Centre d'Estudis Jordi Pujol (CEJP)
Editorial / October 03, 2006
A middle-aged woman, of a well-to-do appearance, sits down on a train next to two black-African passengers. She looks at them again and again. She feels almost duty-bound to show them hospitality, interest and show off her cultural prowess. All at the same time. She smiles at them and enquires in English: "What is your language?". With a broad grin, one of them replies: "Wolof". The lady fails to understand, so she assumes they do not understand English. She repeats the question in French: "Quelle langue parlez-vous? Votre langue originelle?", emphasising "originelle" so as to avoid confusion. The question receives the same reply: "Wolof". She is taken aback and withdraws her charm. Her eyes betray her disappointment; she feels pity for these unfortunate men with such evident language difficulties.
Despite her "broadmindedness", she has not realised that these people know French, can get by in English and speak a little Spanish, but that their language is none of the former, regardless of how international they are. These men speak Wolof with their parents, their children, and their friends.
The poor lady is a victim of a very widespread form of an elitist cosmopolitanism, which disdains national identities as provincial and obtuse and regards as irrelevant everything that does not bear a universal label. Probably, asked the same question, she would have replied "Spanish", undervaluing the fact that she is a Catalan-speaker. She does not refuse to speak Catalan but regards it as dispensable.
If true cosmopolitism is based on the principle that all persons are equal regardless of their culture and nationality, then this must infer that all cultures and all nationalities are in the same category; otherwise we would discriminate between people according to the origin of their language. If we fail to grasp this, we can never be citizens of the world. Catalonia abounds with a cosmopolitism that, in reality, is nothing less than an elegant way to conceal an exaggerated lack of self-esteem.
