Things that strike me

Germany has recently had an election. They have a new foreign Minster called, I believe, Guido Westerwelle.

This is a clip out of a recent press conference, in which a question was put to him by the BBC, for, I imagine, the BBC’s audience. If you don’t speak German, the key piece of information from the speech he gave to the BBC journalist was “This is Germany, we speak German here.” He refused to take the question in English and on receiving a translation, he responded that his answer as was it was to his German colleagues, that this was a press conference in Germany and possibly some other time, they might take tea and speak English there. But for now, they were in Germany.

There are over 3000 comments on that clip already, with a split between those who understand how this will be perceived outside Germany (badly) and those who think that Westerwelle is absolutely correct.

I need to put in a disclaimer here. I speak German and French fluently and I’ve never bought the idea that English native speakers are poor at languages. I think they are basically just lazy. However…how I do feel about this?

Well. I see it as arrogant. The BBC is one of the biggest news providers in the world. They decimate the equivalent German agencies in terms of reach. The de facto position of English as everyone’s favourite second language means that if you communicate with the BBC in English, you reach a lot of people.

This guy is scheduled to be Germany’s next Foreign Minister. The press conference wasn’t just for the benefit of the German media. Maybe, 50 years ago when all this would have been in print, you could argue the BBC correspondant should have run the conversation in German and then, in writing a written piece, transferred it in English. But the media in the world has changed and these things go on radio, they go on television.

In this case, he wound up on Youtube. Where is the sense in assuming everything will be nicely redacted without direct quotes any more?

If you want to win hearts and minds, you make some effort to meet your audience part way and the audience in English is much bigger – and in some respects (viz America) much more influential – than the audience in Germany.

I think Guido Westerwelle has been misguided in this. Or else he has been totally arrogant. The net result is that my impression of how German foreign policy will change with his accession to the position of Foreign Minister is coloured by the impression that he is misguided with zero comprehension of what constitutes diplomacy and media-savviness. In other words, his PR people have a load of work to do to undo that mishap.