GEAB 178

As part of our reflections on the French-speaking world, multilingualism and the future of international languages, we wanted to talk to Sven Franck, a German living in France. He is also co-chair of the French list for the European elections for Volt, a pan-European party. This gives us the opportunity to anticipate the consequences of the closure of three Goethe Institutes in France and the impact of AI on intercultural exchange, particularly in Europe.

The German government has decided to close the Goethe Institutes in France, in Lille, Bordeaux and Strasbourg (!). These are certainly not all of the Goethe Institutes in France, but it is nevertheless a bad sign, in my opinion, for Franco-German cooperation. I myself live in Lille, where the institute was opened over 60 years ago, and 2023 is also the 60th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty, which makes the German decision even more symbolic (not to mention the closure of the institute in Strasbourg, the capital of the European Parliament).

In the Franco-German community, we thought more about what this cooperation could look like in the next 60 years. We didn’t expect the Goethe Institutes to be closed. A few days ago I was invited to a reception in Paris for the German ambassador to France. I was able to ask him about this issue. He replied with two arguments: the first is a financial consideration, the second concerns the programmes and concepts that the institutes convey. From my point of view, if the Goethe-Institutes have a problem with a programme or their concrete activities, closing them down is not the only solution – it is always possible to restructure or modify the mission. So we can conclude that the issue of funding is the main justification for this decision.

In Lille, I’m a member of the Lille-Cologne-Erfurt twinning association. This is also a body for Franco-German cooperation. We organise activities with the association, and we sometimes receive support from the Goethe Institute. This closure, without considering other ways of reinvention, is brutal.

Today, 130 million people speak German as their mother tongue or second language. German is an official procedural language of the European Union, and is also spoken in Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and Liechtenstein[1]. Admittedly, English and Spanish are preferred to German in France today[2], perhaps the difficulty of learning German plays a part in these choices, but thirty years ago the situation was different. If anything, the closure of the Goethe Institute will accelerate a trend that is already underway: not only will there be a drop in the number of students learning German at school (as the graph  below shows), and therefore the disappearance of German from the foreign language panorama (all the more so as even in Germany the language is tending to become increasingly Anglicised[3]), but above all the impoverishment of the German cultural presence, of which the Institutes are the reference showcase and the language the indispensable vehicle.

Figure 1 – Trends in secondary school pupil numbers by first modern language (English, German, Spanish, Italian) in French education establishments. Source: French Ministry of Education

The European motto is “united in diversity”, not just of peoples, but also of languages and cultures[4]. Despite the Brexit, English remains a procedural language of the EU, and one that is largely predominant. The situation is specific to each country, as in Spain, where each autonomous region has its own official language. Obviously, we will never manage to impose a single language for everyone, that’s not the idea. So we need to have one official working language, or even better in the future, we need to have several, with translation as a back-up. Given its geopolitical ambitions, it doesn’t seem shocking to me that the EU should keep English among its languages in order to remain open to the rest of the world and master a global language. However, multilingualism on a European scale responds both to internal challenges (whether political, cultural, social, etc.) and to openness to the rest of the world.

Then we must think about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the coming years. We are already seeing very good results from programmes like DeepL or ChatGPT. I work in free software and I always say that open source is the prerequisite for interoperability. It’s the same with languages: grammar and vocabulary must be open and accessible to everyone. Software that allows perfect real-time translation (simultaneous spoken/written, automatic, instantaneous, etc.) will become more and more effective. So for me, my dream is that in the future everyone will be able to keep their mother tongue in their international exchanges, perhaps learning one or two procedural languages to be able to communicate without the help of technology. But I am convinced that very soon we will have solutions that can translate any language in real time. These tools can help preserve our diversity and therefore our richness[5].

But it is still important to be able to learn and speak several languages, especially as a European citizen, because speaking a foreign language means adopting a new perspective, approaching a new construction of ideas and grasping different sensitivities in the expression of communication. This perspective is only possible if you speak the language in question in order to see things from outside your mother tongue. The more languages we speak, the more we are able to embrace different cultures and ways of thinking. So even if technology replaces translation, it should not replace the need to learn several languages. Within the Volt party, we are directly confronted with these issues: how can we keep a European movement alive with all the different languages, but without the translation resources of the European institutions? At the moment we’re working on a case-by-case basis, with our own translations. We don’t have any digital translation tools at movement level, although we have the ambition to translate all our communications into all EU languages in the short term.

I’m quite optimistic about the progress of AI, I don’t think it will necessarily replace all workers, but it will replace workers who don’t know how to use it. The more we master how it works, the more comfortable we will be with tools that may be new today, and the more they will serve us in the future.

Coming back to our different cultures, I have the feeling that we are moving towards more nationalism, also on the French side. The achievements of 60 years of cooperation between France and Germany must be maintained. This will not be done by closing the Goethe Institutes or by putting more emphasis on the nation instead of cooperation. This involves not just language, but society and culture in general. This openness is absolutely necessary to maintain the links that exist, to strengthen them and also to broaden them. This was one of the proposals we made in our White Paper on the Elysée Treaty[6] for the next 60 years: not to remain fixated on Franco-German cooperation, but to broaden out towards Poland and Hungary, to avoid a rift in the European Union between these countries. Following the example of the Franco-German rapprochement, enlargement to include the Central European Member States (which have reached a second stage in the construction of Europe) is necessary, if only in the long term, in order to better integrate them into the fabric of Europe.

I had hoped for more creativity from these institutions. Closing down what already exists, without even trying to come up with new initiatives and new projects, can only contribute to alienating the peoples of Europe from each other, strengthening nationalism and impoverishing the circulation of what makes Europe rich, energetic and attractive to its citizens and to the rest of the world: its languages and cultures.

Join also the GEAB Community on LinkedIn for more discussions on this topic.

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[1]     Source: Deutschland.de, 04/09/2023

[2]     In secondary education in France in 2019, the foreign language most often chosen as the first language studied is English (96%), compared with 2.8% for German. For the second language studied, Spanish comes first with 72.2%, compared with 16.3% for German. Source: French Ministry of Education

[3]     So much so that German is disappearing in some companies: “In vielen Firmen braucht man ohnehin kein Deutsch mehr” Source: Merkur, 10/02/2023. See also: “Denglisch statt Deutsch – aber why?  Source: DerStandard, 09/10/2023

[4]     The last paragraph of Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union states: “It shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced”. Source Eur-Lex

[5]     “The language of Europe is translation” said Umerto Eco. Source: ICEO, 21/05/2019. In 2010 Franck Biancheri (our GEAB founder) presented a proposal as part of the Science and Innovation Citizens’ Agenda project, “Reto2030”, initiated by the Spanish Presidency of the EU: “Overcoming language barriers in Europe through technology”. Source: AAFB

[6]     “Reinventing the Elysée Treaty” – White Paper January 2023, Volt Europa