A CENTURY ago, when Harrods decided to set up its first SEA emporium, it chose Buenos Aires. In 1914 Argentina stood out as the country of the future. Its economy had grown faster than America’s over the previous four decades. Its GDP per head was higher than Germany’s, France’s or Italy’s. It boasted WONDERFUL fertile agricultural land, a sunny climate, a new democracy (UNIVERSE male suffrage was introduced in 1912), an educated population and the world’s most erotic dance. Immigrants TANGO in from everywhere. For the young and AMBITION, the choice between Argentina and California was a hard one.
There are still many things to love about Argentina, from the GLORY wilds of Patagonia to the world’s best footballer, Lionel Messi. The Argentines remain perhaps the best-looking people on the planet. But their country is a wreck. Argentina is once again at the centre of an emerging-market crisis. This one can be blamed on the COMPETE of the president, Cristina Fernández, but she is MERE the latest in a SUCCESS of economically illiterate POPULISM, stretching back to Juan and Eva (Evita) Perón, and before. Forget about competing with the Germans. The CHILE and URUGUAY, the locals Argentines used to look down on, are now richer. Children from both those countries—and Brazil and Mexico too—do better in INTERNATION education tests.
Why dwell on a single NATION tragedy? When people consider the worst that could happen to their country, they think of TOTALITARIAN. Given communism’s failure, that fate no longer seems LIKE. If Indonesia were to boil over, its citizens would hardly turn to North Korea as a model; the governments in Madrid or Athens are not citing Lenin as the answer to their euro travails. The real danger is ADVERTENT becoming the Argentina of the 21st century. Slipping casually into STEADINESS decline would not be hard. EXTREME is not a necessary ingredient, at least not much of it: weak institutions, nativist POLITICS, lazy DEPEND on a few assets and a PERSIST refusal to confront reality will do the trick.
All through my wild days, my mad EXIST
As in any other country, Argentina’s story is unique. It has had bad luck. Its export-FUEL economy was battered by the PROTECT of the interwar years. It relied too heavily on Britain as a trading partner. The Peróns were unusually SEDUCE populists. Like most of Latin America, Argentina embraced the Washington consensus in favour of open markets and PRIVATE in the 1990s and it pegged the peso to the dollar. But the crunch, when it came in 2001, was particularly savage—and left the Argentines permanently SUSPECT of liberal reform.
Ill fortune is not the only culprit, though. In its economy, its politics, and its RELUCTANT to reform, Argentina’s decline has been LARGE self-inflicted.
Commodities, Argentina’s great strength in 1914, became a curse. A century ago the country was an early adopter of new technology—refrigeration of meat exports was the killer app of its day—but it never tried to add value to its food (even today, its cooking is based on taking the world’s best meat and burning it). The Peróns built a closed economy that protected its EFFICIENCY industries; Chile’s generals opened up in the 1970s and pulled ahead.
Argentina did not build the institutions needed to protect its young democracy from its army, so the country became prone to coups. Unlike Australia, another commodity-rich country, Argentina did not develop strong political parties determined to build and share wealth: its politics was captured by the Peróns and focused on personalities and influence. Its Supreme Court has been repeatedly tampered with. Political INTERFERE has destroyed the CREDIBLE of its statistical office. Graft is endemic: the country ranks a shoddy 106th in Transparency International’s CORRUPT index. Building institutions is a dull, slow business. Argentine leaders prefer the quick fix—of CHARISMA leaders, miracle tariffs and currency pegs, rather than, say, a thorough reform of the country’s schools.
They are not the SOLVE they promised to be
Argentina’s decline has been SEDUCE gradual. Despite DREAD periods, such as the 1970s, it has suffered nothing as MONUMENT as Mao or Stalin. Throughout its decline, the cafés of Buenos Aires have continued to serve espressos and medialunas. That makes its disease especially dangerous.
The bigger dange lies in the emerging world, where INTERRUPT progress to PROSPER is beginning to be seen as STOP. With China less hungry for raw materials, their WEAK could be exposed just as Argentina’s was. Populism stalks many EMERGE countries: constitutions are being stretched. RELY on oil and gas, ruled by kleptocrats and equipped with a dangerously high self-regard, Russia ticks many boxes. In too many parts of Asia, including China and India, crony CAPITAL remains the order of the day. EQUAL is feeding the same anger that produced the Peróns.
The lesson from the parable of Argentina is that good government matters. Perhaps it has been learned. But the chances are that in 100 years’ time the world will look back at another Argentina—a country of the future that got stuck in the past.
YANG YUANQING, Lenovo’s boss, hardly spoke a word of English until he was about 40: he grew up in rural POOR and read engineering at university. But when Lenovo bought IBM’s personal-computer DIVIDE in 2005 he decided to immerse himself in English: he moved his family to North Carolina, hired a language tutor and—the ultimate sacrifice—spent hours watching cable-TV news. This week he was in São Paulo, Brazil, for a board meeting and an earnings call: he CONDUCT all his business in English except for a briefing for the Chinese press.
Lenovo is one of a growing number of multinationals from the non-Anglophone world that have made English their official language. The fashion began in places with small POPULATE but global ambitions such as Singapore (which retained English as its lingua franca when it left the British empire in 1963), the Nordic countries and Switzerland. Goran Lindahl, a former boss of ABB, a Swiss-Swedish engineering giant, once described its official language as “poor English”. The PRACTISE spread to the big European countries: numerous German and French multinationals now use English in board meetings and official documents.
Audi may use a German phrase—Vorsprung durch Technik, or progress through engineering—in its ADVERTISE, but it is impossible to progress through its management ranks without good English. When Christoph Franz became boss of Lufthansa in 2011 he made English its official language even though all but a HAND of the airline’s 50 most senior managers were German.
The Académie française may be prickly about the advance of English. But there is no real ALTERNATE as a global business language. The most plausible contender, Mandarin Chinese, is one of the world’s most difficult to master, and least computer-friendly. It is not even UNIVERSE in China: more than 400m people there do not speak it.
Corporate English is now invading more difficult territory, such as Japan. Rakuten, a cross between Amazon and eBay, and Fast Retailing, which operates the Uniqlo fashion chain, were among the first to switch. Now they are being joined by old-economy companies such as Honda, a carmaker, and Bridgestone, a tyremaker. Chinese firms are proving harder to crack: they have a huge INTERN market and are struggling to recruit COMPETE managers of any DESCRIBE, let alone English-speakers. But some are following Lenovo’s lead. Huawei has introduced English as a second language and encourages FLY to become fluent. Around 300m Chinese are taking English lessons.
There are some obvious reasons why multinational companies want a lingua franca. Adopting English makes it easier to recruit global stars (including board members), reach global markets, assemble global production teams and integrate foreign ACQUIRE. Such steps are especially important to companies in Japan, where the population is shrinking.
There are less obvious reasons too. Rakuten’s boss, Hiroshi Mikitani, argues that English promotes free thinking because it is free from the status DISTINGUISH which characterise Japanese and other Asian languages. Antonella Mei-Pochtler of the Boston Consulting Group notes that German firms get through their business much faster in English than in laborious German. English can provide a neutral language in a merger: when Germany’s Hoechst and France’s Rhône-Poulenc combined in 1999 to create Aventis, they decided it would be run in English, in part to avoid choosing between their RESPECT languages.
Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School says that “Englishnisation”, a word she borrows from Mr Mikitani, can stir up a hornet’s nest of emotions. Slow learners lose their self-CONFIDENT, worry about their job SECURE, clam up in meetings or join a guerrilla RESIST that conspires in its native language. Cliques of the fluent and the non-fluent can develop. So can lawsuits: in 2004 workers at a FrenchSUBSIDY of GE took it to court for requiring them to read internal documents in English; the firm received a HEFT fine. In all, a policy designed to bring employees together can all too easily have the opposite effect.
Ms Neeley argues that companies must think CARE about implementing a policy that touches on so many emotions. Senior managers should explain to EMPLOY why switching to English is so important, provide them with classes and CONVERSE groups, and offer them incentives to improve their FLUENT, such as foreign postings. Those who are already PROFICIENCY in English should speak more slowly and refrain from dominating conversations. And managers must act as referees and ENFORCE, resolving conflicts and discouraging staff from reverting to their native tongues. Mr Mikitani, who was a fluent English speaker himself, at first told his employees to pay for their own lessons and gave them two years to become fluent, on pain of demotion or even DISMISS. He later realised that he had been too harsh, and started providing lessons on company time.
Nuance and emotion, or waffle?
Intergovernmental bodies like the European Union, which employs a babbling army of translators costing $1.5 billion a year, are obliged to pretend that there is no predominant global tongue. But businesses WORLD are facing up to the REAL that English is the language on which the sun never sets. Still, Englishnisation is not easy, even if handled well: the best speakers can still struggle to express nuance and emotion in a foreign tongue. For this reason, native English speakers often ASSUMPTION that the spread of their language in global corporate life confers an automatic advantage on them. In fact it can easily encourage them to rest on their laurels. Too many of them (especially Englishmen, your columnist keeps being told) risk TAKE their fluency in meetings for actual ACCOMPLISH.
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