Why wouldn't the EU recommend to Baltic states and Ukraine to give Russian language official status?

Question

As known, the Russian language is widely spoken in the states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which are EU members, and Ukraine, which has signed the association with the EU, is native to 29.6% of its citizens by the 2001 Ukrainian census. Why wouldn't the EU recommend giving it the official status like it's done in Belgium (which is one of the founding states) with French, Dutch and German, or Finland, where Swedish is 2nd official language with only 5.3% of Swedish speakers (and despite 600 years of Swedish rule), or at least regional, like in dozens of EU member states?

Chapter III of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union says "The Union shall respect cultural, religious and linguistic diversity" (Article 22). I suppose when the Russian language and culture are native to 25-40% of the Baltic population and the five largest cities in Ukraine, this article should have provided the Russian language with at least regional recognition.

Are there purposeful political reasons behind this?

Answer 1

This is a matter for the individual countries. For example, in Ireland the official Language is Irish, The majority language, English has a Secondary status.

Other countries, such as the UK, have no official language, but, of course, the UK uses English for communications with the EU.

The EU has an interest in preserving minority languages. As part of its cultural programme, it may support languages that are under threat, such as Basque, Galacian or Catalan. There is no suggestion that Russian is a threatened language.

Ukraine is not a member of the EU. So the number of Russian speakers is irrelevant. It has no representation in European institutions. The Baltic states, or their representatives in the European Parliament have not asked for Russian to be recognised as a language of the EU.

Answer 2

Russian is not an official language of any EU country.

Latvia held a referendum in 2012 to decide if Russian would be given the status of official language, and guess what 74.8% votes were cast against the language.

Had the Russian language succeeded the referendum, Russian could have become one of the EU languages.

Answer 3

Ukraine should be completely left out of this question as it is not a member state or strongly tied to the EU. (In the context of the previous sentence, ‘strongly tied’ is implied to be a Switzerland or Norway-like relationship.) The question may still be asked about the Baltic states.

The European Union, however, does not regulate the individual member states’ language policies in any way. Whether or not member states designate an official national language, of if they designate one whether they designate more than one, and if they designate more than one whether they define a ranking between these languages is entirely up to the member states. Thus, the United Kingdom has no official de jure language at all, France has one official national language, Finland has two of which one is dominant in almost all areas of the country, Belgium has three of which two have an almost 50 % population share and so on. Germany has two designated regional minority languages, Finland has one, and Cyprus has two minority languages in addition to its two official languages. This principle is known as subsidarity and is one of the core principles of the EU: what can effectively be regulated at a national or regional level need not be regulated by the supranational EU.

In addition to what was said in the paragraph above, the EU 24 has official languages of which three are procedural languages and one (Irish Gaelic) is temporarily derogated due to the difficulty of finding translators. While it may seem as if these 24 languages were the de jure (or de facto where the former are lacking) national languages of the member states, that is in fact not the case. Turkish is an official language of Cyprus and Luxembourgish is the official language of Luxembourg yet neither are official EU languages.

Let me take a second to quickly break down your examples. Belgium was one of the founding states of the EU predecessor institutions, alongside the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, France and Italy. Back then all three Belgian languages were already de jure or de facto languages of at least one further member state and two languages in general use in Luxembourg (German and French) were as well. There was no need for any special, specific regulation. When Finland joined the EU in 1995, it did so alongside Sweden and Austria. With Finnish being the vastly dominant language in Finland—as you note—it would obviously become one of the official EU languages. But so would Swedish because of Sweden where it is almost exclusively spoken.

On the other hand, when Ireland (and the UK) joined the EU’s predecessors in 1973, English obviously became official language but Irish was only granted the status of treaty language; meaning that it would be usable as a spoken language in the European Parliament and secondary legislation (i.e. not treaties) would not be translated into it. This was despite Irish enjoying the status of first official language by the constitution of Ireland. It was not until 2007 that the EU (more precisely: the foreign ministers) agreed to elevate Irish to an official language at the Republic’s request. Thus, in the European parliament where the languages are listed in a specific order (basically alphabetical by date of accession with caveats), Irish follows Greek (1981), Portugese, Spanish (both 1986), Finnish, Swedish (both 1995), Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak and Slovene (all 2004).

As the case of Irish shows, becoming an official EU language is a matter of a member state requesting and the other member states accepting. As of now, no EU member state has a Russian majority, none have designated Russian as an official (co-) language and whether Russian is a regional minority language (such as Basque, Sami or Catalan) is largely irrelevant for EU official procedures.

Finally, I would like to point out that the Finnish and Belgian language situations have been a thing decades prior to the establishment of any EU predecessor. The Finnish language law practically dates back to its independence from Russia in 1917. So again, these are not issues where the EU said anything whatsoever.

Answer 4

Here is a completely unofficial rationale for Western powers to not push Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to make Russian an official language:

This policy is a continuation of the West's Cold War policy of refusing to recognize the Soviet Union's annexation of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

There are three primary categories of Russian-speakers in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia:

• Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians who were forced to learn Russian under the Soviet-era school system. (I doubt that the original poster has these people in mind when discussing Russian-speakers.)
• Russians who moved to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia after the Soviet Union conquered those countries.
• Descendants of the Russians who moved to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia after the Soviet Union conquered those countries.

Russia is the successor state to the "Empire of All the Russias". It has a long history of occupying and/or annexing territories where Slavs (especially Russian-speakers) live -- and using the "Slavic-speaking" and "Russian-speaking" populations as an argument for the occupation and/or annexation.

Pushing Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to recognize Russian as an official language could be seen as either legitimizing the Soviet Union's colonization of these countries, and/or legitimizing potential future claims by Russia to parts (or all) of the territory of these countries.

Answer 5

To avoid same propaganda narrative as we hear for Ukraine: this is Russia, has always been, this country is an artificial formation ... let them say, they will say this about USA and Antarctica also. Nothing can be done, local Russians need to learn local languages for the safety of countries they belong.