Does the world need Esperanto?

"[Esperanto] was very much the child of its times, like Theosophy, perhaps, or even Communism, which explains both its rapid spread in the early part of the 20th century as well, I think, as its eventual failure, if that's the right word, to live up to the hopes of the hopeful [Dr Ludwik Zamenhof], the founder of the movement.
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It's also unsurprising that after the nightmare of the first world war, so many people around the world were inclined, in an era of modernism, to imagine peace in universalist terms.

A century later, we live in a rather different world, one where diversity (in dialects, ethnicities, customs, beliefs) is widely celebrated as a very fine thing, while anything that smacks of a grand narrative (a universal truth, a universal movement, anything hegemonic) is regarded with suspicion, although not universally, naturally."
(Robert Dessaix, 21 January 2006, ABC Australia)

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