When one national language, such as English, assumes a hegemonic position as the second language of the world, it inevitably absorbs other languages and disintegrates other peoples. In the space of a few generations, it destroys other languages and cultures, as Latin did in the ancient world.

Only an invented language, which is nobody's mother tongue, does not have this destructive effect: this is demonstrated by Latin itself, which, when it became a dead language, allowed the free development of the neo-Latin languages, even though for centuries it remained as the language of culture (and not only the second language) throughout Europe.

These considerations explain the reasons for Esperanto as a universal language: its structural characteristics make it as similar to isolating languages as to inflective languages, which explains its popularity in Japan and China, where they actually publish a magazine called "La popola Cinio".

However, linguistic domination is nothing other than the reflection of political domination. It is, therefore, not enough to sing the praises of Esperanto and condemn the corrupting influence of English in an effort to displace the latter as a second language, as it has reached this position due to the political, economic, and military and cultural force of the English-speaking countries. We need to create a political power comparable if not equal to that of the Anglo-Saxon world - a power which, by virtue of its cultural raison d'ętre, is specifically and constantly committed to opposing the hegemony of English and the threat which English constitutes for all other languages.

This is why we have attached and continue to attach such importance to the creation of a European Federation to this end: with an objective which concerns, and which must concern from now on, not only the Old World but also the whole world.

The European Federation, however, will not be created tomorrow.

We therefore need an intermediate stage, which we will call Esperanto for teaching purposes.

In Germany, the Institute of Cybernetic Linguistics of the University of Paderborn has conclusively proved in scientific reearch what a number of scholars of linguistics and interlanguage had already discovered empirically: that Esperanto, because of its simplicity and the ease with which it can be learnt, has a fundamental propaedeutic function in the teaching of foreign languages: children who study this language for two years before learning another language - English, French, etc. - are able after another two years to catch up with and overtake classmates who have been studying one of the above-mentioned languages for four years. The first step, therefore, is to adopt this method of teaching, which can obviously be combined with any of the other methods of modern language teaching. Esperanto will thus be able to spread between peoples: no longer only as a means for learning foreign languages, but as a European and international lingua franca, officially adopted as such.

The importance of this objective cannot be stressed enough. And nor can the risks we run until it is achieved, as the world has an ever-growing need for a second language, whose creation is therefore inevitable. But we almost certainly cannot do without the first step.

Andrea Chiti Batelli

Federalist and Esperantist