Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SllX | Hacker News Reader

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The EU has a 6-month rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

So this is the President of France postulating that when his country takes the Presidency next year, he will use that to push French to be the next working language. I don’t know what the President of the Council of Europe does besides Chair meetings, but apparently it includes setting the language for which the meetings will be held in.

So this isn’t something the EU as a whole has determined will be policy going forward, more like the first guy to drop his pants in a newly opened frontier for dick-waving. If this was something the President of the Council of the European Union could do unilaterally anyway, then my read is that Emmanuel Macron would have pulled this stunt, Brexit or no Brexit, and Brexit is just convenient political cover.

More likely this won’t last more than the 6 months that France has the Presidency, and it will be amusing to see if say, Hungary the next time they have the Presidency insists on high level communications in Hungarian.

> I don’t know what the President of the Council of Europe does besides Chair meetings, but apparently it includes setting the language for which the meetings will be held in.

Please excuse my pedantry, but you've misspoken here: the European Council, the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe are three different things; and here you've accidentally said the third when you meant to speak of the second. The first two are EU institutions–the European Council is senior to the Council of the European Union, in the former EU member states are represented by heads of state or government, in the later they are represented by the ministers responsible for various policy areas (finance, agriculture, trade, transport, education, etc). The Council of Europe, by contrast, is a separate international organisation from the EU, with a much broader membership – it includes the vast majority of European countries; it is most famous for hosting the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), although it is active in other policy areas as well.

And all three have a presidency. The President of the European Council is an individual, currently former Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. He doesn't take orders from the Belgian government, he is truly independent. By contrast, the presidencies of the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe, are held by governments not by individuals. The presidency of the Council of the European Union rotates every six months, it is currently held by Portugal, Slovenia is up next. Likewise, the presidency of the Council of Europe rotates every six months; currently it is held by Hungary.

> Please excuse my pedantry, but you've misspoken here: the European Council, the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe are three different things; and here you've accidentally said the third

Yes, yes I did and I did not catch it, and I’m outside the Edit window as well.

It seems not even I can keep up with Europe’s love of councils.

This comment brightened my morning.

I'd like to add something substantive, but the two parent posts already noted everything I would have.

Just the number of councils with similar sounding names makes the whole EU project sound like satire.

The EU has one of those "ideas" websites where people can post and vote on proposals. (Of course, most proposals are going to go nowhere, but maybe it will put the idea in the head of some bureaucrat somewhere.)

And their idea website already has a proposal posted to rename the European Council and Council of the European, in order to reduce confusion with the Council of Europe: https://futureu.europa.eu/processes/OtherIdeas/f/8/proposals...

Thanks for providing some insight into the inner workings. It’s worrying seeing one of the nominal leaders of a union of over half a billion people succumb to these pressures. Clearly he is intelligent and perceptive enough to understand the consequences.

And besides the long term costs that can be reasoned out, all sorts of emotions, insecurities, etc., will undoubtedly come flying out from many quarters.

I doubt if these sorts of topics can be discussed calmly by anyone invested in the change.

> Clearly he is intelligent and perceptive enough to understand the consequences.

Yes. The consequences are hopefully getting re-elected as a moderate at a time when right-wing populism and nationalistic rhetoric is popular. The next French election is next year.

If this is what it takes to keep Le Pen out then consider ourselves fortunate.

I mean, this language stunt is quite harmless, but you can only appease the rightwing nationalist a certain way, before you become one of them.

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