All three Baltic states are firmly placed in the grand tradition of nation states: Wilson's five points, including the right to national self-determination, gave birth to the modern states, along with most of the states in Eastern and Central Europe. There is no onus on the Baltic states to follow foreign dictates, whether from Moscow or Brussels, of mandatory bilingualism. Anyone who thinks they need to simply doesn't understand the idea of national sovereignty.
The point of the language laws in the Baltics is to assimilate the Russian "minorities" here. Pretending otherwise in order to try to win a point in the never-ending propaganda war with Russia is disingenuous.
The Baltics have no other choice than to attempt assimilation. If they don't inculcate some sense of Baltic patriotism among the "native" Russians, they risk having a fifth column of somewhere between 10 and 50 percent of their population, or, at the very least, a large sector of the population potentially rife with dissension. By assimilating - localizing is perhaps the better term - the new Russian populations, the Baltic states are simply following their own best interest, which may or may not pay off in the future at some undetermined junction when the interests of Moscow and the Baltic states cross again.
While it is in the ethnic Balts' national interest to localize the Russians living here, it is also clearly in the local Russians' interest to learn the language of the country they are now living in. The Baltic states will continue to develop their economies on western models, ensuring a greater likelihood of prosperity here than in Russia. To be a part of that process, the Russians understand, they must participate in the societies they find themselves in. Enfranchisement is the key word to the problem of the Russian "minorities" in the Baltics.
But the language laws of the three Baltic states present a real problem, not so much for the local non-native speakers, but for the future social and political development of the three states. Various language commissions now preside over the state of the languages. Boosters of the system point out that France has had much the same thing for some 100 years now, a bulwark against foreign influences in the grand language of reasoned discourse. Those boosters usually fail to point out, for whatever reason, that the French language as it is spoken on the ground in France today can be called McFrench or Franglaise. The young embrace English in a way that would have made de Gaulle not just seek an exit from NATO, but from modern civilization itself. And why does France serve as a positive role model for solving the remaining ethnic tensions in the Baltics, when the French national anthem alludes to driving out those of impure blood from the land?
The real problem with language laws and language commissions and regulation of language in general is that it is a battle lost before it has been waged. Language changes, despite the best intentions of grammarians to pigeon-hole it, to fix its rules and to pin it like a butterfly in a glass case. Language - everyday speech - is the most democratic of all civilization's institutions. The people choose their words off the cuff, on whim almost, and without consulting reference books or codices of law. What the Baltic states are really doing is saying the will of the people must be controlled. And that appears, 10 years after exiting the Soviet Union, strangely like a survival of the internalized self-censorship that grew up as a mode of survival in the years of servitude - or even its further elaboration.
While the trappings of state exist, the spirit is yet burdened, and the struggle against tyranny takes place under the surface, in the subconscious of the three Baltic nation-states. Will the promise of reform and liberation be fulfilled, or will the Baltics continue to languish in a sea of bureaucracy, corruption and group-think conformity? (GeoffreyVasiliauskas is a freelance journalist based in Vilnius).
Please enter your username and password.
2024 © The Baltic Times /Cookies Policy
