Word Wars

President Jacques Chirac is usually good-natured, but on that day in Beirut in May 1998, he seemed excessively annoyed when an Arab journalist asked him a question in English. "Ici on parle Francais!" the president said testily, reminding the press conference that Lebanon was once a French-speaking country.

Mr Chirac is known to speak English. As a young man he spent a summer in Boston and worked as a waiter while attending a course at Harvard. On occasion, he even speaks English in public. His outburst in Beirut betrayed a growing militancy for the cause of Francophonie.

It was the same knee-jerk reaction that afflicted Air France pilots who resisted orders to speak English - not French - with the control tower at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport in March. The problem is that non French-speaking pilots could not understand them, and they risked colliding on the tarmac. The Americans refer to "keskidi-flights" - after the French pilots they often hear on the radio saying: "Qu'est-ce qu'il dit?"

The Organisation internationale de la francophonie was established in Hanoi in 1997 to defend the French language, but - despite its billion franc annual budget - it's fighting a losing battle. The organisation is headed by the former UN Secretary General Boutros BoutrosGhali and claims that 500 million people on five continents speak French, of whom 113 are real French speakers. Presumably the other 487 million know how to say bonjour. French is allegedly the second most used language internationally - after English, of course, but in terms of numbers of people who speak French, it ranks 11th, after Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish and so on.

Various Francophone organisations, subsidised by Paris, have existed for decades. March 20th has been the annual Journee Internationale de la Francophonie since 1988. President Chirac decided to give the concept new life by establishing his own, French-speaking Commonwealth. He said he wanted "to lessen the risk of a world where people would speak, think and create in a single mould". Speaking French is not a serious requirement: Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic are the newest of La Francophonie's 55 member states.

"We must not only defend French language and culture," Mr Boutros-Ghali says, "but enlarge this defence to that of pluri-lingualism and cultural diversity. Just as multi-party politics is the guarantor of democracy on a national level pluri-lingualism plays an identical role on a world scale, to prevent an authoritarian mono-culture, against democracy becoming uniform." Hmmm.

La Francophonie's biggest problem is the confusion between promoting the French language and projecting political power. The organisation has tried to forge a political role for itself, observing elections in Africa and making endless resolutions about world crises.

At least once a week I receive a fax from Mr Boutros-Ghali's office telling me that the secretary general approves the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, or is sending a mission to Bangui to help consolidate peace in the central African republic. Surely that billion francs could be better spent on scholarships for students to live in France?

La Francophonie's last summit in Moncton, Canada, last September, was supposed to be devoted to youth. To Mr Boutros-Ghali's displeasure, it instead focused on human rights, and the assembly decided to set up a human rights observatory - which would, as the Canadians warned, replicate the work of other international bodies, including the UN.

Some members demanded condemnation of abusers of human rights who were present at the summit - like Laurent-Desire Kabila of ex-Zaire. But Paris vetoed the idea. "If we made the respect of fundamental liberties a criterion for belonging to La Francophonie, it would simply cease to exist," Le Monde explained.