OSNews

irbis, you seem to have a positive view of the benefits of a neutral international language for Europe. Although I don't think anybody is denying the political difficulty implementing this, hopeful people like you can make the impossible possible. The fall of the Berlin wall seemed impossible, as did the creation of the European Union, the adoption of the Euro and the metric system, yet with time they have been widely adopted (although admittedly the metric system took a lot longer). So keep your hope alive!
I think it is absolutely critical that international communication in Europe respects the linguistic diversity within Europe. It is not fair that the language of 12% of Europe's population becomes the lingua franca for all. Additionally, the number of people who speak English as a second language (and the highest estimates put this figure at less than half the population) would include only the intellectual elite in Europe, that is business people, academics, politicians, diplomats, high-ranking public servants etc. This figure is higher in urban areas than in rural areas.
With regards to your estimation of the number of Esperanto speakers, Linstedt's estimate might be nice and round (1000 native speakers, 10,000 fluent speakers, etc.) but it's certainly not based on much more than a guess. It's certainly not true that 10% of fluent speakers of Esperanto are native speakers, and my experience is that native speakers comprise only a tiny proportion of Esperanto's speaking population - we are talking about an interesting phenomenon, but certainly nothing more. While there is little doubt that there are around 1,000 native speakers of Esperanto (it wouldn't be hard to form a rough list), there are far more than 10,000 fluent speakers of the language, and far more than 100,000 who can speak it actively. Esperanto speakers are concentrated in Europe (especially Eastern Europe), China, South America, the Middle East and parts of Africa, so the proportion of speakers would be higher in Europe.
I agree that it doesn't matter whether Interlingua or Esperanto is widely used in Europe, if it is to be a neutral language. Unfortunately, Esperanto is the only non-ethnic language to have gained speakers in the hundreds of thousands. There would be only a few hundred fluent speakers of Interlingua, a thousand at the most. Volapuk never gained a wide following either, and it took only a few years for most of the Volapuk clubs in Europe to adopt Esperanto (Volapuk being an a priori language). Having attempted to learn both Interlingua and Esperanto, I am fluent in Esperanto but I found Interlingua harder for a range of reasons (admittedly, I only spent about ten hours trying to learn Interlingua). My basic comparison is that Interlingua has many irregular verb forms, declensions, a more complex alphabet and other irregularities that Esperanto does not have. It's main advantage seems to be that clever native speakers of Latin-based languages can understand the language without having to learn it (and this is true, I am a native French speaker and could understand Interlingua fairly well). On the other hand, learning to speak and write the language is more difficult than Esperanto. Additionally, native speakers of Germanic, Slavic, Finno-Yugraic languages and so on do not have this advantage. I would recommend Interlingua and Esperanto to anyone, but they have different purposes - Interlingua is useful to communicate widely to speakers of Romance languages, whereas Esperanto is useful as a universal second language. Having said that, if Interlingua for some reason became more popular than Esperanto, I would probably support Interlingua instead of Esperanto.

Ideas don't have to have a good chance of success to be worthy of support, but if they promote economic and social justice, language diversity, understanding between people, respect for cultural diversity and harmony then I will certainly support them.