From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Sep 16 2005 - 07:16:28 CDT
eflarup@yahoo.com wrote:
> This would only happen if we were to create a new
> locale (eu_EU) and force everybody in the euro zone to
> adopt that.
Eeeeurrkkkk! I would not like, as an European, being FORCED to use an
EUROPEAN language.
Well, I suppose you wanted to speak about the locale "mul_EU" which refers
to multiple languages, used in within the context of a common European
convention. This makes sense, for numeric date and currency formatting, or
for multilingual contracts, or international payment orders, where it could
be good to have common conventions for digit grouping, decimal separator,
currency unit and number padding and sign positions, date components order
and separator, and the set of digits to use.
For all the rest, using such locale would have no sense. This includes the
case of monolingual documents, where even a locale like "fr_EU" or "en_EU"
will probably be a non-sense. But generally a document is signed by an
author and describes the country from which it is written and its applicable
national law. For this reason, the "_EU" locale code extension will have
little use (unless contracts can be enforced using ONLY the European
legislation, without any interference or restriction by a national
legislation), and using the appropriate country-specific locale will be more
useful...
The _EU extension would have its use if people in Europe could have a
European citizenship without having any other national cistizenship. But as
far as I know, only citizens of member countries can be citizens of the EU,
and even companies registered in the EU must elect their home in one member
country.
The EU citizenship does not exist alone, but the reverse is not true: there
are citizens of member countries that don't have the EU citizenships,
because they live in dependancies of these member countries that are left
apart from the European Union (some examples are the Bailiwicks of Jersey
and Guernsey, forget the old term "Channel Islands" as they are now
independant of each other, the Isle of Man, and other British dependencies
of the Crown in South Atlantic, or Aruba for the Netherlands Crown, or Faroe
Islands and Greenland for Denmark, or French collectivities in the Pacific).
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