told of the Scandinavian countries' joint embassy premises in Berlin. In this way, he said, communities are formed that make former rivalries fade away. At the border between the Saarland and the French region of Grand Est, a common labour market has already been created.
 
It is probably also thanks to Germany's economic strength that many EU citizens are learning German as a second foreign language after English. Ultimately, interest in learning a language also increases with the occasion, as Dr Marek Prawda, Head of the Representation of the EU Commission in Poland, emphasised. Moreover, language competence has numerous advantages - for example, understanding one's neighbour and looking at oneself through his glasses. Prawda went on to emphasise how important German-Polish relations are for the unification of Europe. It was not right to speak of a rift between East and West. Therefore, it would be important to work on eliminating the misunderstanding of mutual incomprehension. In the EU, Poland would also have the role of directing the gaze of the Western states towards Poland's neighbours in the East.
 
With Europe's vision of multilingual competence of all EU citizens, we hope that we will all see through each other's glasses more often and thus consolidate the European narrative of Europe as a peace project.

The participants in the discussion were

Dr Marek Prawda
Head of the Representation of the EU Commission in Poland,
former Polish Permanent Representative to the EU and Polish Ambassador in Berlin
 
Christine Klos
Head of Department Europe,
Interregional Cooperation, France and France Strategy
in the Ministry of Finance and Europe of the Saarland
 
Norway - a Neighbour of the European Union
 
Guest: Petter Ølberg
Ambassador of the Kingdom of Norway to the Federal Republic of Germany
 
Moderation:
Ralph Sina
Head of the WDR/MDR Radio Studio in Brussels
 

An event of the Europanetzwerk Deutsch of the Goethe-Institut on the occasion of the German EU Council Presidency, in cooperation with the EU Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) and the Representation of the EU Commission in Germany. The Europanetzwerk Deutsch is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.