this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

I'll copy my comment from the other question:

I should preface my comment that community orientation, respect, and ethnicity/respect for your heritage are big parts of the area i'm from.

I’ve worked in Western Europe. I don’t know why but there seems to be a lot of taxes for everything. You have to get govt permission for everything. People seem to rely on the govt to provide things rather than have some agencies fill niches that aren’t filled by the govt (for example I saw signs like don’t help homeless people, the govt is helping them).

I’m from an Asian country, we don’t have much tax, we don’t rely on the govt for anything (we can’t), and we have many NGOs. I think it’s similar in America.

As an Asian, there are a few things I can note about Europeans.

Europeans seem to have lost their sense of traditions, to me as an Asian it doesn’t make sense since keeping our traditions and values is a huge part of our culture and society. Americans do this too but at least they seem to retain some notion of their ethnicity like they recognize their heritage is Irish or German or Chinese or Native or whatever.

Europeans also accept blame for bad things they did in the past (which is a good thing) but I think they can go overboard to compensate for that (to their detriment). I don’t think accepting blame for things in the past is a thing that’s done in Asia; we rewrite history instead. It would help if we acknowledged what we did and can have better relations with others moving forward.

Europeans identify more with nationality than ethnicity. For example, someone from Czech Republic moving to France is considered French. In North America I think they would be considered Czech-French. In Asia they would be considered to be a Czech expat living in France. Our ethnicity matters a lot.

In North America and Europe for some reason people refer to elders by their first name? We would never in 1000 years think of doing something like that, it's considered extremely rude. We either use their surname (like Mr.X) or Uncle/Auntie.

In terms of politics, both US and Europe seem quite extreme to me. Europe seems very liberal, you can do what you want, there doesn't seem to be any boundaries and people will tolerate anything. In the US people are extremely polarized with politics, both left and right. I've never heard of many other countries where there seem to be so many people per capita with conspiracy theories or violence with protests or lack of support for people (like old people or mental health issues, there's no community support, there's so much individualism). People seem to just accept things that seem unthinkable in a developed country (like texas not giving water to workers in heat).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Could you elaborate on the lost sense of traditions?

Also I don't agree with you about the 'nationality not ethnicity' thing, but that really may vary, and I don't think it would be possible to debate that, as we'd first have to define the difference between nat. and eth., they seem to be ~the same thing to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ethnicity generally includes your skin colour in the description whilst nationality has none of that.

Though I don't agree that someone who just simply moves to another country changes nationality, it's a tricky definition as it can be confused with citizenship but it's more to do with long you stay there and if you embrace the culture.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you elaborate on the lost sense of traditions?

i mean the things that are associated with their home culture is lost, like an associated religion, wedding traditions, etc.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

ethnicity and nationality is not the same btw

"Ethnic membership tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language, dialect, religion, mythology, folklore, ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art, or physical appearance. Ethnic groups may share a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, depending on group identification, with many groups having mixed genetic ancestry."

nationality is just where you live, you might not have heritage to that place

[–] emergencyfood 2 points 1 year ago

we'd first have to define the difference between nat. and eth., they seem to be ~the same thing to me

Nationality is the nation you are a citizen of. Ethnicity is the ethnic group(s) you identify with.

In Europe, these are largely the same. The only multi-ethnic countries I can think of are Russia, the UK and Spain.

But in most parts of the world, one country would have multiple ethnic groups, and one ethnic group may be spread across multiple countries. For example, China has Han people, Mongols, Muslims, Tibetans and so on. Of these, the Mongols also live in Mongolia and Russia, the Tibetans also in India and Nepal, and so on.

Again, in Europe it seems to be common for people to identify primarily with their nation (except Catalans, Scots, etc.) But elsewhere, since the borders were often drawn by outsiders, people often identify more with their ethnic group. This unfortunately leads to a lot of conflict.

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