In the news a couple of days ago, they interviewed a German woman about the crisis in Greece and how she felt about German taxpayers bailing out the failed Greek economy. One of the things she pointed out was “The southern Europeans are not as disciplined as us northern Europeans”. I was really astonished by this statement, believing it was undoubtedly a racist remark. But then I reassured myself that the channel I was watching is famous for its political correctness, and would never indulge in bigotry.
Questions:
Do you consider it racist to say northern Europeans are more disciplined than southern Europeans?
If we look beyond the issue of racism, was the German woman factually correct in her statement?
Beyond that, I’d day that *generally *speaking, this statement tends be accurate for a given definition of disciplined. Most Northern European cultures, and particularly Scandinavian ones, (Iceland’s banking debacle notwithstanding) have a long social tradition of placing value on characteristics like saving, thrift, punctuality and precision. Many southern European cultures tend to be more prone to spending, irresponsible partying, lateness, and tend to have a “meh, good enough” attitude in many affairs. Of course there are any number of exceptions to those broad generalities.
And with anecdote: my Italian girlfriend was just saying this morning she didn’t want to live in northern Italy because “everyone there is too rules-conscious - it’s too near Germany”. Nor the far south of Italy because “it’s lawless - too much crime and corruption”. I.e. where the mafia come from.
Similarly my German friend, after living in the UK for five years, found that the lack of rules consciousness she had picked up in England was getting her in trouble. She was walking down the street and had a guy in a car, who wasn’t a cop, on a completely different street to her, screech to a halt several yards from where she was walking just to shout out of his car window to admonish her for jaywalking.
And us Brits are positively Germanic compared to the Irish.
I’ve been meaning to start this thread myself for ages. Unfortunately, whoever made this statement on German TV will largely be ostracised and branded a racist. I say “unfortunately”, because any Northern European with any sort of familiarity of living or working in Southern Europe knows that the statement is unequivocally true. There are significant cultural differences between the “Germanic” countries in the north, and the Latin countries in the south. Even the Italians recognise this. The closer you get to the German border, the greater their reputation for punctuality and hard work. From talking to many northern Italians, they don’t even recognise southern Italians as being their fellow countrymen.
For instance, an anecdote:
For the last eight months I have been living and working in Northern Italy. By Italian standards, as mentioned, northern Italy has its shit together. All the industry and wealth generating businesses are based up here. Large businesses have to be “bribed” by the Italian government to open factories in the south. When the bribes stop, the factories shut and move back up north.
Yet even here, compared to the UK, the shit that goes on is unbelievable. I worked for six months without receiving a pay cheque. I got my MEPs involved eventually (I’m on an EU funded project) and even that didn’t help. My MEPs eventually contacted a European commissioner in charge of fraud and graft prevention to look into the matter. They started putting pressure on my department to pay up, sending increasingly hostile and aggressive letters to the head of department. I eventually threatened to quit, take legal action and sue for constructive dismissal. My head of department took this as a personal affront and we nearly had a fist fight in his office. From talking around, things like this are not out of the norm. People routinely get paid late.
What looks, from the perspective of a holiday maker as an endearing “laid back attitude” becomes absolutely fucking impossible to handle when you live here and are used to things “just working” and everybody doing their jobs correctly.
It’s not racism if it’s actually true. But even if untrue, it would still not be racism, because southern Europeans and northern Europeans are still the same race (for most definitions of “race”).
In my own experience (I lived 14 years in Greece and 22 years in Austria), your statement is very obviously true. There is a very high awareness of that discrepancy in both cultures, and both of them consider their mentality to be morally superior to the other.
They say or imply things like this all the time, so I don’t see it as surprising at all. I don’t think anyone in Southern Europe bats an eye when they do say such things. They’re probably more annoyed by the “serve-me-now” attitude of legions of vacationing Germans who go there for the beaches.
she should just get more specific and say “nowadays Germans are more organized than Southern Europeans”. Just like the people of Northern Italy say similar things about the more “southern European” people of Southern Italy.
I think the “nowadays” part is important, because you can find times in British history when English people were pretty organized too. But, sic pasit.
And I am really astonished that you thought it was racist. You could have thought "gee whiz, I didn’t know that southerners are less disciplined ----I need to learn more about the cultural differences between Southern Europe and Germany. "
Facts are facts—and there is nothing racist about pointing them out.
It’s a very, very sad aspect of our modern world that people are afraid to say out loud that some cultures are better than others.
Heh, my Italian boss jokes that my problems were nothing. He’s still waiting to be reimbursed by Ecole Polytechnique from when he was working there. The debt’s so old it’s still in Francs.
More anecdotes from where I work: our office has a single exit. Between the exit and our working area is a server room. This is the one room in the place that would most likely catch fire. No problem, there appears to be a fire exit at the other end of the corridor. How do we open it? First you need a key to the administrator’s office. Those are kept inside a locked drawer, so you need a key for that first. But that’s also inside a locked room, so you need another key just to get to the locked drawer. Once you’re inside the office, the key is kept inside another locked cupboard, full of unmarked keys. By chance, if you manage to find the right key, you’ll open the fire exit to reveal a brick wall on the other side. Perhaps we could smash a window? No, all the windows have fitted metal bars. Apparently you can open the bars somehow, but again, these are locked. But that’s nothing compared to the mathematics building across the road, where the fifth floor fire exit just opens up into a fifty foot drop: they never completed the stairs for the fire escape!
Apparently, there is such a thing as a fire inspection in Italy, but they’re so lax that the university just shuts down any condemned building for a year, moves everybody around to other previously condemned buildings, and then waits a year to reopen the building.
I literally cannot conceive this happening anywhere in Northern Europe, especially in a public building in what is their most well known university.
I don’t blame the woman at all. The states of Europe are now financially locked as the United States are, the difference being it is illegal for American states to spend into the red. Perhaps the inefficiency of governments in the southern countries are more to blame than the generic ‘those people’, but it is the electorate that allows bad government to continue and the Germans must pay for it.
The main point of irritation is precisely that word: “better”
Maybe it should not be a matter of personal offense to say that a socially conditioned inclination to discipline, punctuality and attention to detail is* better** for business***. Or that it propitiates a better standard of living. Or that a strong tradition of fair rule of law is better at protecting people’s rights.
But IMO the hackles get raised when someone seems to have either implied, or inferred, that it means therefore everyone else must be disorderly, lazy, easily corrupted and reckless in character; or that it means being ethnoculturally “germanic”(or whatever) is in itself just flat-out “better” than being “mediterranean” (or whatever the contrast gropup).
Sad human experience makes it just too easy to imagine the words “…and therefore everyone should do as WE say” or “…and therefore THEY can’t help but be always behind” coming after it, even if that was not what was meant.
Not true. This is all the fault of the euro. Germany has long been an export driven economy. But if they’re going to depend on exports, they need other nations willing to import their goods; in Germany’s case, that’s mainly the rest of Europe. So long as nations like Spain, Italy, and Greece are willing to run trade deficits to buy up Germany’s output, Germany is happy.
But now, because of this debt crisis, countries like Greece are locked into the euro and can’t do the things that need to be done, like devalue. Their monetary policy is now dominated by German interests - Germany’s banks have high exposure in all these floundering countries in southern Europe and are facing huge haircuts. But the Germans feel that’s unacceptable, and their intransigence is eventually going to collapse the euro.
Greece and Italy have been basket cases long before the Euro was ever thought of. If it wasn’t the Euro, it would have been something else that tipped them over the edge.
