The year is 1981, and the young Vincent Merk has just arrived in Amsterdam from his home city of Strasbourg. The Frenchman is there to spend two years as a postgraduate student at the university in the city. Full of enthusiasm for all things Dutch, Vincent Merk wants to forget his French heritage and to be, as he remembers it, “more Dutch than the Dutch”.
Born near Strasbourg, Merk has always been a dedicated internationalist. While at school, he did an exchange year with a family in the US. He enjoyed learning English and, when he began a public administration degree at his local university in France, he took Dutch as a third (and German as a fourth) language. Thinking about those early days in the Netherlands, he squirms slightly with embarrassment. “At first,” he says, “I was … denying my French origin. I wanted to be completely local. I wanted to be a cool local and hang around like a Dutchman.”
He quicky learned that trying too hard to fit into the local environment wasn’t cool. He also learned that adjusting to a new cultural environment didn’t mean he had to reject his French heritage. Four decades later, and now a university lecturer in intercultural skills, he says these lessons are as valid today as they were back then.
Intercultural pioneer
Merk describes himself as having been something of a pioneer in the early 1980s, before the EU’s famous student exchange programme Erasmus started in 1987. He had won a scholarship in the Netherlands that was part of a series of bilateral cultural agreements between France and the Netherlands. When he went to study in Amsterdam, he was full of idealism about what life would be like in this new country. In truth, in terms of intercultural knowledge, he quickly realized that he didn’t know much and simply became an “autodidact in learning about the Dutch way of life,” he says.
“I guess nowadays, you’d say I was an expat or a migrant. This was a time when there were not many international students. And there were no real courses on intercultural communication and management. Yes, in this sense, I was a pioneer.” It was during this time that Merk started to grasp the challenges around adapting to what he calls “new cultural contexts”. It also marks the starting point of his career in intercultural training.
His experience from those early days in Amsterdam is central to the advice he gives to today’s students heading abroad to live and work: adapt, but at the same time, be yourself and remember your roots. “On the one hand, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’,” he says. “On the other hand, don’t try to jump the gun and become a local too quickly. It will come eventually.”
Merk’s job at the Eindhoven University of Technology is to teach intercultural communication skills. “I’m a skills trainer and an intercultural management lecturer,” he says. “Essentially, my job is to train the engineers of the future to be able to communicate and work in a diverse and international environment.” Subjects of his courses range from planning and organizing to presentation skills and running meetings, always in the context of an intercultural and international setting. He helps students develop their empathy and adaptation skills and respect for “the other”. “I teach all the skills that you want an international engineer to possess before they go abroad. It’s preparation … for the future. We make them employable in an international context.”
Doing business with France
As well as teaching at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Merk has for decades been an independent trainer and consultant for doing business with France. This, he says, “is my other hat”. Though he avoids cultural stereotypes, he says there are some common characteristics to be aware of. “The French can be flexible. They might come up with last-minute solutions and they often like to improvise,” says Merk. This, he explains, can sometimes create challenges for Dutch or German business partners. “They have to accept that their French counterpart might come up with brilliant last-minute ideas that do not fit completely with the planning-oriented approach of Germans,” he warns. But the result can be an innovation that leads to a happy agreement for both sides.
In addition to this flexibility and creativity, it is important to understand that France is still in some ways a fairly hierarchical society. “If you come from a less hierarchical society, such as the Netherlands or Scandinavia, you will not understand at first how the French hierarchy works.” This is related to the famous grandes écoles, the selective institutes of private higher education that produce a so-called elite class of French citizens who invariably get the best jobs. “You need to be aware of the grandes écoles when doing business with the French,” he says. “These people have their own networks; they know each other and which schools they all went to. As an outsider, you can’t necessarily break into the networks, but it’s very important to know about them.”
Another challenge can be what he terms “time perceptions in France” — at which point Merk again stresses (and often repeats) that, for this interview, he needs to “generalize a bit”. Typically, French people are more flexible than Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians with regard to time. That said, it’s “not as extreme as is the case with some people around the Mediterranean, South America or India.” Nevertheless, Merk says that it is important to be aware that, “in general, French people are not as punctual as Germans.”
Red lines
Such flexibility extends to red lines, which mark the borders of what can or cannot be discussed or actions that can or cannot be taken. German or Dutch business people are more likely to respect these red lines, whereas the French might see them more as unclear lines. “For the French, there is a grey area in which they can be creative in proposing to do something. In contrast, the [more typically monochronic] Germans or Dutch might see this as crossing a red line of what is permitted, what is feasible or what is commonly done.”
Merk himself jokes that he crossed a red line 40 years ago. After arriving in the Netherlands back in 1981, he quickly realized he had crossed an imaginary line when he rejected his French origin and tried to be “more Dutch than the Dutch”. Today, he embraces both his French and his Dutch identities. “It took time,” he says. “But there’s no doubt: I’ve become a local. And I now have the best of both worlds.”