It’s more than 40 years since I noticed that concepts have different meanings in other languages. It’s as if each nation carries its distinctive baggage in its collective heads – for example “Chancellor”, “policy” and “accountability”. And the image conjured up by the word “councillor” very much depends on the country’s electoral system and the relative financial power of the municipal system.
When the Wall fell, central and south-east Europeans had to learn what such previously reviled concepts as capitalism and democracy meant – both in practice and in theory. Thirty years on, it’s assumed they know – although political cultures in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania – let alone Italy – do not operate in quite the way of those in NE Europe.
It’s Bulgaria and Romania I know best – from living in them for some 15 years and have tried during that period to convey to my readers a sense of their political culture.
Since 1990 I have lived in about a dozen countries and have tried to keep up with the literature on cultural differences. Indeed earlier this year I did a series of posts on this which I have this week reviewed – resulting in a short (10,000 word) paper which you find here and which I hve tried to summarise thus -
The words and concepts we use have different meanings in different cultural contexts – some subtle, some profound
Until recently, the western interpretation was accepted as the holy grail
The origins of the field can be traced back to Almond and Verba’s “The Civic Culture” of 1963 which looked at various democratic societies.
The subsequent literature uses a variety of terms – political culture, national culture, world values, world views and cultural theory – which may or may not refer to the same phenomenon.
De Hofstede used his base in IBM to carry out survey work on its plants in various parts of the world and popularised in the 1980s a series of measures showing the power of distinctive national contexts
This work was taken up by a variety of consultants to multinational business such as Richard Lewis, Frans Trompenaars, Charles Hampden-Turner and Erin Meyer to reinforce the argument about national traits
Something seemed to happen at the turn of the new millennium. Anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists somehow started to feel that discussions about cultural differences are no longer politically acceptable.
Indeed the World Values Surveys take great care to create clusters which blur national divisions and focus instead on such things as tradition and self-expression
And yet we persist as citizens in maintaining – and arguably accentuating – our cultural identities – see the section on the Scots
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