Any discussion of an emerging global language has to be seen in the political context of global governance as a whole. In January 1995, the Commission on Global Governance published its re¬port, Our global neighbourhood A year later, the Commission’s co-chairman, Sridath Ramphal, commented (in the paper referred to on p. 19):
There were, for the most part, people who were pleased that the Report had engaged the central issue of a global community, but they took us to task for not going on - in as they thought in a logical way - to call for a world language. They could not see how the global neighbourhood, the global community, which they acknowledged had come into being, could function effectively without a world language. A neighbourhood that can only talk in the tongues of many was not a neighbourhood that was likely to be cohesive or, perhaps, even cooperative... And they were right in one respect; but they were wrong in the sense that we have a world language. It is not the language of imperialism; it is the language we have seen that has evolved out of a history of which we need not always be proud, but whose legacies we must use to good effect.
And at another place, he comments: ‘there is no retreat from English as the world language; no retreat from an English¬speaking world’.