History of European Ideas, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 201-213, 1991 0191-6599/91 $3.00+0.00 Printed in Great Britain © 1991 Pergamon Press plc EUROPE'S BABYLON: TOWARDS A SINGLE EUROPEAN LANGUAGE? MARK FET/'ES* My conclusion is that the problem of a language for international communication presents itself as the conflict between a planned language, Esperanto, which is known to function to the satisfaction of its users, and a hegemonic national language, which, as we all know, is, today, English. Andr6 Martinet (1989) There may be readers of this essay who, on encountering the above statement, have already raised a surprised or sceptical eyebrow. To set Esperanto, associated in most people's minds with a woolly and basically unsuccessful utopianism rather than with everyday reality, on the same conceptual level as the leviathan of World English may seem to be carrying the debate beyond the bounds of relevancy. Indeed the mainstream of European linguistic discourse during the past century has taken exactly this position. I shall try to show in this essay why this is so, how the relevant factors may be changing, and that the two poles of the debate identified by Martinet in fact give a very fruitful perspective into the problems of second-language communication. Although Martinet may have had in mind a world rather than a European context when he made the above statement, the debate is essentially the same: What is the role of rationalism in human affairs, more particularly with regard to the political, cultural and psychological dimensions of language? These are vast issues; we shall here be limited to sketching the field of battle which separates Esperanto's David from English's Goliath, and gathering a few useful shards from the missiles that the two combatants hurl overhead. It may be useful to start by reminding ourselves of the reality of the language problem in Europe. Like many aspects of its inheritance from pre-history, Europe's Babylon often escapes critical attention: we rarely stop to confront much-parroted assumptions of continuity in European thought and culture with realities 'on the ground'. According to the prevailing myth, intellectual exchange has for centuries presented few problems for individuals working in the mainstream of European thought; but who can say what potential connections, what leaps of kindred spirit have been obscured by the tangle of European tongues? Today this is no longer a problem for a small, relatively polyglot elite. More people than ever before, with the development of scientific and cultural cooperation, trade and travel, are being brought face to face without being able to talk to one another. A recent survey concluded that 'truly correct comprehension of the English language [in Western Europe]... falls noticeably *Centre for Research and Documentation on the World Language Problem, Nieuwe Binnenweg 176, NL-3015 BJ Rotterdam, Netherlands. 201