I've noticed that outside France and Germany it seems to be the defacto second language. Smaller countries that speak languages like Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Ic

I've noticed that outside France and Germany it seems to be the defacto second language. Smaller countries that speak languages like Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic etc just don't have the network effect so they also learn English. Then people in the larger countries like France and Germany tend to want to converse with the most people. The UK is large, and all the smaller countries have ESL speakers, so they learn it to, and so on and so forth. Weirdly despite a lot of global speakers I didn't meet many Spanish speakers in Europe (outside Spain). (Though it is funny to have someone chastise you for only speaking English then blank out when you start speaking Spanish back at them.)