The idea of Francophonie as a cultural community of people and institutions using the French language was born quite a long time ago. This term was supposedly invented in the 1880s by Onesime Reclus. But the term entered the journalistic lexicon only in the sixties of the last century. It was then that it found its place in the dictionaries of the French language. A great promoter of the idea of francophonie, also in the institutional dimension, i.e. written with capital F, was Leopold Sedar Senghor, the father of Senegal’s independence. He was strongly supported by the President of Tunisia, Burgiba, and the King of Cambodia, Sihanouk. For Senghor, French was the platform for creating the spirit of a new humanism that was to be threatened by technological progress. And the French language as the language of great literature, philosophy and diplomacy was to be a vehicle for the promotion of new Enlightenment values. It is interpreted in less hymnic and more down-to-earth terms that the formation of Francophonie in the name of a common language and culture was motivated by the rapid spread of the English language and its globalization due to American mass culture, and the displacement of French as the main language of international politics and diplomacy.
Institutional cooperation in the form of the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation was established in 1970. It consistently evolved into a full-fledged political intergovernmental organization. It has been operating under its present name as the International Organization of Francophonie since 2005.
The organization has gradually expanded its institutional structures. Francophonie summits have been convened regularly since 1985, and they are indeed of the highest setting. Every year the ministers responsible for Francophonie meet. There is a permanent council and a permanent secretariat. Francophonie has a strong parliamentary and non-governmental dimension, as well as specialized agencies (university network, television network, the association of mayors and the Senghor University of Alexandria). Since 1997, Francophonie has the post of a secretary general. The first was Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The French were said to have offered him the position as a consolation after the failed attempt to reelect Boutros-Ghali as UN Secretary General.
Boutros-Ghali pushed for the extension of his tenure in New York like a tank. However, he encountered an insurmountable barrier: the opposition from the United States. The discussions on the appointment of the Secretary General entered a decisive phase at the turn of November and December 1996. Poland was at that time a member of the Security Council, and I led a small team at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was to support our mission in New York with instructions and materials. I spent also a few weeks in New York. Thanks to the kindness of the top management of the Permanent Mission (big bow to the minister, and later the Polish ambassador in London and the Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, recently deceased Zbigniew Matuszewski, who carried the burden of servicing our membership on his shoulders), I was able to participate in informal consultations of the Council. The ones concerning the election of the Secretary General were carried out in a very small group, without the participation of the Secretariat staff and with only two accompanying persons for each delegation. And it was in such a group that Madeleine Albright, who represented the United States in the organization, was forced to block Boutros’ candidacy so explicitly and in such “non-parliamentary” (“non-diplomatic”) way that it could leave no one under any illusions. Polish diplomats could say that they saw how brutal the cuisine of great politics looked. The Americans pushed Kofi Annan to the post, and the French nominated their diplomat as Assistant Secretary General for peacekeeping operations.
About 300 million people speak French worldwide. The number of Francophonie members grew from 21 to almost 90 (observers included). Even countries that neither use French in administration, nor have a francophone ethnic identity or a francophone colonial past have been admitted to the ranks of the Francophonie, such as Romania and Bulgaria. The observer is Poland and even Estonia, where communicating in French is really very difficult. But the ease of joining a club under the aegis of France lures many. Algeria, which is one of the most populous francophone countries, does not belong to the Francophonie. Wounds from its relationship with France, apparently, have not yet healed. Israel cannot get permission to observe deliberations (although three Israeli universities participate in the Francophonie university agency). Of course, the door to Israel was closed for the most political reasons, that is, as a result of the blackmail of the Arab states. And Saudi Arabia itself withdrew its observation application after the 2018 Kashoggi murder scandal. Its observation status would have issued the worst possible testimony to the criteria required from an observer. Thus, the policy influences the functioning of the Organization. Certainly the Francophonie is the least linguistically hermetic global organization with cultural roots.
Francophonie has tasks that go beyond the sphere of culture and language, education and science. One of its missions is to promote democracy and human rights. Another is promoting sustainable development and solidarity. In the name of democratic values, the membership of Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, and the observer status of Thailand (after the military coup in 2014) were exemplarily suspended. The organization adopts documents for the consolidation of human and democratic values. For example, at the 2018 summit in Yerevan, a document on equal rights between women and men was agreed. But overall, membership in the Francophonie has no greater influence on the practices of some countries.
Francophonie was supposed to hold back the English language in the world. It did not record any major successes, although some francophone countries, such as France or Canada, were pioneers in regulations limiting the share of foreign-language music works in radio and television broadcasts.
The French undoubtedly lost battle for the status of the language of diplomacy. International organizations have widely switched to using English as the language of daily work and communication. From the very beginning, the United Nations and NATO were created on the basis of the bureaucratic procedures of the “Anglo-Saxon” world. Even when NATO Headquarters was in France (before de Gaulle evicted it from there to Brussels), it worked “in Anglo-Saxon” mode.
The European Union (as the EEC) and the Council of Europe were once decidedly francophone. EEC enlargement to include Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Sweden forced the conversion to English. Apparently, the most non-Francophone turned out to be the Irish (the British, if they spoke a foreign language, it was usually French). And the big enlargement of 2004 pushed French to the absolute sidelines. And Brexit will not change much here, apart from the great paradox that the Union will work in a language that is not the first official language in any of its members.
Even at the beginning of our millennium, the Council of Europe used French as its first working language. After the term of Catherine Lalumiere, for the next twenty years the Secretariat was, however, headed by politicians who could not say more than a few learned words in French. So the paperwork had to be in English, even if French was the lingua franca in corridor conversations between bureaucrats. And despite the fact that the Secretariat is based in Strasbourg, the French gave themselves a break. In the OSCE, permanent institutions were created only after 1990, but on the basis of UN experience and with English as the working means of communication (English was the negotiating language from the very beginning in the CSCE).
Earlier, before the Francophonie, the Spanish-speaking countries began to cooperate with each other. The Organization of Ibero-American States unites the Spanish-speaking countries. It includes over 20 countries in Latin America, Europe and even Africa (Equatorial Guinea). Nearly half a billion people live in countries with Spanish as their official language. The organization was established in 1949 as an agency for cooperation in the field of education, and it was only after a good few years that it was given an intergovernmental character. But the focus on tasks related to education, culture and science remained. It has an extensive institutional structure with the General Assembly, Governing Board, Secretariat (based in Madrid). It plays, however, no political role at all.
The least known of the global linguistic communities is the Lusophone Community, i.e. the Community of the Portuguese Language States. Yet, it covers over a quarter of a billion people on an area of over ten million square kilometers. It was established in 1996, i.e. twenty years after the final collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire. So it took a long time to overcome the bad colonial memories. It brings together nine countries scattered on four continents. More than a dozen countries have associate observer status (including the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, and even Georgia). Macau as an administrative region of China, Uruguay as the home of Portuguese and Spanish speakers known as Portunol, or Galicia as a region of Spain are interesting cases of countries/regions entering the orbit of interest to the Community.
It mainly operates as a platform for cultural cooperation. Cooperation in the field of tourism, economy and even defence was also jointly declared (even joint military exercises were conducted, but as computer simulations). It has a permanent secretariat (based in Lisbon), a permanent steering committee (meeting monthly). Regular sessions of the Council of Foreign Ministers (annual) and Conferences of Heads of State and Government (every two years) are convened.
The organization supported democratic reforms in Sao Tome and Principe and in Guinea-Bissau. It supported the independence of East Timor. The most tangible political achievement was the Community’s endorsement of Brazil’s aspirations for permanent membership of the UN Security Council. However, reforming the Security Council has remained an elusive goal for thirty years. And even in the geographic region of Latin America, Brazil does not yet have absolute support.
Although Italian is spoken by more than 80 million people worldwide, and Italian is the official language of the OSCE and several European countries (apart from Italy also San Marino, the Holy See and Switzerland), and Italian is known in the former Italian colonies, there is no the tendency to institutionalize the family of states with Italian speakers. This does not mean that the community of the Italian language cannot become a factor influencing political decisions. In 1996, the OSCE diplomats in Vienna were very excited about the election of the organization’s Secretary General. Nothing warms up diplomats like personal rivalry. The list of candidates was substantial, and there was no hope for a consensus on the horizon. And then, like a bolt from the blue, there was a message from the incumbent OSCE chairman, Swiss Foreign Minister Flavio Cotti that Giancarlo Aragona, an Italian diplomat, should become the new secretary general. The Swiss ambassador to the OSCE, Benedikt von Tscharner, and especially the Italian ambassador Mario Sica, who had been nominated as a candidate a few days earlier, did not hide their surprise. Few in Vienna realized that Flavio Cotti had earned himself the nickname “Ankuendigungsminister” in Switzerland. He was not used to wasting time on deliberations, searching for common denominators, or tediously building a consensus. He just made decisions and announced them immediately. He was not joking at all. Apparently he found out that during his term of office he would get along best with the OSCE Secretary General in Italian, because he had gotten along well with him on the occasion of meetings with the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose cabinet Aragona headed.
As a joke, it can be said that President Kwasniewski tried to create a club of Polish-speaking world leaders. At the 2000 Millennium Summit, he talked over dinner with the President of Lithuania and President Mali in Polish. This interested President Clinton. Kwaśniewski explained that they form the most elite club of Polish-speaking leaders of countries. And he asked Clinton if he was aware of who the club’s president was. Clinton didn’t guess, and when he heard that it was the Pope himself, he almost slipped from his chair.
Linguistic and cultural key communities can be seen as secondary fields of political and diplomatic activity without major political consequences. It is difficult to attribute to the English or French, Spanish or Portuguese that they use them to practice some, even hidden, form of neocolonialism (even if only cultural). But even if their political dimension is modest, they are an element of building a bridge of positive influence of Western countries on the countries of the “Third World”, easing anti-Western sentiments in the political elites of some countries, especially in Africa and Asia. They are an instrument of “soft power” not even so much of Great Britain or France, but of the West as such.
Both Francophonie and Lusophony extend the circle of members (especially Francophonie) or observers to the limits where the linguistic and cultural connectivity of some countries is highly conventional. This results in situations where the participating politicians of some countries have to use interpreters to understand what the talks are about. I saw it myself at the Francophonie summit in Yerevan in 2018. The Prime Minister of Armenia as the chairman of the session learned enough French that he could read the speeches prepared for him fluently, but many politicians had to use the work of an interpreter while listening to the debates.
I myself was supposed to become an interpreter. I was sent to study at MGIMO with a referral to language training in the direction of interpreter work. It has not been verified at the Polish MFA that MGIMO did not provide such education. It was not a linguistic college. There were special classes in the so-called political translation, but only to and from Russian (and not from Polish after all). And not for the purpose of preparing professional interpreters. Someone in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs made an idiotic decision with which others did not know what to do. So no one did anything special in this regard, and when these “interpreters”, like me, were graduating, no one at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs remembered why they had been sent there.
And I acted as an interpreter only once, but of what kind. In 1992, I was ordered (without even being asked for my opinion) to interpret President Walesa’s meeting with President Yeltsin. The meeting was agreed ad hoc at the CSCE Summit in Helsinki. Professional interpreters were not brought in. So I had to translate in both directions (each side should normally have its own interpreter). And the meeting was not nice and easy. It concerned the course of the withdrawal of Russian troops from Poland (it caused serious problems and raised our reservations, for example as to the condition of the abandoned facilities) and other difficult matters. So it was quite polemical. President Wałęsa was able to impress with the ability to take the initiative in the conversation from the very beginning and maintain it until the very end (years of experience in negotiating with communists). He did not monopolize the talks, but gave the floor to experts (that was the role of Minister Skubiszewski in that conversation) when it was necessary to move on to the substantive detail. The difficulty, however, was that the style of President Wałęsa’s speech sometimes made it impossible to grasp the exact meaning. And it was impossible to translate well, even into Russian, without fully understanding what the interlocutor meant. President Yeltsin, on the other hand, did not hear well (and hardly at all in one ear), so I had to speak (sitting on the other side of the table) quite loudly as requested discreetly by the Russian side. And speaking out loud increases the tension that was not lacking in the conversation anyway. At one point I thought that if this conversation resulted in a crisis in mutual relations, it should be the translator’s fault. Fortunately, it did not go this way. And the only participant in the negotiations who was able to appreciate my efforts turned out to be Minister Skubiszewski.
