The Untied States of Europe

By TYLER MARSHALL

May 20, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands —

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and it’s all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss and it’s all organized by the Italians.

--An oft-told European joke

For decades, those struggling to build a united Europe saw the Continent’s rich cultural diversity as an asset in fulfilling their dream.

They noted how a Latin flair for the grand gesture helped generate such unifying symbols as the single lavender-colored passport now issued by all 15 European Union countries. And how British pragmatism helped streamline and decentralize the Union’s formidable bureaucracy.

“Europe’s strength is in its diversity,” argued Richard Hill, a British-born specialist on cross-cultural dynamics who lives in Brussels.

Others are no longer so sure.

Efforts are moving ahead to strengthen the Union, and member states are beginning to hitch their economic fate to a common currency and mull revolutionary political steps such as adopting a single foreign and security policy. But the enormous differences in culture, values and outlook that have separated the nations of Europe for centuries now loom as a large impediment to deeper unity.

Although governments of several EU members devote resources to smoothing relations among linguistic or cultural groups within their countries, the issue of bridging these far greater divisions across the Union is largely ignored.

While in the United States diversity is a gut issue that triggers constant, often heated, public discourse and action, in Europe the architects of integration have hardly addressed the subject.

Stereotypes Thrive

Amid this inaction, raw national stereotypes continue to thrive, cropping up in jokes, offhand comments and easy banter.

As for the once conventional wisdom that Western Europe’s economic and political convergence over the decades would gradually erode many of the differences, it simply hasn’t happened.

“There was the belief that the Common Market, the European Union and [the goal of] unification would lead to a common culture, but it apparently doesn’t work that way,” said Niels G. Noorderhaven, director of the Institute for Research on Intercultural Cooperation, which is based in this picture-book Dutch town where the treaty on European political and economic unity was signed more than four years ago.

Today, Noorderhaven is only one of many who believe the experiment of forging a united Europe will probably fall well short of a “United States of Europe”--in part because of deep and fundamental divisions.

He and others go so far as to argue that there is evidence to suggest the opposite is happening--that cultural differences in Europe may be hardening.

“When you start talking about pulling down political boundaries or becoming part of a greater whole, people have a desire to want to preserve what is unique about themselves,” noted Ralf Dahrendorf, the respected German-born social scientist who is now a British lord and head of Oxford University’s St. Antony’s College. “It’s not surprising.”

It’s also unsettling, because history has proved that convictions of such uniqueness among people in Europe can, with only a little tension, quickly lead to friction and tragedy--as the recent Balkan conflict has underscored.

Some experts argue that either the notion of European diversity or the goal of integration must give.

Divided by History

Dutch academic Geert Hofstede, who studied European cultural differences for U.S. computer giant International Business Machines Corp. in the 1970s and later emerged as one of the leading experts in the field, has argued that Europeans remain inevitably divided by their history.

“Countries have remained separate precisely because there existed fundamental differences in thinking and feeling between them,” he said in a 1993 farewell lecture at the University of Limburg here. “Why do you think the Belgians revolted against the Dutch in 1830? The border between Belgium and the Netherlands revives the border between the Roman Empire and the barbaric Germanic tribes . . . in about 4 AD.”

Hofstede said he found no other instance in the world in which two neighboring countries had so much in common yet still showed such differences in what he termed “their mental programming.”

“The inheritance of the Roman Empire survives in the minds of the populations of the Latin countries,” he said. “The Germanic countries never knew the same centralization of power, nor a universal system of laws, implying greater equality and tolerance for uncertainty.”

Schooling Differs

Relationships between the individual and authority diverge at an early age among Europeans, according to Noorderhaven, with elementary school teachers in northern countries such as the Netherlands and Scandinavia having far less “distance” between themselves and their pupils than their counterparts in Mediterranean countries.

Dutch children, for example, are schooled to keep low profiles and taught that being first at something isn’t necessarily a virtue. The message prepares them for life in one of the globe’s most egalitarian societies.

At home and in school, children in Mediterranean countries such as Greece and Italy tend to be nurtured as special, unique (and, implicitly, superior) individuals.

In Britain, it’s acceptable to finish first--but only if one can do it without seeming to work harder in the process.

For those nurturing the ideal of a united Europe, such diverse values carry important implications. “These cultural differences go very deep, and they aren’t just about culture,” Dahrendorf said. “Attitudes to the economy and to the state are fundamentally different in different countries.”

He described the tough anti-inflation criteria for monetary union written into the Maastricht Treaty as “German culture put into an international treaty,” but he questioned how nations such as Italy or Britain, which have no such allergy to inflation, can settle into such a system. “In Britain, there is a feeling that a bit of inflation may not be such a bad thing.”

In business, cross-border mergers in Europe historically have a high failure rate, usually because of “culture blindness.”

Richard Branson, the British-based entrepreneur, in 1995 gave up a four-year attempt to face down recalcitrant German trade unions and closed his Virgin Megastore music, book and video outlet in Frankfurt, in part because German employees refused to wear T-shirts with the Virgin logo. Since trade union power in Britain was crushed in the early 1980s by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, such confrontations are a rarity in Britain.

At the political level, countries such as Britain and Denmark, with long traditions of relatively non-intrusive government but respect for law, have tended to resist proposals for new regulations from the EU’s executive, the European Commission, in Brussels. Yet they have the best record of implementing those regulations once they are agreed upon.

On the other hand, Belgium--where bureaucracy is oppressive and evading laws and regulations is a national sport--ranks among the quickest to propose new EU rules yet has the worst record in the Union for implementing adopted legislation.

The relative importance of rules and regulations in European countries is sometimes easy to spot: Contrast the picture of the German woman unwilling to cross an empty road until the red light turns green with the Italian taxi driver in Naples who looks on red lights as little more than a suggestion to slow, views stop signs with disdain and considers a right turn from the left lane as a logical, routine maneuver.

Just why the unprecedented mobility of Europeans over the past 40 years--plus close economic and political cooperation--have not been a greater cultural leveler is unclear.

Few Lessons on Unity

But the absence of any moves toward common educational standards or school curricula are cited as one key reason. That children of all ages in EU member states are taught little about the Union, its origins or goals may be another factor, social scientists suggest. That only 3% of EU citizens reside outside their native countries also helps answer why even the crudest national stereotypes remain powerful:

* An American recalled being trapped on a Paris-Brussels express train, already hours late and going nowhere fast, and watching three Britons in the same car come to a slow boil over their plight and eventually spill out their prejudices. “The French and the Belgians don’t know how to run anything,” one said. “What they need is some good German control.”

* At a seminar of former world leaders in Colorado Springs, Colo., last fall, Thatcher, the former British prime minister, commented that she remained apprehensive about reunified Germany despite the country’s four decades of model democracy. “Her natural character is to dominate,” she said of Germany. “There’s something in this that I still fear.”

* And polls conducted by the French Tourism Ministry about travelers’ complaints seemed to tell more about visitors than about France: Germans said they found the French undisciplined, Belgians said they were nice but wrapped up in themselves, the Swiss said they weren’t clean enough, and the British described them as quarrelsome and chauvinistic.

Many argue that, with Europe’s cultural differences so deeply ingrained, the best that advocates of greater unity can hope for is broader understanding of what they face.

Taboo Subject

But social scientists such as Noorderhaven note that within the EU’s formidable bureaucracy of 20,000, not one official studies the impact of the Continent’s cultural diversity. “It’s more or less a taboo within the European Commission that these differences might have an impact,” he said. “Perhaps they see it as a threat to the idea of unification. But if you try to deny them, then the trouble really begins.”

He cites a highly successful student exchange program that underwrites foreign studies for 150,000 high school and university students as the best EU weapon to foster awareness of diversity.

“It’s a chance to study material with a European dimension,” he said. “People also really get exposed to life in another culture, and, through that experience, they become aware of their own values and prejudices. This is the best-spent money in the European Union.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

What Europeans Think of Others

The study was based on face-to-face interviews with 1,000 people in each country. Each person was shown a list of countries and for each item was asked to choose three countries for which that item was most applicable and three countries for which the item was least applicable. The numbers below show the percentage of people who named each country.

Inhabitants of this country are friendly, cheerful

Top 5

Italy: 49%

Spain: 46%

France: 25%

Greece: 23%

Portugal: 12%

Bottom 5

Ireland: 13%

Japan: 14%

Britain: 19%

Germany: 21%