No, it is not as simple as you seem to put it. Egnlish is not german, period. If someone wants to prosper in germany, they better learn german.
There’s Ireland.
Ireland and Malta have English as one of the official languages, and for Ireland English is even the more important one of the official languages.
But that's it.
Hrmmm. What language do you think people who work in the EU government use when communicating with each other? Here's a hint, it's not Portuguese, Finnish, Dutch, French or Italian.
It's definitely not German (a few historical reasons for that...).
The term lingua franca means "bridge language." That's what English is in the EU.
> ...The future is sign language I suppose.
Or, Europeans can continue doing what they already do when conducting business or dealing with tourists, which is...speak English when dealing with people from other countries.
> English is the lingua franca of Europe.
These two sentences contradict each other: Integrating people implies that these people better learn and speak the native language of the country that they are in instead of English (in the EU of course except for Ireland and Malta, the only two EU countries where English is an (but not the only) official language).
I manage anyway, but im sure this unnecessary friction is one of the factors in reducing entrepreneurship in Germany (my native tongue isn’t English but like everyone these days I learned English very early in life and still speak it better than German).
Ultimately it would be better for Germany to reduce friction for economic activity as much as possible. As others said you can register a company in Estonia without being fluent in Estonian. There is nothing inherently different about German or Germany except that they don’t care as much as Estonia does to encourage (or at least not discourage) entrepreneurship.
In general I wish “old Europe” would have been subjected to the same requirement for reform and modernization as the former communist countries were as a condition when they joined the EU. And generally for some Germans to drop the attitude that they’re better than Eastern Europeans - nobody is suggesting this with malicious intent, it’s meant to make things better for everyone in Germany - including Germans themselves.
Based on the demographics, most European countries are going to have to start importing young people (immigrants) if they want to keep their social welfare systems up for the next generation. It’s a well known fact that first generation immigrants often have the highest rates of entrepreneurship.
Yet, unlike the US, which was created around the idea of being a nation of immigrants, Europe does a really bad job of integrating people (not unique to Europe, it’s really the default state of humans).
English is the lingua franca of Europe. To make it hard for the people most likely to start a business (immigrants) to do so, is astonishingly short sighted. Where do you think the tax money that pays for the salaries of the 5 million German government workers rubber stamping all these documents comes from?