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Lecture of the President of the Republic at the University of Helsinki, October 21, 1999
21.10.1999

Will the small endure?


Dear Mr. Rector,
Dear academic colleagues!

A friend of mine suggested I should give my presentation in Estonian. He proceeded from the lecture's title, which in full length sounds: ''Do small languages and cultures have a chance of survival in Europe?'' This friend of mine believed that my preference of English would in itself be a negative answer to the question thus posed. Myself, I am convinced of the opposite, and to prove this I chose the language of 95% of the world's literature on electronics and organic chemistry. I am convinced that the reason why electronics and chemistry are going to endure is not contained barely in the fact that the research results are mostly published in English. I am equally convinced that the chances of survival of the small languages and small cultures do not depend on whether or not the formulae of electronics or organic chemistry or astronomy are presented in Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Czech, Slovenian, or Basque. Yet every civilised language should be able to describe the changes in the world around us. The question of questions that we are here to discuss is much simpler and much more fatal: will democracy in Europe endure, if the people are speaking in one way, and the political leadership in a different one, and the gap between the two usages shows a tendency to increase, which might lead to a Euro-Sanskrit? Thus, today's subject covers, besides the temporal and geographical dimension, also the dimension of politics. Already before World War II, a well-known English poet wrote a poem to which he added: to be read in the BBC pronounciation. And at nights, when I reply to the e-mail sent to my homepage, mostly in Estonian and in English, I often find myself asking the question: how would the voice of my unknown correspondent sound? Would I understand him? Would he? This doubt in itself is an answer to the questions derived from language imperialism, to which small nations are more sensitive than others.

Speaking of the small languages of Europe, I have to explain in a few words my understanding of Europe. Europe is called a continent. Actually, it is a small peninsula of the Eurasian continent, poor in natural resources, and its geographical comparison with Asia, Africa, or America is mostly due to historical, economic and cultural reasons. The Europeans themselves think that Europe is situated in the Temperate Zone. There is a moving contradiction here, because for the survival of the population, more energy is needed in Europe than in the subtropics, the cradle of humanity. In my opinion, Europe's most important characteristic is its amazingly jagged coastline, the numerous bays, gulfs, straits, peninsulas and islands, and the balance - so rare in the world - between seclusion and contact, isolation and communication. The Estonians, for instance, seldom realise that they are living on a peninsula, surrounded by water from three sides - sometimes a protector, sometimes a link to the world, and yet this is the key to the whole Estonian history. On a broader plane, the immense length of Europe's coastline, when compared to the comparatively small area of the background, is in my opinion the crucial reason why an amazing number of different languages and cultures, and today, also states, have emerged and managed to live side by side on such a small area. These are old truths, and this is why they must be repeated time and again. Speaking from this university rostrum, I dare say that the efficiency of any laboratory, any chair depends on the diversity of attitudes - on the condition that this diversity of attitudes is directed towards the common goal. (Of course, I am not disclosing neither the meaning of efficiency nor that of a common goal.) In academic world, this is called a school of thought. Probably, this could also be said of Europe on whole - the diversity of languages, and thus also cultures, is the synergetic factor that has made our continent, though poor of natural resources, the global locomotive of European culture.

This makes us pause and consider for a moment the general character of our culture, something that we could perhaps call the idea of Europe. What is the force, the principle that has driven this relatively small part of the world, to create a civilisation that has by now come to influence even the most remote corners of the world both with its technological achievements and its philosophical ideas, its culture? I think this principle is best defined as unity in diversity, or diversity in unity.

In order to speak about the future we sometimes have to begin with thinking about the past. And if we look at the long history of European civilisation, two cultural settings immediately come to mind as the times and places of unusual cultural dynamism and activity, rich in new ideas and developments - in short, cultural moments in which the ground for the subsequent development of Europe was laid down. These are ancient Greece and the Italy of times of Renaissance.

We couldn't say that either of these times was particularly noteworthy for political stability. Rather the opposite: in both these settings there were inner conflicts, and intrinsically different political systems were simultaneously in use, although the cultural environment was in both cases homogeneous in the sense that the same language was spoken throughout the area in question and people could move relatively easily. A poet turned down by the Sforzas of Milan could go to the educated bankers of Florence for support. In such situations, political diversity existed under the umbrella of a general cultural unity. And also in both places those centres grew and prospered that had more respect for diversity and free thought. Even for intellectuals critical of democracy, Athens was a better place to live than Sparta, because in Athens their voice was listened to. And Italian national consciousness emerged out of the city-republics plagued by inner political struggles, but not by dreams of the well-ordered powers inclining toward centralisation.

But even in the times sometimes called the Dark Middle Ages the principle of Europe was still there. In the East Roman Empire the rulers at Constantinople commanded both the supreme political and spiritual authority and the most meticulously compiled collections of Byzantine laws were conceptually invalidated by the presupposition that the will of the Emperor superseded any law. In the West, as you well know, the tension between the secular and spiritual power was the source of intrigue and conflict that, on the one hand, anathematised emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire as well as the English king John Lackland, and on the other hand led the popes of Rome to captivity at Avignon. As we remember, the inheritors of the stable, but unproductive Byzantine system created a political order with only one party that controlled all the arms of power, whereas the diversity of Europe gave birth to the culture of political pluralism that is now considered the civilised norm. Politics is not a professional language, like that of doctors and pharmacists. Politics must be the most understandable language in every society, and reach the consciousness of every citizen. Neglecting this truth would mean turning our back to democracy and creation of the caste of politicians, which would be contradictory to the phenomenon of Europe. There is nothing more horrifying than reading the minutes the meetings of the Soviet political bureau in the Kremlin - the secret language consisting of meaningless words, and sometimes signifying a death sentence - and in the long run, the death sentence to the political bureau itself.

But if we compare our Europe to the cultural unity and political diversity of ancient Greece or the Italy of the Renaissance, we find that the configuration of unity and diversity has, for our times, been reversed. At present, all of those who share the European identity also share a certain standard of political culture, a discourse on social norms into which the traditional institutions, such as monarchies, have been integrated. The diversity of political institutions does not affect the general way they think and operate, not does it represent a split in the basic social values we all share. The real diversity is elsewhere: in the cultural heritages, in the languages, traditions and (folk) arts of all European nations. This diversity is able to generate a cultural dynamism in the framework of political unity.

Sometimes it even seems as if this diversity does not matter any more - or even that it has become a nuisance, a troublesome relic of the past that should fade in the course of modernisation and unification. But diversity is not rational. And if we consider the historical development to be an ever-ongoing process of unconditional rationalisation, we should certainly find no fault with the advance of uniform and level standards in cultural matters as well, leaving them at the mercy of global market mechanisms. Even now English has almost acquired the status of contemporary Latin in academic writing, and our age knows tens of Joseph Conrads who abandon their native tongue to turn to a more widely spread medium for self-expression, although usually they fail to reach the level of their Polish predecessor.

However, we can already see what that has brought about. Quite often one hears or reads an English text that has clearly been written by someone thinking in another language using English words, which has nothing common with English except vocabulary. The differences between variants of broken English may well exceed the differences between two closely related languages such as Finnish and Estonian. If we add the trouble caused by accents and peculiarities of pronunciation, the illusion of a single means of communication vanishes altogether. The word ''pidgin'' that designates such languages is well known, but it is sometimes forgotten where it comes from: this is how the Chinese to whom basic English was taught pronounced the word ''business'' - thus ''Pidgin English'' originally means ''Business English''. Even such an artificially constructed and, so to say, wholly rational language as Esperanto varies considerably from country to country. These variations increase when the content of the text becomes more complicated. That is only to be expected - one cannot encapsulate the workings of the human mind in a totally rationalised system. And whenever the human mind is able to work freely, diversity asserts itself.

Cultural diversity is enriching. In this sense it is very interesting to consider the linguistic politics of the Soviet Union between the two world wars, and the story of constructing literary languages for a vast number of national minorities on the territory of Russia, our Finno-Ugric relatives among them. It goes without saying that the majority of scientists involved in this project were honestly concerned with the languages and cultures, and also convinced that the cultural changes a new literary language would bring with it would be beneficial for the small peoples. On the other hand, even a cursory look at the dictionaries reveals the other side of the project: when the language-builders could not find a suitable indigenous word to express a required political reality, such as the ''city executive committee'', they turned to Russian and coined a new word gorispolkom for some language in Siberia whose speakers had generally no idea what a city, let alone a committee, actually was.

Thus these people had to take over much more Russian characteristics than they would have liked. They had to learn a multitude of new words and expressions, and models of thought that came with them. And, instead of strengthening their own cultural identity, they gradually acquired a new one in the process - one that did not historically contribute to diversity at all, but led to the way of pragmatic assimilation.

World history could mislead us to the conclusion that large size is the inevitable precondition of success. The British Empire, or the Russian Empire - whether Tsarist or Communist are considered here. And erroneously sometimes the success of the United States. Erroneously, because the technology of the United States is considered apart from this country's internal diversity, which extends to the unicameral parliament of Nebraska which is an exception from the bicameral system of the rest, or the civil law system in Louisiana, bearer of the French cultural tradition, although generally the United States of America are considered to be the cornerstone of common law. What do languages have to do with all this, you are justified to ask. And yet we may presume that the co-existence of different legal systems in the same country is much more complicated than co-existence of different languages on the same continent. Also on the European Union accession negotiations, the main problems are of legal nature. Hence the conclusion: a union, a federation, or a confederation in itself does not pose a threat to languages and cultures. Our languages and cultures are endangered by the imperialism of the empires. So far, the languages and cultures have come out as winners of these confrontations - the empires have fallen sooner or later, and not because of external pressures, but due to the moral and physical degradation of the ruling nations. Of course, this is no compensation for the small nations lost forever, but it could be seen as a warning - continuous expansion at the expense of suppression of others in the end destroys the expanding power itself. And yet being suppressed has not always meant the cultural degradation of the suppressed - Irish and Jewish culture give ample proof of this, and the exile cultures of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania can be added to the list.

If a language becomes the language of international communication - or, as the Soviet jargon had it, the language of communication between brotherly peoples - this poses a threat to this very language itself. The Latin spoken in Colonia Agrippina on the eve of the fall of Rome would have driven Cicero to despair. Many Estonian men still share the experience of very different Russian languages: the language spoken in the multinational Soviet army would have put its speaker into at least an embarrassing situation if uttered in a more educated company. It is a paradox that as Russian became the language of the empire, part of Turgenev's and Tolstoy's Russian was lost. Hence, we come to another important conclusion: small languages do have a future, indeed, in a sense, it is the imperial languages that do not have a future, having become international and acquired new and different dialectical qualities in Siberia and Burma, in Kazakhstan and Morocco.

In the pre-imperial era, different languages and dialects of Europe peacefully existed side by side. The example need not be sought far - in Tallinn, Low German, Swedish, and Finnish were spoken, and to cope in this society, one had to know several languages. Russian, indeed, had been imported by the empire for this beginning of the century, if we do not consider the communities of the Old Believers on the bank of Lake Peipsi, who have found religious refuge in Estonia for three centuries and not been Estonianised. The Old Believers are the only ancient cultural minority in Estonia, which has survived the Soviet occupation and lasts today.

The Europe consisting of uninational and unilingual states is the product of the 20th century: it had its beginning in the post-World-War-I nationalism, in the violent assimilation policies of the Communist and the Nazi empires, which began with the liquidation of Ukrainian farmers and culminated with millions of people perished in World War II. It ended with the winning empire's compromise with the rest of Europe, which resulted in forcibly drawn borders, and the creating of the ''Soviet people'' between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea by means of destroying national cultures.

What is going to be the future of the European nations and cultures? Europe's future unity does not mean a common language or a common culture. Such fears are spread by the so-called Euro-sceptics, who are convinced that the union is based on the idea that only the expansive and suppressive empires are successful and capable of development, and that any other kind of unions would be undermined by internal squabbles. And yet this is certainly not the case: in history, we have seen colonial empires fall, and the fall was a brought about by the constant need for expansion and by the assimilated spiritual values and stagnant economy. And the European Union is an example of exactly the opposite. Europe's strength must be in Europe's diversity, and not in a conflict-ridden, but mutually considerate and complementary. The European unity is not an expansive, lingual or religious unity, but a mutually complementary integrity, whose success is guaranteed by the synergy of diversities and which is based on the twenty centuries old principles of private law guaranteeing everybody's rights, as well as the just as old principles of Western Christianity that also ensure the rights of an individual.

I do not believe that the creation of a united, and ever more perfect Europe would mean the end of history and peaceful leisure in the material security of languages and cultures. The problems of languages, both big and small, will completely alter their face. Here, I see the appearance of several ''languages'' within one language as one possible problem. The technological development and globalisation of society has resulted in more and more narrow specialisation. At the same time, the attempt to reach the top in any very specific profession presumes the absorption of greater and greater amounts of strictly specific professional information. Such information consists of denominations, expressions and sentences often understandable only to the professionals. This would not be a problem if the professional language would remain the means of communication for specialists, with the sole purpose to enable the quick exchange of professional information. And yet lately in Estonia, and elsewhere in the world, another tendency is noticeable - the jargon of one or another profession is being forced on the whole society, as the only right and way of self-expression. I mean the language of laws.

The legal acts, that are the normative basis of every society, must be understandable to all members of the society. And yet more often than not this is not the case. Even for educated people, it is a trying enterprise to attempt the comprehension of legal texts. There are times when a local or state official draws up a document in a correct and clear language, which it is impossible to implement, as the law has not been cited correctly.

We have achieved the freedom to preserve and develop our language and culture. And yet this freedom does not mean freedom of the obligation to do so. The threat to the future of our languages and cultures more and more proceeds from our own indolence - the professional jargon fulfilling our days and entertainment language clogging our evenings could lead us to a situation where most of the language users are unable to understand laws or read fiction, to say nothing of philosophy, or to exchange thoughts on the most trivial subjects with a specialist of another profession. Information society may - due to the narrow specification and vulgarisation of language - become a society where information moves fast, but does neither carry nor kindle ideas. This would give another opportunity to totalitarianism.

Thus, Voltaire's call ''écrazes l'infame!'' is still valid. Computer language and phrases from TV commercials penetrate our languages now similarly as Soviet newspeak was inserted into the small languages of Siberia. It sometimes seems that the more technologised our world becomes, the less capable are our languages to speak about it. The same applies to phenomena produced by mass market mechanisms, of course. Our own cultural industries are constantly plagued by the small size of their market, for instance, the publishing of serious literature can never become a profitable business in the countries of Estonia's size. It might quite justifiably be asked, thus, whether our languages are in fact too small to survive in the present world order.

But if we think back to the beginnings of European literary languages, we inevitably have to conclude that all the great languages of today were actually small languages once. The small dialect of Tuscany was transformed into the literary languages of Italy by the great works of Dante and Petrarca, and when Joachim du Bellay published his ''Defence and Glorification of the French Language'' in 1549, he used extensively a dialogue by Sperone Speroni that glorified Italian, just substituting the words ''the French language'' for ''the Tuscanian language'' in long passages. Nevertheless his manifest was enthusiastically received, because it reflected a certain level of self-consciousness that the French culture had achieved at the time.

I am convinced that this kind of self-consciousness is that in the long run determines the fate of a culture or a language. If we now ask whether our small languages could have a future, the answer is actually not complicated at all. Our languages will have a future only if we, their speakers, want them to have it. In 1988, when 300 000 Estonians gathered on the Song Festival Grounds in Tallinn to demonstrate against the system, the future of our language was one of the most important issues at stake, and it would be somehow inconceivable to suppose that things have radically changed in between.

At the Eastern border of European cultural space, at the frequently pillaged crossroads where our home stands, we cannot really conceive of our independence otherwise than as a cultural and not only political notion. But we feel that the preservation of our language and culture is our duty not only to our grandchildren, but also to our European neighbours. It is our contribution to Europe's dynamic diversity, without which Europe would not be Europe.

 

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