Recent reports of the declining popularity of language study in England will cause William Hague some concern. Britain’s foreign secretary is already worried about the diplomatic and commercial prospects of future generations of monoglot Britons.

Still, he ought not to worry as much as ministers in countries where language capabilities are inadequate and, at the same time, national constitutional structures militate fiercely against finding a remedy. In these countries, serious political pressure and funding may resolve the first problem. Only shrewdness and patience can reckon with the second.

The race to pivot towards Asia is instructive here. The UK and France, for example – both of which are unitary or quasi-unitary in structure, run by a supreme central government – should be able to pivot to Asia more rapidly than, say, the German federation. For all of Germany’s linguistic acumen in European tongues (the country’s Asian-language capabilities are currently negligible), the education function is constitutionally distributed among the 16 federal states. And so we have a strategic paradox that is unfamiliar to unitary countries and their leaders: the capital (in this case, Berlin) sets the foreign policy direction of the country but does not have complete control over the development of the talent required to deliver its international goals.