Hence, languages like English, French and Spanish can easily guar- antee certain prestige and recognition by means of an ever-growing language industry, especially in a world where, in Julien's words, one cannot survive in the job market without English. While power is what turns certain languages into global languages, this does not seem to be the case of Esperanto. A stateless language backed by individual supporters and by powerless institutions—such as Esperanto associations, subsidised mostly by annual membership fees—that hardly produce for-profit language products, Esperanto finds itself faced with a striking asymmetry of power. Yet, ironically, this asymmetry is behind Esperanto's very raison d'etre.
This view of Esperanto as a non-compulsory language appealing to individuals has been present since Zamenhof, who envisaged Esperanto as an antithesis to the top-down, coercive and xenophobic stances asso- ciated with national languages. Unlike national languages made global through political and economic power, Esperanto is purposefully power- less, meaning it will likely never become a de facto global language. If, as argued by Julien, people can choose freely whether to speak it or not, the possibility of not learning it is left open and many would certainly choose not to study it. Indeed, if we give due importance to the centrality of the language's non-compulsory character, it does not come as a surprise that Esperanto has never replaced the use of French and, currently, English, for international communication. Nevertheless, Esperanto succeeded in becoming a living language and in establishing a widespread speech community.
Diverging from the aspiration of Esperanto becoming the global language, Julien revealed to be one of the several young Esperantists who joke about this farfetched expectation. An example of his humorous approach to it was an Internet meme that he shared in the Tele- gram group of UEA and TEJO volunteers in April 2017. Based on an exploitable, the meme (in English) showed Zamenhof lying on a hospital bed after having been on a coma for one hundred years. As a nurse approaches the bed, Zamenhof asks her, in a dialogue in English: 'is Esperanto the global lingua franca yet?' And her answer is: '...what's Esperanto?' Widely circulated on digital media, this meme was created by young Esperantists as a joke aimed at the finvenkistoj and those who ceaselessly promote the language.
From this standpoint, without concrete prospects of being a politically powerful alternative or becoming a de facto global language, Esperanto seems to have lost its momentum, being occasionally labelled 'a lost cause' or 'a thing of the past'. These dominant expectations for the Esperanto movement are shaped by the model laid down by modern communist and socialist theories of comprehensive social change, as well as by other grand narratives and ideologies that assume social movements to be necessarily future-oriented and based on a linear temporality (Boggs 1977; Maeckelbergh 2011). Such theories, however, collapse when it comes to the causes and issues approached through prefigurative poli- tics. This contrast takes shape in Esperantujo in its most delineated form between, on the one hand, those who see Esperanto as a generator of lines of flight and, on the other hand, those who long for a future in which, through the accumulation of achievements and supporters, Esperanto could fulfil the long-term purpose sometimes assigned to it.
For speakers like Martine, Daniel, Idris and Julien, Esperantos polit- ical powerlessness vis-a-vis its fight for protagonism in the international scenario is seen as a constitutive feature of the language, rather than a flaw. This lack of political power, linked to Esperantos non-instrumental and non-compulsory character, is precisely what makes this language useful, in an affective-effective sense. Standing no concrete chance of replacing English for the purposes of international communication, Esperanto has 'failed'. Yet, in line with the perception that it should not be imposed, Esperanto had always been fairly unlikely to become a de facto global language in the first place. From the perspective of a prefig- urative endeavour, Esperanto has neither failed nor succeeded: it simply created and creates the frame wherein a set of present-oriented practices take place. Such practices, as we have seen, do not confront the main- stream options made available by wider society and by other languages. Rather, they produce novel possibilities through a powerless language that generates powerful communication and networking alternatives. If Esperanto indeed wins—by becoming a de facto global language, in the sense advanced by traditional social movements—it will have lost—for having become a hegemonic language, being imposed on people, like several other languages.
Unsurprisingly, the possibilities that Esperanto generates match with cosmopolitanism in practice: through speaking the language and joining the community, Esperantists learn cosmopolitan principles that are, later, enacted through cosmopolitan sociabilities. The latter, just as the very existence of this community, are ephemeral, intermittent and, some- times, even based on one-off personal contacts and one's sporadic partic- ipation in Esperantujo. Still, such cosmopolitan sociabilities operate changes in people's lives and open up for possibilities that go beyond the enactments of Esperantujo.
Over time, Esperanto has moved away from the label 'the universal language' and has been conveyed through more contemporary nomen- clatures such as a 'constructed' or 'artificial language' (more popular among nerds and geeks) and the more scholarly concept of 'interna- tional auxiliary language'. In line with this move away from Esperantos initial claim of universality, the profile of its speakers has also gone through changes, in which the stereotype associated with Esperantists in France shifted from intellectuals and the bourgeoisie to revolution- aries and leftists of all sorts and, more recently, to geeks and language enthusiasts. Likewise, the initial humanist cosmopolitanism linked to
Esperanto gave way to an internationalist one, in an increasing cele- bration of the national diversity that was originally underplayed. From a world-encompassing project, the significance of Esperanto turned the language into an increasingly liberal one: from the globe to individuals, from macro to micropolitics and from changing the world to working people's selves.
As argued by Christopher, an Esperantist in his sixties who hosted me during a trip to North East England, in a conversation in Esperanto:
Even if there's no one else speaking Esperanto in the world, this language won't have failed and won't necessarily die. All these materials, music, books, literature in this language have been produced, they will all remain here and, in the future, someone can find these materials, come across the language and make use of it again.
'We're not as numerous as we wanted, but we're more than you can imagine'. Ultimately, it does not matter how many Esperantists there are, but how far one can go and what can be done with Esperanto.
8.5 Keeping the Conversation Going
Returning to the title of this chapter, Bruno Latour (1993) argues that we have never been modern, asserting that the separation between nature and society fostered by modern science as the ultimate feature of moder- nity has never effectively taken place. This does not mean that scholars should neglect the modern constitution, but rather that modernity should be analysed as a powerful discourse that hides the ways in which nature and society are mutually constitutive. Through a very distinct argument, but perhaps reaching a not-so-different conclusion, Esperanto has never been primarily and solely universalist—nor universal. Focusing on the discourse about universalist ambitions that early Esperantists and finvenkistoj associated with the language and that non-Esperantists projected onto it casts a shadow on how the language is rendered meaningful through everyday practices. From helping people flee total- itarian regimes and enabling less touristy travelling to fostering spaces for horizontal learning and fairer communication, Esperantists' practices and orientations have blended prefigurative and universalist practices, with the former making the language fully operational, regardless of its universal use.