The polite but awkward squad?

All countries are obviously different – but this has not stopped academics from amusing themselves with long,  intense and generally incestuous debates about a particular country’s “exceptionalism”. At one time, it was about the United States (“why has socialism never taken hold?” “Why does religion have such a hold?” – if not “how has the country become so dominant?”); at another, Germany (whose historians had a great debate in the 1980s about the “Sonderweg “ (“how did such a cultured nation land up with the Nazis?”)

Britain (no longer “great”) has long been credited with being the first to experience the Industrial Revolution and, if not to invent “democracy”, at least to bring forward the modern version of “liberal democracy”. In that sense Britain inarguably has a distinctive - if not quite “exceptional” - history.

In European Union circles, it certainly has the reputation of being an “awkward” partner which always had a “semi-detached” attitude to the continent. Although the powerful concessions it won from its partners suggested it should be the last country to leave, most people were not surprised when it embraced Brexit…

But the question I want to explore is the relatively neglected one of what exactly accounts for this “awkwardness” of behaviour – after all, the Brits are equally well known for their politeness. One argument indeed is that it is this very politeness which explains the Perfidious Albion reputation “England” at least (as the Imperial overlord) has.

But first, a personal note. In the mid-1970s I was, by virtue of my position in one of Europe’s largest Regions, exposed for the first time to the dynamics and discourse of international gatherings. And I found myself quickly being among the first to try to puncture the rhetoric of particularly my southern European colleagues. I’ll never forget the subsequent semi-ostracization I suffered at a mountain retreat in Sicily as a result of my brutal assault on what I saw as the empty discourse of the participants.

In the 1980s, by then more experienced, I was lucky enough to be a member of the British delegation in the Council of Europe – the local government section – and learned to cultivate alliances with my Dutch, French, Belgian and German colleagues……But I realised that the impatient readiness to speak one's mind was a well-known British feature – matched only by that of the Dutch.

Since de Hofstede we are all, of course, familiar with the literature on the culture of geography - whose principal exponents are de Hofstede, Trompenaars and Inglehart. Richard Lewis’s When Cultures Clash (1996) is my favourite go-to reference whenever the discussion turns to questions of cultural difference – as is Richard Nisbett’s Geography of Thought (2003) who argues that -

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken. 

East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Causal attributions emphasize the context. Social factors are likely to be important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning.

But it’s more recently that many of us came across this devastating Anglo-EU translation guide which takes some common phrases Brits use; how our European partners generally understand them; and what the Brits really mean by them. 
For example - when we say "very interesting", foreigners think we are impressed. What we are actually thinking is that it's a lot of nonsense!

Similarly, when we say "with the greatest respect", we are actually thinking "the man's an idiot" whereas the non-English speaker assumes that he is being listened to.

"Incidentally, by the way" actually means "this is the primary purpose of the discussion" – but is thought by the unfortunate foreigner to mean that the issue is of no significance.

For those who deal with Brits, the table is essential preparation and, who knows, sharing it with them might open up new friendships.

All this is familiar ground……..good for conversation at parties and even in many business schools. But few people bother to go beyond this and try to explore why it is that the Brits behave this way….
It is to that question I will turn in the next post….

Further reading

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/03/britains-naive-exceptionalism/

https://www.cer.eu/insights/british-and-their-exceptionalism

http://www.unice.fr/crookall-cours/iup_cult/_docs/_RUGM_Chapter-05.pdf

At home in one’s Past (Demos report)

Discourse Analysis of a Michael Gove speech

The British Self and Continental Other

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-uk-never-felt-at-home-in-eu/

French, german and British perceptions of the Turkish bid for EU membership

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/how-i-learnt-to-loathe-england

Bucharest Flames

Romanian politicians don’t do resignations. When, a few years back,  one of their previous Ministers who had migrated to Brussels as a Euro MP was one of three Euro MPs to be caught in a sting, the other two quickly resigned but not Adrian Severin…..When Victor Ponta became Romania’s Prime Minister some 3 years ago, he was almost immediately discovered by a global scientific journal to have committed extensive plagiarism for his PhD. He shrugged that off – although it had immediately led to resignations of German and other national Ministers guilty of such transgressions. But not in Romania…..Even being indicted a few months ago by the country’s powerful anti-corruption brigade (DNA) didn’t seem to rattle him – only one of the charges would have been liable to remove him.

But Ponta duly went (pushed it appears) this week as public anger at political shamelessness reached boiling point - first from the death of a police outrider escorting a the Ministry of Interior’s car which had no right for such protection but then, at the weekend, from almost 50 deaths in a night-club which, like all such places in the country, had absolutely no fire or safety precautions…… The “Sarah in Romania” blog can always be relied upon for a caustic comment on such matters – and her latest comment doesn’t disappoint..….

This time their seems some focus for policy change to the anger….the country now has a President who has used at least the language of radical change (although the jury must remain out on whether he has the capacity to deliver); and the street protests which were normally led by a party political element look this time to have a slightly more hopeful base in the citizens……but so-called “civil society” (about which one does not hear so much these days) has never really taken off in Romania – despite the extensive funding it got from external sources…..

There simply is no moral authority in the country – the Orthodox Church is one of the richest organisations (as in Greece) taking tithes from poor people; running money-spinning projects (such as TV and Radio); priests are civil servants their salaries paid by the state; and the Church is now vying with Ceaucescu’s construction megalomania with the scale of the new Cathedral it is starting to build in Bucharest – whose grounds already groan under the number of churches….. 

I had a little soiree at my flat in Sofia this evening (coincidentally the night the Brits celebrate the night of Guy Fawkes’ failure to blow up Parliament in 1605!) at which I discovered that the Bulgarian Orthodox Church enjoys no such advantages here….Why the difference, I wonder – although the two neighbouring countries – as I’ve frequently noted in the blog - are SO different (in all respects) that I shouldn’t have been surprised….

Cultural differences

I have quite few websites about the EU on my favourites bar – but don’t often access them since they are either too technical or too predictable. I’ve just looked at the two which are in my “links” on this site and have to wonder why I put them there! Neither gives any real sense of what’s going on in the EU. But I’ve just hit (through the Social Europe site) a blog which seems genuinely informative about a range of EU activities; gives links for further reading; and which resists the temptation of self-indulgent raving to which too many blogs succumb (“yours truly” excepted, of course!)
I mentioned recently “The geography of thought” – the book which reports on the experiments which take the writing of people like de Hofstede and Trompenaars about differences in cultural behaviour a stage further – to suggest that Europeans and Asians literally see the world differently and think differently. By coincidence I read in parallel Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France – which is a delightful dissection of the mental and behavioural DNA of the Parisian bourgeois. She uses the country’s interesting mix of Catholicism and Revolutionary principles to offer an explanation of why the English (I use the term for obvious reasons!) and the French find it so difficult to understand one another – whether in matters relating to infidelity or diversity. Have a look at some of the 77 reviews on the Amazon site to get a sense of her argument.
The differences between Bulgaria and Romania is a fascinating issue for me. The Danube does not just act as a geographical but as a cultural and even physiognomic (?) boundary. Witness the way the voice timbre of women drops and their “sini” (glands) grow in the 2 minutes it takes to cross the great bridge which connects Giurgiu from Russe! Another difference I noticed the other day is that all the plastic Bulgarian pepper pots seem to be recyclable (the tops unscrew to allow you to top up) – whereas the Romanian ones are not! Very significant! I was also interested to read that the Romanians share with the Serbians a feature which I find most annoying – a search for blame and an almost sadistic delight in pointing out apparent contradictions in their interlocuteur’s conversation. A classic example was this week when I told my partner about the crack which had developed in the mountain house toilet. “No”, I replied, “I remember very clearly flushing the toilet after I had turned off the water in January; and not only did I put salt in the toilet water remaining but I remember squeezing the water in the toilet basin with a cloth!” “But”, Came the suspicious query, “Why did you need to add salt if you had squeezed the water out?”! I rest my case!
And let's not talk about the various ways people conduct arguments - with the tentative explorative style fitting very ill with the aggressive debate which seems to characterise what we might call Latin nations???