Stop Generalizing About Europe

When Americans talk about Europe, they talk about Europe, this is the problem. Someone who knows Europe geographically and politically often means with "Western Europe" the European countries with a strong economy. (Why would you exclude UK?) Others might use this term to refer to all countries west of Poland. What I am saying is: even the term "Western Europe" is really unprecise.

And even if you only talk about Western Europe without UK, it's still a very heterogenous landscape. Please, why do you think the EU exists? Why do you think two World Wars basically originated in Western Europe? Germany is really different from the Netherlands. Everything is different, houses look different, cities look different, job market is different, just about everything is different.

I'm sorry, but almost everytime I hear Americans use the term Europe, the sourrounding statement is almost always wrong. To illustrate it a bit: imagine I would make statements about the continent America like: in America xxx. There is almost no chance that such a statement holds any informational value... :-)

True, you're generalizing when you say "Europeans are...", but you would also be generalizing if you said "Americans are...", "San Franciscans are...", "Rich people are...", "Programmers are...", and so on and so forth for any group of people you can think of. Talking about a group of people is generalizing, and generalizing is a necessary part of life, because despite the fact that doing so may cause untrue things to be said about certain people, it is also true that generalizations are true about more people than they are untrue about. That's why they're called generalizations.

People say "vc's in the bay area understand startups." Is this universally true? Of course not. But am I ignorant for saying so? Not in the slightest, because in more cases than not, it is true.

So yeah, the guy's statements might not be holistically accurate, but who's are? He's offering guidlines, and I believe that's fair.

Disclosure: I have not yet had the pleasure of visiting Europe. It is possible that my opinions might change after experiencing life there firsthand.

I was taught at my (European-based) business negotiation course that such generalizations as the ones mentioned in the article, are a basic American negotiation strategy to undermine European confidence. I was told that Americans are aware (most of the time) that their behaviour is received as ignorant and rude. After reading the article, I'm back to wondering whether my business negotiation professor was just prejudiced or is there a grain of truth in what he told me?

You were implying that CA and LA have more varied internal culture than do Bulgaria and Romania, else you wouldn't have made the comparison - it would have been redundant to what loxs had said.

> Former USSR countries are mostly unified by the same language, religion (or lack of) and culture

You are a bit wrong there. Consider the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Culturally, genetically and linguistically they have almost nothing in common with their USSR neighbours. And pretty much the only thing share by the three states are the geographic location, some common lineage, and the fact that they were part of the USSR for about 45 years.

For example, Estonia considers itself to be a Nordic country; its inhabitants are genetically Nordic (and often as blonde as Scandinavians) compared to the Balts of the other two states, and its language is closely related to Finnish. (During Soviet occupation, the Estonian language was dominated by Russian, which was made compulsory in schools; after the USSR collapsed, Estonian has blossomed, especially among youths; I believe the same thing happened in the other Baltic states.) Latvian and Lithuanian share a common linguistic heritage, but they are different, and Latvians and Lithuanians cannot understand each other (unlike, say, Italians and Spanish people, or Scandinavians). Genetically Latvians and Lithuanians are closer to Estonians and Finns than to Russians.

The Baltics is just one example. For examples of other countries that seem weirdly out of place in the traditional US image of the Soviet Union, look at the Central Asian ex-Soviets states, such as Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

> They used to be the same country

The Soviet Union was a union of countries -- many of them forcibly invaded and taken over by the Soviets in the wake of WW2 -- and everything (culture, language, religion, etc.) reflects this fact. The Soviets ruled everything, including the economy, from Moscow, but each of the member states very much preserved their own sense of identity; it was a union, but not a "unified" one. While the Soviet Union may have superficially resembled the US, it was always a very different beast.