This is BS. English proficiency is very high in The Netherlands and Scandinavia, but people there are not lining up to emigrate.
According to you, who wants to leave and why?
P.S. Raising your kids in a British college? As in a school in Britain?
According to you, who wants to leave and why?
P.S. Raising your kids in a British college? As in a school in Britain?
The Netherlands and Scandinavia accounts for the most of the European global tech output and this is not because Spaniards don't know how to code.
The Dutch and people in the Scandinavian countries are so proficient in English that they do products like the Americans. Knowing English that well makes it possible to understand the global popular culture and think in global scale when doing startups.
There are "only" 379 million people speaking English as a native language.
But there are 1.2 billion people speaking English as a second language, which means that there are more people speaking English that do not actually speak "proper" English, than people speaking it because they were born with it.
The outcome is that
> About 75% of the world's 1.2 billion English speakers are non-native speakers. However, while non-native speakers often understand each other well in English, many native speakers are bad at making themselves understood by non-native speakers.
> "Often you have a [room] full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other, and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them"
The EU exists to matter on the global stage in the age of superpowers, to keep alight the flame of European economic imperialism that was being smothered bu US/USSR (and now US/China). It just so happens that most people here think the best way to go about that, without massive societal upheaval, is to guarantee prosperity for all. There is little “cute” about the project, any “cuteness” you might see is the result of strategic positioning.