can’t understand at all what the detriment for humanity would be if
one fine day … there no longer exist nations and national
languages, but there exist only one all-human family and one all-
human language.” 1
Gary Mickle, an American Esperantist living in Germany, has set
out to demystify the movement’s touted “diversity protection
claims.” Esperantists, by propounding a counter-mythology to the
“gray jumpsuit” myth, have anthropomorphized Esperanto as a
gentle, unfailing guardian of rights, a superego that disciplines the
unpredictable negotiations between the Esperantic ego and (yes) id.
Perhaps; among the proponents of a universal language, there have
been worse offenses. That said, since 1970, when the Declaration of
Tyresö denounced “linguistic imperialism,” the UEA has been
strongly in favor of linguistic and cultural diversity. In the 1996
Manifesto of Prague, the UEA pledged to “unshakably” uphold seven
objectives: democracy, global education, effective education,
multilingualism, language rights, language diversity, and human
emancipation.
The manifesto made clear what Esperanto could contribute to
language rights activism: a century of experience in managing
transnational identity, the creation of durable international
networks, and a record of living up to an exacting standard of
language equality. Under the presidency of Mark Fettes (who
authored the Manifesto of Prague) the UEA has recently formulated
a strategic plan dedicating Esperanto to lingva justeco, linguistic
justice for a global Babel. The interna ideo, renovated by and for a
new generation, lives on.
The third myth is the utopianism myth: that Esperantists believe
in, expect, and labor for the fina venko, when the whole world is
speaking Esperanto (and, according to the “gray jumpsuit myth,”
only Esperanto). That finavenkismo took a fatal blow in the League of
Nations debacle in 1921–22 is beyond dispute; six decades later, it
was finally buried in the marshlands of Rauma. Zamenhof himself
was only intermittently concerned with dreams of a distant, utopian
future. On the contrary, his was the future that was, as he said at
Boulogne in 1905, already “floating in the air,” fluttering “images of
a time to come, of a new era.” 2 And he entreated Esperantists to
seize these images and make them real; to “build into the blue,” in
the words of philosopher Ernst Bloch.
While Zamenhof could wax rhapsodic about unforeseen
technologies for a new century, his idea for changing the world was
based on a strong continuity between experience and expectation.
As a physician, he knew well that it was in the nature of human
beings to change, whether to perish of disease, or to be slowly cured.
He sought to change human beings by literal y changing the mind,
shaping the way it perceives, thinks, judges, and makes what it will
of the minds of others. Indeed, he may have felt that the process was
not entirely different from, say, administering medication for
trachoma. Esperanto involved no technological miracles; it was
made by hand, with books, paper, and pen, and it would be given
life by brains, tongues, and hearts.
These three myths—the “heyday” myth, the “gray jumpsuit” myth,
the “utopianism” myth—all bespeak a certainty that Esperanto
doesn’t matter—shouldn’t matter—to Americans. Yet somehow the
notion that Esperanto doesn’t matter seems to matter quite a bit.
Americans need to believe these myths because by doing so, they
project onto Esperanto their deepest fears: that American culture is
consumerist and faddish; that beneath all the diversity fanfare, there
is a residual, Tocquevillian conformism; and that to believe that a
male, white, slave-holding elite of the eighteenth century gave us
our contemporary, multicultural nation is utopian at best and, at
worst, delusional. Americans’ myths about Esperanto, at bottom, are
there to shore up fractured mythologies of America.
There’s a fourth myth about Esperanto that needs to be refuted,
but this one obtains among Esperantists themselves. The “myth of
neutrality” asserts that because Esperanto is neutral regarding
politics and religion, it is therefore apolitical. On the face of it, this
myth is not hard to refute, since its very premise is faulty;
Esperanto’s vaunted neutrality is only meaningful in the context of
both politics and religion. Esperanto emerged in the Pale of
Settlement as an answer (albeit unorthodox) to the Jewish question;
and in the shadow of Dreyfus, Zamenhof (the “Jewish prophet”)
sacrificed his Jewish-derived Hillelist ethics so that his language-
movement might endure. Moreover, the notion that Zamenhof was
blind to class struggle, most famously espoused by Lanti in the SAT
schism of 1921, is unfounded. On the contrary, Zamenhof’s
disenchantment with Zionism came about, in part, from his disgust
that class struggle was cleaving apart the early settlements in
Palestine. Instead of being blind to class, Zamenhof was clear-
sighted enough to recognize that class identity was inimical to his
vision of a granda rondo familia of all humanity.
What Esperantists have never fully recognized is that Zamenhof
offered Esperanto not only as a bridge across ethnic divides but also
as a means for bridging political differences. Zamenhof wanted
diverse peoples to talk not only past their differences but also about
them. Within his program for Homaranism, he envisioned
multiethnic cities, states, and continents—indeed, a multiethnic
world—using Esperanto for the sake of negotiating differences.
There’s a reason why Esperanto could yet become an exquisite
instrument for political dialogue: Esperanto is itself a dialogue
between modernity and tradition. On the one hand, Zamenhof
designed it for liberal individuals in search of modernity, progress,
and autonomy; on the other, he designed it to consolidate and unify
a community around timeless concepts of the good: justice, peace,
harmony, and fellow-feeling. But unlike most communities bound by
traditional values, the Esperantic community shares a future, not a
past, and one must choose to belong to it. Thus, Esperanto does
more than balance the claims of the individual with those of the
community; it reconciles these claims every time a liberal individual
freely chooses to belong to the Esperantic community.
Esperanto is not simply applicable to politics; it is essential y
political. I realize this is a provocative claim, not least because I’ve
unsettled Esperantist audiences by making it. But my argument is
that Esperanto dovetails with the contemporary so-called liberal-
communitarian debate; “so-called” because the debate has become
an ongoing, evolving dialogue between two camps: proponents of a
liberal, rights-bearing self, irrespective of identity (à la John Rawls’s
“veil of ignorance”), and champions of communities with
prerogatives and purposes (à la Michael Sandel’s communitarian