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Title: Esperanto and Anarchism Author: Will Firth Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: Esperanto, history, language, violence, war Source: Retrieved on August 7, 2009 from http://raforum.info/spip.php?article3664&lang=fr Notes: This text is an expanded version of an article written by Will Firth for the Lexikon der Anarchie, Verlag Schwarzer Nachtschatten, Plön 1998, ISBN 3-89041-014-6. The original German version was also published in 1999 by the Maldekstra Forumo Berlino as a brochure in the series “Esperanto und das internationale Sprachproblem”.
The international language Esperanto is an auxiliary language that was
conceived and developed for international communication. Of around 1,000
known plans for auxiliary languages, Esperanto alone has proved its
worth in over 100 years of practical use.
In July 1887 the young Jewish ophthalmologist Lazarus Ludwig Zamenhof
(1859–1917) published his textbook with exercises for the “Internacia
Lingvo” in Warsaw under the pseudonym “Dr Esperanto” and under the
vigilant eye of distrustful tsarist censors. The book was in Russian and
was followed that same year by editions in Polish, French and German. In
Zamenhof’s “International Language” Esperanto means “one who hopes”, and
Zamenhof hoped that by creating the international language he would
contribute to the cause of international understanding and world peace.
The word Esperanto soon became the name of the language.
Esperanto is relatively easy to learn due to its regularity and
flexibility. It has phonemic orthography, i.e. a one-to-one relationship
between writing and pronunciation. Its spelling is regular. Its grammar
is almost free of exceptions; versatile prefixes and suffixes contribute
to the language’s high precision and expressiveness. Its vocabulary
consists primarily of Romanic and Germanic roots that are widespread in
many languages. When people hear Esperanto spoken, their impression is
usually that it sounds like Italian or Spanish. While it is true that
the European origin of its vocabulary makes Esperanto more difficult for
Chinese, for example, than for English-speakers, the Chinese
nevertheless find Esperanto fairly easy, certainly much more so than
English. The reason is that extensive use is made of compounds and
derivatives, the meaning of which is easy to determine because
derivational word elements (morphemes) are attached to the word-root
without it changing. This “agglutinating” characteristic is a formative
feature in the Turkic languages, among others. English, for its part,
belongs to the inflectional languages, in which the root of a word is
not immutable (e.g. foot — feet; swim — swam — swum).
Today the loosely interconnected community of Esperanto-speakers has
upwards of a million members. There are tens of thousands of books in
Esperanto (chiefly original literature) and several hundred mostly small
periodicals that appear regularly, of which many are circulated
worldwide. Hardly a day passes without international meetings such as
those of specialised organisations, conferences, youth get-togethers,
seminars, group holidays and regional meetings taking place throughout
the world. Also, several radio stations broadcast programs in Esperanto,
some even on a daily basis. Esperanto sometimes becomes the “family
language” for couples of different origins, and their children speak it
as a native language (along with the language of their country of
residence and in some cases another language). Esperanto develops and
adapts to the changing needs of its speech community just as any other
living language does — both through lexical borrowing and the coining of
terms from existing linguistic resources — without losing its relative
simplicity. This is because the semantic differentiation and
expressiveness that a language enables are not contingent upon its
particular historic origins or upon immanent linguistic factors, but
arise exclusively from the communicative needs of the speech community.
Some terms commonly used with reference to Esperanto are “auxiliary
language” and “artificial language”. For those unfamiliar with the
actual extent of the practical use to which Esperanto is put, these
terms sometimes give rise to the erroneous idea that such a language
must be primitive and impoverished, of no more substance than what the
intellectual capacity of its “creator” was able to impart to it and such
as might fit between the covers of a single book. Yet as most
Esperanto-speakers have been aware right from the beginning, a language
suited for all human communicative needs can only develop through a
collective process. Esperanto did not arise “out of nothing” any more
than Haitian Creole, for example. A language comes into being when a
need for it is felt.
Along with Esperanto, Zamenhof advocated a quasi-religious doctrine
called “homaranism” [which literally means the doctrine of seeing
oneself as a member of the human race], which he associated with
Esperanto. This rather diffuse concept is grounded in liberal and
humanistic thinking, e.g. the idea that all humanity is “a family” that
must find itself; or the idea that all “world religions” have a common
origin and can be brought into harmony with one another. While some
Esperanto-speakers find this interesting and interpret it in different
ways, many others derive little inspiration from Zamenhof’s “love of
humanity”.
After the publication of the language project in 1887 in Warsaw,
Esperanto spread very rapidly, in the beginning mainly within the
Russian Empire. One of the first literary works in the new language
(alongside Zamenhof’s own vigorous literary and translation activity)
was En la tombo [In the Grave] by Nikolai Borovko, written in 1892,
which describes the torments of a man buried alive. The Christian
anarchist Leo Tolstoy spoke out firmly in favour of Esperanto. This
“Russian period” came to an abrupt end in 1895, when the only Esperanto
periodical published an article by Tolstoy, which led to its prohibition
by tsarist censorship. The subsequent “French period” saw the holding of
the first international Esperanto congress in Boulogne-sur-Mer in 1905
(with 688 participants from 20 countries). On this occasion Zamenhof
officially withdrew from his position as the driving force of the
movement: from that point on, the Esperanto movement was to manage
itself.
In 1905 the anarchist Paul Berthelot founded the monthly magazine
Esperanto, which appears to this day. In 1908 Hector Hodler founded the
Universala Esperanto-Asocio [UEA, the Universal Esperanto Association],
which still conjoins the activities of most Esperanto organisations in
the world. UEA headquarters is in Rotterdam.
By World War I, Esperanto had developed a sizeable following in France.
From there it was able to spread to far-flung parts of the world,
especially Japan and China. In 1921 a movement that used Esperanto and
had emancipative aims and an anational structure was founded in Prague
following a proposal by Eugène Adam (Lanti): the Sennacieca Asocio
Tutmonda [SAT = World Anational Association], which has done much to
extend the socio-cultural base of the language. SAT has its headquarters
in Paris. (See II. 2. “Esperanto and Anarchism”.)
The blossoming of Esperanto that followed lasted 10 to 15 years,
depending on the conditions that prevailed in the particular countries:
there was a pronounced “Hungarian phase”, which made Budapest the
“cultural capital of Esperanto”[1] for a few years. But the ascendance
of totalitarian and militaristic regimes, which led to World War II and
thereafter to the Cold War, put an end to the boom for many decades.
After the war especially, the expansionism of Anglo-American language
and culture was at its height, and Esperanto enjoyed less public
attention.
For the first time in 1954, and once again in 1985, the Assembly of
UNESCO recognised the value of Esperanto for international intellectual
exchange. In September 1993 the World Congress of the writers’
association PEN accepted the Esperanto PEN Centre (authors who use
Esperanto) as a member, thus marking Esperanto’s recognition as a
literary language.
The worldwide dissemination of Esperanto is not balanced: despite
progress in the last few years, it is barely present in many countries
of Africa and Asia. The majority of Esperanto-speakers live in Europe.
Whether Esperanto is “eurocentric” by virtue of this fact is a subject
of rather frequent discussions within the Esperanto movement, but the
true international character of Esperanto does not allow for it to be
considered purely European. Its development in a few countries (China,
Iran, Togo, Congo — the former Zaire) has been truly phenomenal at
times, while on the other hand there are other countries that still have
no organised Esperanto movement.
An especially active role within the Esperanto movement has been played
by TEJO, the UEA youth organisation. Like the Universal Esperanto
Association UEA, it organises annual congresses and numerous other
meetings. (The “International Seminars” held by the German Esperanto
Youth in the week around New Year’s Day are especially worthy of
mention).
One of Esperanto’s current developmental trends is “raĹmismo” (a term
derived from the name of the Finnish city Rauma where a TEJO congress
was held in 1980). “RaĹmismo” sees Esperanto-speakers as a kind of
“people in diaspora” and strives to create cultural values (e.g.
literature) through Esperanto. It bids farewell to the “radical” goal of
gaining acceptance for Esperanto as a universal second language,
regarding it instead as one language among others, a language that
people may use as they see fit and without ambitions of an ideological
nature.
Esperanto’s development is scrutinised by a body called the Academy of
Esperanto. The Academy’s task is to develop the language within the
framework of the Fundamento, the basis established by Zamenhof.
Decisions made by the Academy are not binding, but resemble guidelines
that have the character of well-considered recommendations. Actually,
the Academy often either fails to keep pace with Esperanto’s development
or is in some cases incapable of providing unanimous recommendations
because of internal differences.
Sometimes the objection is raised that Esperanto is sexist, because —
according to a superficial analysis — all feminine forms are derived
from masculine ones. At first sight there appears to be some truth in
this, because words denoting persons can indeed always be converted to a
feminine form by adding -in- to the basic form, e.g. laborist-in-o =
(female) worker. Nevertheless, what differentiates Esperanto from many
European languages, for example, is that it has no grammatical gender.
Words have no gender unless the object they denote has natural gender
(for example: “chair” is not feminine like it is in French or masculine
like in German, but “mother” and “father” are feminine and masculine
respectively.) Although the basic structure of the language is
non-sexist, it must be noted that actual usage in Esperanto, as it is
used within a patriarchal society, does have traits of sexism. The
existing possibilities for generating words denoting male persons are
rarely utilised, as the basic form is usually perceived to be masculine.
It is not far from here to the criticism that all feminine forms are
derived from (what appear to be) masculine forms. While technically
untrue, this critique is understandable. If linguistic sexism is to be
reduced, Esperanto must be used in a more conscious way, and the same
applies to almost every other language!
Anarchists were among the pioneers that propagated Esperanto. One of the
first anarchist Esperanto groups was founded in Stockholm in 1905. Many
others were to follow: in Bulgaria, China and other countries.
Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists were the most numerous group among
proletarian Esperantists before World War I. In 1906 they established an
international association, Paco-Libereco [Peace-Freedom], which
published the Internacia Socia Revuo. Paco-Libereco joined forces with
another progressive association, Esperantista Laboristaro, in 1910. The
common organisation was called Liberiga Stelo [Star of Liberation]. By
1914 these organisations had published a great deal of revolutionary
literature, some of it anarchist. One example of an activity that began
in the years prior to World War I was the animated correspondence that
took place between European and Japanese anarchists. In 1907 the
International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam passed a resolution on the
international language issue, and similar congress resolutions were
passed in the following years. The Esperantists that attended these
congresses became particularly involved in anarchist international
relations. In Germany Esperanto came to be widely used within the
workers’ movement especially between 1920 and 1933. In August 1932 the
German Workers’ Esperanto League had 4,000 members — and it was not
without reason that Esperanto was affectionately referred to as the
“Workers’ Latin”. The workers’ Esperanto movement developed a great
variety of international exchanges: “The worker Esperantists usually
belonged to the parties and the cultural and social political movements
of that era. They regarded it as their task to enable the utilisation of
the international language Esperanto at an international level for the
purposes of the particular organisations (...). At the Workers’ Olympics
Esperanto had an important function as a means of communication between
peoples that spoke different languages. Moreover, Esperanto was placed
at the service of cultural organisations of all working-class political
and trade-union tendencies, for example within the Workers’ Gymnastics
and Sports League, the Workers’ Samaritan League (...) and many others”.
Illustrierte Geschichte der Arbeiter-Esperanto-Bewegung, p. 66.
In August 1921 a meeting of 79 workers from 15 countries was held in
Prague. They founded the previously mentioned SAT, an organisation of
anti-nationalist leftists that is still active today. SAT reached its
peak in 1929–1930. At that time it had 6,524 members in 42 countries. By
1997 it had fewer than 1,500 members. The foundation of SAT and its
initial consistent self-isolation from the bourgeois Esperanto movement
were results of general political developments at the time, which were
encouraged by the doctrinaire application of the policy of political
neutralism by the bourgeois Esperanto movement of the time.
In March 1925 a “Berlin Group of Anarcho-Syndicalist Esperantists”
greeted the 2^(nd) Congress of the International Workers’ Association
(IWA), which was then being held in Amsterdam. It stated that in the
German IWA section, the FAUD, Esperanto had “taken root to such an
extent that a world organisation of Esperantists on a
libertarian-antiauthoritarian basis has been established”. This is
probably a reference to the TLES [which translates approximately as
“World League of Stateless Esperantists”], which was founded in the
1920s, as SAT was subject to strong communist influence in the
beginning. TLES appears to have later been absorbed by SAT.
The workers’ Esperanto movement was especially strong in Germany and the
USSR, where, among other things, the “Scientific Anarchist Library of
the International Language” (ISAB) was founded in 1923. It published
Ethics by Kropotkin, Anarchism by Borovoi and other works for an
international readership in Esperanto. One of the important centres of
activity for anarchist Esperantists during this period was the Far East,
China and Japan. In these countries Esperanto quickly became a topic of
popular attention thanks to anarchists. A few journals, mainly
bilingual, were published. Starting in 1913, Liu Shifu (his nickname:
Sifo) published the journal La Voĉo de l’Popolo [The Voice of the
People]. It was the first anarchist periodical ever to appear in China.
In the beginning, the information in its Chinese-language section
stemmed mainly from the aforementioned Internacia Socia Revuo. Liu Shifu
died in 1915 at a young age. There were many anarchists and socialists
among the first Japanese Esperantists. They were repeatedly subjected to
persecution. In 1931 the journal La Anarkiisto ceased to appear when its
editors were put in prison. Anarchist Esperantists suffered a major
setback when many of them were murdered or sent to labour camps during
the persecution of Soviet Esperantists (see II. 3. Repression).
Esperanto had a minor role in the International Brigades during the
Spanish Civil War (1936–39). From 1936–39 a weekly information bulletin
of the CNT/FAI was published by ILES (Iberian League of Esperantist
Anarchists). The CNT/FAI radio station also had broadcasts in Esperanto.
After World War II, the Paris group was the first to engage anew in
organised work. Starting in 1946, it published a periodical called
SenĹťtatano. Years later there was still an active anarchist group in
Paris. In 1981 Radio Esperanto was founded at its instigation. Radio
Esperanto continues to broadcast one hour weekly on the frequency of
Radio Libertaire. Most libertarian and anarchist Esperantists have since
been organised in SAT. Its anarchist members constitute an autonomous
“faction” in SAT, which in 1969 began to publish the Liberecana Bulteno,
which has since been renamed Liberecana Ligilo.
The history of Esperanto has included not only harassment and
disparagement, but also outright bans and persecutions. Esperanto has
been viewed by various regimes as a “dangerous language” (which is the
title of a very commendable work noted in the Bibliography): As early as
1895 the journal La Esperantisto was disallowed from entering tsarist
Russia; in 1922 the teaching of Esperanto was banned from French
schools; in 1935 the teaching of Esperanto (which had been an optional
subject at “free schools”) was prohibited in Germany; in 1936 Esperanto
itself was banned in Germany and Portugal; from the mid-30s onward,
publications of SAT along with anarchist publications could no longer
enter the USSR. As Stalinist repression increased, the activities of the
once strong Soviet Esperanto movement were subjected to ever greater
limitations. In a swift move in 1937, many of the most active
Esperantists were arrested and either shot or sent off to prison camps.
Esperanto was from then on ostracised and strictly forbidden as a
“product of bourgeois internationalism and cosmopolitanism”; starting in
1938, Esperanto was banned in all territories that had been occupied or
annexed by Germany.
These prohibitions and persecutions greatly hampered and inhibited the
Esperanto movement, and with it the propagation and development of the
International Language.
Even after World War II there was to be no easy fresh start in 1945.
Under Stalin’s influence, Esperanto groups were prohibited in East
Germany in 1949, followed by a ban in Hungary in 1950 and Czechoslovakia
in 1952. After Stalin’s death there was a slow revival of the Esperanto
movement in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet
Union, followed in 1965 by East Germany, in which the Esperanto movement
was able to organise within the Culture League.
One reason the libertarian spectrum should find Esperanto relevant is
that grassroots democratic groups and social movements cannot maintain
staffs of translators and interpreters — unlike governments and
corporations. As a rule, they must do without language services. It is
also much more sensible to spend limited funds on concrete activities.
(This, in practice, often prevents any continuous international
cooperation.) The power relationships within a system of
quasi-communication — when the communication is through an interpreter —
are also something of a problem from an anarchist perspective. Moreover,
educationally disadvantaged members of grassroots groups are almost
completely excluded from the work that is done on the international
level, because they possess no knowledge or insufficient knowledge of
foreign languages. Generally speaking, internationalists and
anti-nationalists face the fundamental question of how to enable people
of various languages, who are otherwise unable to communicate with each
other, to enter unhindered collective activity.
Anarchists in particular should find that Esperanto has much to offer in
terms of this kind of exchange . Yet it is a fact that anarchists do not
make much more intensive use of Esperanto than do other movements or
groups within the population. There is a libertarian faction within SAT,
which publishes a quarterly bulletin, Liberecana Ligilo [“Libertarian
Link”]. By publishing translations from various languages and different
libertarian tendencies, it is able to bring the various ideas to the
attention of a small, but diverse internationalist public.
An anarchist living in Germany complained with respect to the barriers
to international comprehension:
“More or less in isolation from one another, (we) work and fight,
without engaging in an exchange about our victories and defeats, and
without supporting and encouraging one another. Intensifying contact
above the regional level with people having similar ideas and aims
should be an important component of our work, in order to make effective
active solidarity possible.” (Graswurzelrevolution 183, p. 13).
This observation hits the nail on the head: our attempts to practice
solidarity on an international scale and to get ourselves networked
usually stay within very modest dimensions. One of the chief causes of
this is the problem of linguistic comprehension.
Whoever reads the libertarian press, encounters fairly frequent
complaints on the part of groups that are unable to manage their
foreign-language correspondence, organise international meetings with
interpreters, etc. At present, the international cooperation of
anarchist, autonomous and grassroots trade union forces depend for the
most part on the use of whatever language knowledge happens to be
available. Here is how that works: somebody in the group knows language
X and therefore it is possible to establish contact with people in or
from region X. This way of establishing contacts is spontaneous and
organic. Yet the superficial “pragmatism” of this principle of
haphazardness has the great weakness that contacts are quickly
interrupted if the “key persons” with the language skills cease to be
available for whatever reason. Even in a country like Germany, where
many people have some English skills, people’s proficiency in the
language is seldom up to the task. The ability to speak English as a
second language is usually based on long years of compulsory instruction
at school, a system rooted in the economic and ideological bond that
Germany has with the US. This is not the case all over the world. In the
ultimate analysis, English is not “the” international language, but only
the most widespread colonial or hegemonic language.
The proportion of anarchists in the Esperanto movement is no greater
than in the population at large, at least in Germany Anarchists’
position in the Esperanto movement on the whole is marginal. Mutual
misgivings between Esperanto-speaking anarchists on the one hand, and
apolitical/“bourgeois” Esperanto-speakers on the other hand complicate
relations. Few, if any, libertarian and anarchist Esperantists are
interested in an exclusive or very extensive use of the language within
the movement while it is still not widespread beyond. Esperanto could,
however, gain true acceptance as an additional means of communication
within the movement if there were a greater understanding of the way
languages and language choice are used as tools by states and economic
interests, and also as criteria of social selection and exclusion.
All kinds of interest groups that are making an effort to collaborate
and network above and beyond language barriers would benefit greatly
from having an easy-to-learn and politically neutral language for
general communication. For this purpose, “major” languages like Spanish,
French, English, Russian and Chinese are inadequate. With Esperanto,
direct contacts can be made in many directions, without any particular
national language being made the standard.
It is worth emphasising that Esperanto is more than just a relatively
simple means of communication. Since it “belongs” neither to any
“people” nor to any state, and as there are but a scant number of native
speakers of Esperanto, nobody can claim ownership of it. In practice
this means a high degree of communicative equity, which overcomes the
troublesome dynamics of the relation between “omniscient” native
speakers and bedevilled “foreigners”. Esperanto thus opens the way to a
high level of communicative equality, something that enthrals many
Esperanto-speakers. If that seems difficult to comprehend, a comparison
may help: this feeling of equality is not dissimilar to the euphoria of
those (usually highly educated) Germans who finally manage to assert
themselves with enough self-confidence in English. In doing so, they get
the impression that they can “talk to the whole world”. Esperanto takes
this feeling and the opportunities associated with it a step further —
it can open as many different doors as if one had learned, along with
English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and a few other languages.
As previously mentioned, Esperanto is often characterised as an
“artificial language”, as opposed to other languages, which are
perceived to be “natural”. But since the victory of the nation-state
principle, at the very latest, a differentiation between “artificial”
and “natural” languages is hardly tenable. The reason is that forces of
standardisation exert great pressure on the language of any national
state. Languages like standard German or French have for centuries been
standardised and regulated through law and by decree as well as by the
mass media. Authors, story-tellers and inventive individuals from all
social strata exert a direct and conscious influence on language.
Criteria for what is “natural” and “artificial” become blurred.
Nevertheless, many people harbour thoroughly ethnicist prejudices about
the pristine character of their own language and its superiority (or
that of other national languages) over one that is felt to be
“artificial” and therefore automatically inferior. So it is no mere
happenstance that “Esperanto” is deprecated as a bastardised linguistic
mishmash or abused as a metaphor denoting an activity that levels
something to a low standard (e.g. “Esperanto Europe” [Helmut Kohl]). It
must be emphasised that Esperanto has developed to a large extent
spontaneously since 1887.
An interesting analysis of subliminal fear of Esperanto has been
provided by Claude Piron in his study Psychological Reactions to
Esperanto: “Esperanto is seen as troublesome in a world where every
people has its own language, and where this tool is passed on en masse
from one’s ancestors and no individual is entitled to violate it. It
demonstrates that a language is not necessarily the gift of past
centuries, but may result from simple convention. Taking as its
criterion of correctness not conformity with authority, but
effectiveness of communication, it changes the way of interrelating:
where previously there was a vertical axis, it replaces it with a
horizontal axis. Thus it attacks many profound matters on which light is
not accustomed to be thrown. For example, what happens to the language
hierarchy because of it? Irish Gaelic, Dutch, French and English are not
seen as equal in people’s minds or in many official texts. If people of
different languages used Esperanto to communicate with one another, this
hierarchy would lose its basis.” [translation by William Auld]
Esperanto is also accused of being eurocentric. (It is curious that such
critics often compromise their argument by throwing their support to
English or Spanish as languages for international communication.) This
critique contains a kernel of truth: Esperanto, linguistically speaking,
bears in many respects the stamp of Indo-European languages. Esperanto
also originated in eastern Europe and maintains to this day a certain
European flavour by virtue of the fact that most Esperanto-speakers
still live in Europe. Yet Esperanto has reacted to a number of
non-Indo-European stimuli in the course of its development, as is
corroborated by some of the information in this article: the
well-established activity in Japan and China, the “Hungarian period”[2]
of its development, or the formation of words in Esperanto through
agglutination, something that is atypical in Indo-European languages.
Many feel that Esperanto is worthy of support, yet refrain from learning
it out of pragmatic considerations. They prefer to utilise their
valuable free time learning a “major” language, which they regard as
more practical. Other Esperanto sympathisers, in the face of the
dominance of English in today’s world, are reticent to get involved in
learning and actively using the language. It has always taken a good bit
of idealism to learn and practice Esperanto.
Fallacious beliefs about the users of Esperanto also abound. They are
believed to promote Esperanto as a panacea for conflicts and wars. And
journalists occasionally circulate the rumour that Esperanto is dead.
Speculation as to the future of Esperanto is pointless. It should be
stressed that Esperanto exists, that the Esperanto movement is stable,
and that Esperanto is used intensively, however limited its total share
of international communication may be. And anarchists use it too.
Â
[1] Spomenka Ĺ timec, Tibor Sekelj, Pioniro de la dua jarcento, Vienna
1989.
[2] It is to be noted that Hungarian is not an Indo-European language.
It belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages. These languages are
structurally very different from Indo-European languages.