Eurohierarchy

More ethnography. In all cases, emphasis added.

Some background.

See this.

See the table.  All consistent with popular national stereotypes.

Abstract:

We theorize that people’s perceptions of national hierarchy are aligned not only with longstanding cultural schemas of development but also with schemas of cultural wealth. We use data from the Nation Brands Index surveys to examine how European publics’ evaluate their own country and other European countries across many attributes. We find that European publics rank northwest European countries highest on developmental attributes and southwestern European nations highest on cultural attributes, while they rank eastern European countries lowest in both categorizations. Moreover, we show that publics’ rankings of countries load to two related yet distinct factors, the contents of which closely reflect schemas of development and cultural wealth. This evidence suggests that these two distinct schemas are simultaneously present in Europeans’ perceptions of national hierarchy.

Main text:

How nations perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others is especially important because such perceptions are a primary motivating factor in geopolitical military activity and trade wars among countries that have interest in boosting their status position (Melegh 2006)...

…that European publics think of an intra-European hierarchy of nations that favors western and northern countries and disfavors eastern and southern ones. 

The question is - why? My “take” on it is that stereotypes have some basis in reality and therefore Southern and Eastern Europeans need to take a hard, cold look at themselves and ask why they are not feared or respected, why they are treated with contempt. They need to improve themselves and stand stall; merely complaining about the attitudes of others is insufficient.

Among Europeans, perceptions of a developmental hierarchy of nations traces to widely disseminated historical narratives of a north-to-south gradient of societal advancement, with the origin of “civilization” imagined as beginning first from the seat of Greek, and later, Roman, empire in southern Europe (Antohi 2000). With the economic, military, and technological ascendency of western European countries beginning in the 17th century, the perception of a north-to-south civilization slope was gradually replaced by a perceived east-to-west developmental spectrum that closely tracks to the invention of “Eastern Europe” (Melegh 2006; Wolff 1994). 

“Invention”????????????????

One piece of evidence for the longstanding prevalence of such hierarchical views of different European nations is the use of categorical language to classify societies and places, such as the historically common labels of “savage” versus “civilized” peoples or “primitive” versus “modern” nations (Swindle 2019). In certain periods of Europe, pejorative adjectives like “barbaric,” “heathen” or “backward” have been ascribed to Slavic nations, places that fell outside of the Roman Empire and also to Eastern Orthodox religious adherents (Melegh 2006; Thornton et al. 2015:299–301; Wolff 2004). This classification practice continues to be widespread today, although generally with different adjectives (e.g. “less developed” versus “developed”).

Owing to our interest in beliefs about European national hierarchies, we restricted our analysis to data collected in the eight European countries—France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom (UK)—about their perceptions of the 23 European countries…

Turkey??????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As measured by average country ranking, European publics placed Germany at the top of the regional hierarchy of nations, followed by Sweden and France. The top ranked countries for each index were: Sweden for Governance and People, Switzerland for Immigration & Investment, Germany for Products, France for Culture and Italy for Tourism. Romania was the lowest ranked country overall, followed by Lithuania, and Estonia. Each of the bottom ranked countries is located in what has historically been referred to as eastern Europe, while all the top ranked countries are located in western Europe. These data offer further evidence of an entrenched and durable east-to-west perceptual slope of societal hierarchy among European publics.

Those peoples ranked low need some hard introspection.

The average standard deviation (SD) was 7, which suggests that Europeans in different countries relied on common evaluative criteria when ranking their continental peers. Austria received the most consistent ranking (SD=4.1), followed by Hungary (SD=4.5). The least consistent rankings were given to Russia (SD=13.9), which had a high average ranking of 44.5 on Culture, but the lowest average ranking of all ranked European countries on Governance at 11.1. We observed several other notable inconsistencies in countries’ rankings across indices that indicated a possible bifurcation in Europeans’ perceptions of national development and culture. Spain and Italy received above average rankings on the attributes comprising the Tourism and Culture indices, but below average rankings on the Governance index. Conversely, Nordic countries tended to rank high on all but the Tourism and Culture indices.

Average Ranking Versus Self-ranking

In conclusion, we contrast in Table 8 how publics rate themselves with how other countries rate them. Our analysis shows that self-evaluations evinced an almost universal positive bias.

 But, but, but…I thought Nordics were non-ethnocentric individualists?

Publics were most likely to over-rate themselves on the People and Culture indices and were least likely to over-rate themselves on the Governance index. 

CONCLUSION

Our analyses indicate that Europeans’ evaluations of countries tended to cluster around two latent concepts, the contents of which closely relate to cultural schemas of “development” and “cultural wealth.” 

Our results showing a unique perception of a culturally based national hierarchy, on the other hand, supporting literature arguing about the importance of cultural wealth in nations’ public reputations. While we found that European publics perceived northwestern countries to be the most developed and many southwestern countries to be the most culturally rich, they viewed eastern countries lowest in both national hierarchies. 

That is consistent with the stereotypes that inform my own views on this subject, as discussed at this blog.

But preserving or constructing distinctive elements of perceived national culture requires a careful balancing act. Countries of central and especially eastern Europe must balance seeking acceptance into European proper while still being distinctive enough to attract tourists and foreign direct investment in a global marketplace. A recent Polish marketing slogan reflects this: “Poland is part of the West and also understands the East” (Olins 2006).

We also found that European publics ranked their own nation much more favorably than did their regional neighbors. 

The petty nationalists should be happy.

All in all, this paper's data conform to my views.

A practical note related to this topic:

The High Trusters have had a good run of preeminence for several centuries but it is now clearly coming to an end. In America, they are the obsequious junior partners to their Jewish masters; in Europe, they are destroying the continent through the promotion of Afro-Asiatic migration. Unfortunately, supine and disorganized Southern Europeans and rowdy and disorganized Eastern Europeans are not prepared to pick up the slack and resist. The only thing I see feasible at the current time is cooperation between the best elements of all three groups. But for this to happen the High Trusters need to dampen their over-blown self-importance and recognize that their time alone at the top is over.