Stop Generalizing About Europe

A good and bad article all in one.

It's good, because it addresses some common misconceptions.

It's bad, because it implies that you can't generalize about anything nor anyone. Obviously, there are - broadly - common traits in Europe. The point is fine, to the extent that the broader generalizations you make, the more people will be described incorrectly - and you cite some great numbers to emphasize that.

The post makes it sound as if there is some scientific constant for maximum population size you can generalize about.

I think a lot of us need to admit that the author is right. I, for one, do generalize about Europe. I think of social democracies with high taxes. I think of arcane rules and regulations to start and run a business. And most of all, I limit the term "Europe" to include about 20 of the 50 European countries. I will never think of Russia as a European country. If I entered a contest and won a vacation to "Europe" - and the destination turned out to be Albania - I'd be thinking "Wat?!? That's not Europe."

From the outside, the term "Europe" is a confusing morass of distinctions. There's Europe, the Eurozone, the EU. The UN also has a geoscheme that is different than all three of those. Hell, half of Americans probably don't know the difference between England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom.

> The Europe that Americans refer to does mostly use the

> Euro, have better-distributed wealth, plenty of consumers,

> and ambivalent feelings toward entrepreneurs in most of

> its parts.

Well, no it doesn't. Italy and Greece are extremely different to Scandinavia. At least regarding to things like temperament and culture. They are much more like Bulgaria and Turkey, though they may not really be willing to admit that. You can't really sell to Italians by operating in Denmark. That's not to say that you can sell to Italians by operating in Bulgaria either. Especially true for things like enterprise software, eg. accounting systems. "Better distributed wealth" and "use the Euro" do not alleviate the law and language bariers. What these two things do help about is only not having to carry 10 different currencies in you pocket. Which is not at all true if you have to visit one of the non-Euro states.

There is though one type of company that greatly benefits by the situation. And that is the international mega-corp. They can afford to produce or provide services from Bulgaria and sell to the whole world. IBM, HP, VMWare, Ubisoft, Crytek and on and on... All have offices in Sofia, Bulgaria. This is a result of the non-uniform wealth distribution. They can sell to Western Europe and U.S.A while being close to them, using workforce that speaks English and has tradition in technical sciences, while at the same time being relatively cheap.

As a result, Bulgarians don't have ambivalent feelings toward enterpreneurs at all.

So no, you can't generalize. You will be wrong every single time.

Disclaimer: As it should be obvious by now, I am a Bulgarian.

If you want Americans to stop making ridiculous generalizations about Europe, the way to do it is by similarly pledging to avoid the sort of ridiculous generalizations about America made by some Europeans - not by arguing about relative levels of heterogeneity.

Personally, I suspect certain differences between American regional subcultures - for instance, attitudes about the proper role of government in society - are broader than those you'll find between European countries.

> ambivalent feelings toward entrepreneurs

I haven't found this to be the case in the Nordic countries, at least. You can't walk around a corner without tripping over a startup incubator, and there's a lot of interest, among both techies and the public (and the government), about where the "next Nokia", "next Spotify", "next Rovio", etc. are going to come from. Germans also lionize their famed "Mittelstand", which is not made up of Valley-style startups, but is still definitely entrepreneurial.