Imagine a room in Brussels. Ambassadors and ministers representing the Twenty-Seven around a table with the issues that keep Europe awake at night: the war at the gates of the Union, Russia, Trump, the threat of a trade war, European defense, energy, China, immigration, the Sahel, lost competitiveness, and an enlargement that is no longer a whim but a geopolitical issue.
And then Spain takes the floor. The ministers and ambassadors lean slightly in their chairs, perhaps expecting a proposal on defense, Ukraine, or the Balkans.
But no. Spain has something much more important to say: Catalan, Basque, and Galician. Without the slightest embarrassment, the minister makes it clear, in front of the inevitable awkward expression of the ambassador: Spain will not accept new official languages in the Union unless the official status of the three is recognized first.
Montenegro, which has been negotiating its entry for years, must also have been quite surprised. One imagines the Montenegrin ambassador looking at his French colleague.
—Did we get the wrong meeting?
—No. It’s the enlargement.
—And then why are we talking about Catalan?
—It’s Spain…
There appears that diplomatic smile perfected over centuries: neither a smile nor a laugh, but a slight raising of the corners of the mouth and a sidelong glance that means "is he serious?". Because in Brussels there can be vetoes, blockages, and ultimatums, but there is something much harder to achieve: for someone to believe, at this point and with what is happening, the Hispanic threat.
What has been said, and what has not
To understand the little show, one must know who is starring in it. Minister José Manuel Albares dropped it, in passing, before journalists in Brussels -during a visit that in theory was about the integration of Ceuta and Melilla into the single market-: he finds it "unthinkable" that the Union admits a new language without first resolving Catalan, Basque, and Galician.
The Secretary of State for the EU, Fernando Sampedro, defended the same in an informal meeting in Dublin; but when he was asked outright if Spain would block Montenegro's entry, he neither confirmed nor denied it: he limited himself to saying that he trusted the matter would be resolved long before a decision needed to be made. It is the most elegant threat possible: it is launched, but not signed. Between the two statesmen, they have managed to elevate a domestic linguistic issue to the category of a major European strategic matter, with the same solemnity with which others speak of Russia or continental defense.
And this is not the first season of this series. Spain formally requested this in August 2023, as part of the toll paid to Junts for its investiture. In July 2025, it tried to sneak it into the Council and received a slammed door from a dozen countries. Now, in September 2026, the matter returns to the agenda of the General Affairs Council on the 22nd, with a delightful nuance: the presidency itself has already clarified that the point is being addressed "without expectation of decision." That is to say, Spain threatens to block the enlargement in a meeting in which, in writing, it is already warned that nothing will be decided. The first threat in history with its built-in denial.
Diplomacy as an extension of Congress
No one disputes Spain's right to defend its languages. What is difficult to explain is why Montenegro has to be the hostage. Montenegro has nothing to do with this: it has been negotiating for years, has closed chapters, has made reforms. And now it discovers a condition that is not in any treaty nor in the Copenhagen criteria: to enter the Union, one must wait for Spain to officialize Catalan.
One imagines the Montenegrin negotiators wondering what reforms they have left to approve when they discover that the last obstacle is not in Podgorica, but in the Congress of Deputies. At this rate, candidates for the Union will have to study not only the community acquis but also the investiture pacts of Spanish governments.
The scene would be comedic if there weren't something more serious behind it: Spain is using a strategic matter of the Union to solve an internal political problem, and our partners do not have to understand it or buy it. Brussels is not the Spanish Congress nor is Montenegro a pawn to settle investiture commitments. The Government, that said, has discovered a truly creative foreign policy formula: exporting to Europe the problems it does not solve at home. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs could be renamed as "Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Internal Affairs that Should Be Resolved in Brussels".
"Brussels is not the Spanish Congress nor is Montenegro a pawn to settle investiture commitments"
A calculation that doesn't add up
The Government's numerical argument sounds compelling until you think for two seconds: 260,000 Montenegrins versus ten million Catalan speakers, three million Galician speakers, and more than a million Basque speakers. But the Union does not distribute turns by the number of diners, but by unanimity, and it has been three years without giving the yes. Furthermore, Luxembourg, a founding member and home to half the Union, does not have Luxembourgish as an official language and survives without trauma. Because, in Europe, a language can have millions of speakers and not thereby become a veto right over the decisions of others. The Government seems to have discovered a new European rule: languages are counted by speakers and vetoes by millions.
Just in case, Spain has offered to pay the 132 million euros that it would cost to translate everything, according to calculations by the Commission itself. It is the gesture of someone who crashes a wedding of a stranger and, upon being discovered, offers to pay for the open bar in order to stay for the dance. It looks generous. It does not fix the fact that the reform still requires unanimity and that a dozen countries, with Germany and France at the forefront, have serious legal and political reservations about the precedent it would set. The Government repeats that about twenty partners do not oppose - but they do not support either, they remain silent to avoid offending - as if in Brussels the majority won and not unanimity, which is precisely the rule that turns this endeavor into a wet paper every time it is repeated.
The taboo that no one wants to open
And there is an even more uncomfortable reason why in Brussels no one wants to delve deeply into this debate: it is not just that the Spanish request seems disproportionate, it is that opening the door to regional languages as a European issue is a garden that almost no other partner wants to step into. France has Breton, Occitan, and its own Basque waiting in a drawer that it prefers to keep closed. Italy has Sardinian and South Tyrolean German. Romania coexists with a Hungarian minority that does not want any precedent, and the Baltic countries have Russian. It must be recognized that a regional language can become a state issue in Brussels and that it is opening a melon that almost no European government wants to cut at its own table. So the uncomfortable silence surrounding Catalan, Basque, and Galician is not just distrust towards Spain: it is collective self-protection. No one wants their own periphery to take note.
The problem of no one believing it
The worrying thing is not that Albares speaks solemnly or that Sampedro warns of consequences that he then does not specify. The worrying thing is that a diplomatic threat only works if it is credible, and this one has not been for three years. Europe, which dominates political representation like no one else, perfectly recognizes when someone is playing a role: it is not necessary for any ambassador to publicly say that the Spanish position is absurd, just the raised eyebrow, the sip of water, the WhatsApp message, and the reading of the Financial Times while the speech lasts.
"The worrying thing is that a diplomatic threat only works if it is credible, and this one has not been for three years."
—What do we do with Montenegro?
—The same as always. Let them continue negotiating.
And no one mentions Catalan again, because in Europe not everything that is useful in Spain turns out to be important outside of it.
A foreign policy of use and throw away
And this comes at a very specific moment: a government that many consider to be amortized in months, with polls already circulating about Sánchez's succession and Vox capitalizing on any crack, from the release of a former ETA leader to the management of the migration crisis in Ceuta. Raising the linguistic flag costs nothing and yields a lot in campaign, although it has never depended on Spain's willingness but on the consensus of twenty-six other countries that continue to say no.
The risk is that European partners start to ask themselves a simple and devastating question: Are these people negotiating with us or speaking to their voters through us? If the answer is the latter, the diplomat stops listening to the words and looks for the fine print.
The Union is going through one of its most delicate moments: it needs defense, competitiveness, energy, secure borders, and to expand towards the Balkans before others occupy that space. But Spain has found something more urgent: three languages. It's like stopping the cannons in the middle of battle to discuss spelling. And the most extraordinary thing is that the Government believes this strategy makes it seem firm. No. It makes it seem isolated, because influence is not about threatening to block, but about others knowing that when Spain speaks, it is worth listening to. If every threat is met with a smile and a sidelong glance, the problem is no longer what Spain wants to block: it's that no one fears it will do so. And there diplomacy enters a category worse than irrelevance: ridicule.
And here is the cost that does not appear in any budget item: credibility is not a renewable resource. It accumulates slowly, with years of coherence, and is spent quickly, with a tray slap every time a European Council is used as a stage for a domestic reckoning. The problem is not what Spain loses today with Montenegro waiting at the door. The problem is what it will be willing to concede, or to remain silent about, the next time it truly needs its partners: in funds, in defense, in migration, in any negotiation where the outcome really matters. A country that exhausts its margin of trust in symbolic gestures for internal consumption finds itself, when the serious moment arrives, with the coldest room and others' patience already spent. The bill for distrust does not arrive at the minute the threat is pronounced; it arrives later, when it is really necessary for someone to believe you and no one remembers how to do it.
Meanwhile, Montenegro continues to wait, without too much hurry. It has discovered that to enter the Union it is not enough to meet the European conditions: first, you have to survive the Spanish conditions, which do not appear in any treaty but, by being repeated, have almost managed to seem like another chapter of the negotiation.
"To enter the Union it is not enough to meet the European conditions: first, you have to survive the Spanish conditions"
And perhaps one day, when I finally enter, someone in Brussels will propose a small celebration with flags and champagne, and someone will ask:
—And the Catalan?
Another diplomat will smile, glance sideways at his neighbor, and will respond:
—Leave it. That is another war.
A war that, fortunately, only exists in Madrid.