It reminds me of this anecdote [0]: "Outraged by English, Chirac storms out of summit"
> After a brief introduction in French, M. Seillière, the [French] president of the EU employers' federation, said he would speak in English because it was the international business language. Without saying a word, the French President left with the French foreign minister and finance minister. He only returned when the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, began speaking in French.
I’m from Spain, and it is surprising to hear someone say we will do that.
We have a huge inferiority complex, and our own cainistic version of the black legend, that makes us revere anything foreign as better than the local version. We have petty fights re. official languages about whether traffic signs should read “A coruña” or “La coruña”; or whether the national news anchor should say “Gerona” or “Girona” when speaking in spanish. We have regional governments that push spanish out of their regions. We as a nation obsess over english; we dream of speaking it better, we make it sound cool in the ads. We mock our leaders for not speaking it properly.
No one seriously pushes in a coordinated manner for spanish being used in the EU as seriously as the french or german do. At most, we aspire to be the proxy for latin america relationships.
As soon as anyone proposes to use english, we will see it as the opportunity to not have half of europe speak in french.
I'm curious about Spanish objection to English language. Sure, they do have the issue with Gibraltar and British "tourists" perenially, but is there any effect for the language itself?
At least Spanish is spoken by an order of magnitude more people than German, though (Latin America, and nowadays a third of USA as well)
It really won't, especially the French.