To be fair, I must admit that I generally view people who can't speak English at least half decently as being somewhat uneducated(well, people from industrialized nations where a decent education system exists that is).
And I don't see what the big deal is, things are much easier with one language that most people can at least understand, if not speak fluently, and English works just fine for me, and it's not like speaking a bit of English now and then is gonna make me suddenly forget how to speak Swedish.
German or French would probably have worked fine as well, but that's not how it turned out, and who cares, go to school, learn English, congratulations, you can now make yourself understood in most any first world nation.
Heh, it's always funny to bump into French tourists in Stockholm, when they realize I don't understand French they try desperately to speak English, but they tend to suck so much at it, I have to focus one word at a time and try to puzzle the whole thing together, and eventually I can usually point them in the right direction, whereas the "uneducated Americans" can have their directions in a matter of seconds