I should preface my comment that community orientation, respect, and ethnicity/respect for your heritage are big parts of the area i’m from.
I’ve worked in Western Europe. I don’t know why but there seems to be a lot of taxes for everything. You have to get govt permission for everything. People seem to rely on the govt to provide things rather than have some agencies fill niches that aren’t filled by the govt (for example I saw signs like don’t help homeless people, the govt is helping them).
I’m from an Asian country, we don’t have much tax, we don’t rely on the govt for anything (we can’t), and we have many NGOs. I think it’s similar in America.
As an Asian, there are a few things I can note about Europeans.
Europeans seem to have lost their sense of traditions, to me as an Asian it doesn’t make sense since keeping our traditions and values is a huge part of our culture and society. Americans do this too but at least they seem to retain some notion of their ethnicity like they recognize their heritage is Irish or German or Chinese or Native or whatever.
Europeans also accept blame for bad things they did in the past (which is a good thing) but I think they can go overboard to compensate for that (to their detriment). I don’t think accepting blame for things in the past is a thing that’s done in Asia; we rewrite history instead. It would help if we acknowledged what we did and can have better relations with others moving forward.
Europeans identify more with nationality than ethnicity. For example, someone from Czech Republic moving to France is considered French. In North America I think they would be considered Czech-French. In Asia they would be considered to be a Czech expat living in France. Our ethnicity matters a lot.
In North America and Europe for some reason people refer to elders by their first name? We would never in 1000 years think of doing something like that, it’s considered extremely rude. We either use their surname (like Mr.X) or Uncle/Auntie.
In terms of politics, both US and Europe seem quite extreme to me. Europe seems very liberal, you can do what you want, there doesn’t seem to be any boundaries and people will tolerate anything. In the US people are extremely polarized with politics, both left and right. I’ve never heard of many other countries where there seem to be so many people per capita with conspiracy theories or violence with protests or lack of support for people (like old people or mental health issues, there’s no community support, there’s so much individualism). People seem to just accept things that seem unthinkable in a developed country (like texas not giving water to workers in heat).
In North America and Europe for some reason people refer to elders by their first name? We would never in 1000 years think of doing something like that, it’s considered extremely rude. We either use their surname (like Mr.X) or Uncle/Auntie.
In America at least, this is a change in the past 100 years for us, too. If you look at older American media–TV shows, books–you’ll start to see depictions of children calling older people/neighbors “Mr. Lastname” or “Mrs. Lastname” and such. Like, if you watch some American black and white shows with kids in it, you’ll see “appropriate child behavior” of that era modeled, and it’s pretty heavily focused on kids being cute and obedient and chirping “Hello Mr. Smith!” or whatever at the mailman, and absolutely not using first names casually with adults or adults in authority. Heck, I think even older episodes of Sesame Street modeled it, and Mr. Rogers.
I realize there’s no reason for non-Americans to be up to date with older American media, but there was absolutely a time within living memory when calling an older adult by their first name casually was pretty rude. I was born in the 1980s, and the shift away from being overly formal with older adults kinda happened somewhere around there because I remember both the “old” and the “new” being modeled around me.
I’m not sure all the cultural reasons behind the shift–there’s probably a reason for it, I’m just not educated enough in that realm to know what it is for certain.
Or maybe I’m slightly too young. Perhaps someone from Gen X will understand what was going on there better, they would’ve been slightly older than me and have better memories of that period.
I may be misinterpreting their comment but I initially read elder as “elderly people” and not just “people older than them” and that the point was about how adults refer to them by first name unless it’s in a professional environment (e.g. doctor or government title)
For kids at least formality still mostly applies, I’m Gen Z in northeast US and I grew up calling every adult by Mr./Ms. X, with the only exceptions being family. This could be different in other parts of the US though, I don’t mean to generalize.
Could you elaborate on the lost sense of traditions?
Also I don’t agree with you about the ‘nationality not ethnicity’ thing, but that really may vary, and I don’t think it would be possible to debate that, as we’d first have to define the difference between nat. and eth., they seem to be ~the same thing to me.
Ethnicity generally includes your skin colour in the description whilst nationality has none of that.
Though I don’t agree that someone who just simply moves to another country changes nationality, it’s a tricky definition as it can be confused with citizenship but it’s more to do with long you stay there and if you embrace the culture.
we’d first have to define the difference between nat. and eth., they seem to be ~the same thing to me
Nationality is the nation you are a citizen of. Ethnicity is the ethnic group(s) you identify with.
In Europe, these are largely the same. The only multi-ethnic countries I can think of are Russia, the UK and Spain.
But in most parts of the world, one country would have multiple ethnic groups, and one ethnic group may be spread across multiple countries. For example, China has Han people, Mongols, Muslims, Tibetans and so on. Of these, the Mongols also live in Mongolia and Russia, the Tibetans also in India and Nepal, and so on.
Again, in Europe it seems to be common for people to identify primarily with their nation (except Catalans, Scots, etc.) But elsewhere, since the borders were often drawn by outsiders, people often identify more with their ethnic group. This unfortunately leads to a lot of conflict.
I’ll copy my comment from the other question:
I should preface my comment that community orientation, respect, and ethnicity/respect for your heritage are big parts of the area i’m from.
I’ve worked in Western Europe. I don’t know why but there seems to be a lot of taxes for everything. You have to get govt permission for everything. People seem to rely on the govt to provide things rather than have some agencies fill niches that aren’t filled by the govt (for example I saw signs like don’t help homeless people, the govt is helping them).
I’m from an Asian country, we don’t have much tax, we don’t rely on the govt for anything (we can’t), and we have many NGOs. I think it’s similar in America.
As an Asian, there are a few things I can note about Europeans.
Europeans seem to have lost their sense of traditions, to me as an Asian it doesn’t make sense since keeping our traditions and values is a huge part of our culture and society. Americans do this too but at least they seem to retain some notion of their ethnicity like they recognize their heritage is Irish or German or Chinese or Native or whatever.
Europeans also accept blame for bad things they did in the past (which is a good thing) but I think they can go overboard to compensate for that (to their detriment). I don’t think accepting blame for things in the past is a thing that’s done in Asia; we rewrite history instead. It would help if we acknowledged what we did and can have better relations with others moving forward.
Europeans identify more with nationality than ethnicity. For example, someone from Czech Republic moving to France is considered French. In North America I think they would be considered Czech-French. In Asia they would be considered to be a Czech expat living in France. Our ethnicity matters a lot.
In North America and Europe for some reason people refer to elders by their first name? We would never in 1000 years think of doing something like that, it’s considered extremely rude. We either use their surname (like Mr.X) or Uncle/Auntie.
In terms of politics, both US and Europe seem quite extreme to me. Europe seems very liberal, you can do what you want, there doesn’t seem to be any boundaries and people will tolerate anything. In the US people are extremely polarized with politics, both left and right. I’ve never heard of many other countries where there seem to be so many people per capita with conspiracy theories or violence with protests or lack of support for people (like old people or mental health issues, there’s no community support, there’s so much individualism). People seem to just accept things that seem unthinkable in a developed country (like texas not giving water to workers in heat).
In America at least, this is a change in the past 100 years for us, too. If you look at older American media–TV shows, books–you’ll start to see depictions of children calling older people/neighbors “Mr. Lastname” or “Mrs. Lastname” and such. Like, if you watch some American black and white shows with kids in it, you’ll see “appropriate child behavior” of that era modeled, and it’s pretty heavily focused on kids being cute and obedient and chirping “Hello Mr. Smith!” or whatever at the mailman, and absolutely not using first names casually with adults or adults in authority. Heck, I think even older episodes of Sesame Street modeled it, and Mr. Rogers.
I realize there’s no reason for non-Americans to be up to date with older American media, but there was absolutely a time within living memory when calling an older adult by their first name casually was pretty rude. I was born in the 1980s, and the shift away from being overly formal with older adults kinda happened somewhere around there because I remember both the “old” and the “new” being modeled around me.
I’m not sure all the cultural reasons behind the shift–there’s probably a reason for it, I’m just not educated enough in that realm to know what it is for certain.
Or maybe I’m slightly too young. Perhaps someone from Gen X will understand what was going on there better, they would’ve been slightly older than me and have better memories of that period.
I may be misinterpreting their comment but I initially read elder as “elderly people” and not just “people older than them” and that the point was about how adults refer to them by first name unless it’s in a professional environment (e.g. doctor or government title)
For kids at least formality still mostly applies, I’m Gen Z in northeast US and I grew up calling every adult by Mr./Ms. X, with the only exceptions being family. This could be different in other parts of the US though, I don’t mean to generalize.
Could you elaborate on the lost sense of traditions?
Also I don’t agree with you about the ‘nationality not ethnicity’ thing, but that really may vary, and I don’t think it would be possible to debate that, as we’d first have to define the difference between nat. and eth., they seem to be ~the same thing to me.
Ethnicity generally includes your skin colour in the description whilst nationality has none of that.
Though I don’t agree that someone who just simply moves to another country changes nationality, it’s a tricky definition as it can be confused with citizenship but it’s more to do with long you stay there and if you embrace the culture.
Nationality is the nation you are a citizen of. Ethnicity is the ethnic group(s) you identify with.
In Europe, these are largely the same. The only multi-ethnic countries I can think of are Russia, the UK and Spain.
But in most parts of the world, one country would have multiple ethnic groups, and one ethnic group may be spread across multiple countries. For example, China has Han people, Mongols, Muslims, Tibetans and so on. Of these, the Mongols also live in Mongolia and Russia, the Tibetans also in India and Nepal, and so on.
Again, in Europe it seems to be common for people to identify primarily with their nation (except Catalans, Scots, etc.) But elsewhere, since the borders were often drawn by outsiders, people often identify more with their ethnic group. This unfortunately leads to a lot of conflict.