3 ms·
In my experience the typical perception is that you’re X when your parents and grandparents are all X, hopefully also great grandparents. There is a lot more m
by Swizec 6y ago
In my experience the typical perception is that you’re X when your parents and grandparents are all X, hopefully also great grandparents.
There is a lot more melting recently. Europe historically has been pretty big on cultural identity because everyone had/has a grudge with their neighbors for trying to assimilate them at the edges.
Slavs for example (I’m from Slovenia) can trace or Slavic lineage all the way back to the 600’s and the fact we haven’t been assimilated into German or Italian despite being part of their countries for centuries is a point of pride.
There is still a recognized small German minority in Slovenia from back in the 1300’s when they tried to deal with the slavic problem by encouraging people to go settle in our area, which was part of the Holy Roman Empire but we of course wanted to keep it Slavic.
To be fair, as late as the 1940’s the germans were trying to germanize the slavs.
Some of these grudges are very fresh and ongoing. Look at how the Catalonians are fighting against being called Spanish
- barry-cotter 6y ago> There is a lot more melting recently. No, there really isn’t. It may look like there is because of the post WW2 ethnic cleansing leading to more or less monoethnic monolinguistic nation states but the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were always indifferent to what the peasants “were“, like the peasants themselves, mostly. People cared a lot more about religion than ethnicity almost everywhere in Europe until after the French Revolution. The tiny urban, bourgeois or well traveled population were the exception. Everybody else mostly just rolled with it. Most French people didn’t speak a Romance dialect modeled after the Parisian one until well after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
- Swizec 6y agoI meant more like since schengen and easy travel within the EU. If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from. The bigger question is whether we want to.
- type0 6y ago> If we keep this up, in a few centuries we might get to a point similar as USA where your identity doesn’t depend on which country your grandma comes from. As a fellow European I don't think it's going to happen. Not in a hundred years. We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening. We might get to the point where people will define themselves with dual nationalities, like Polish-German, but this we see even today.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago>We speak different languages that alone prevents it from happening.// I recall some people from Netherlands getting upset that English was becoming quite prolific to the point that University courses are sometimes held in English. I think this happens to some extent in other countries in EU too? Germany, Spain, and France seem highly unlikely to adopt English without a fight - not sure about other countries. But I wouldn't rule out some movement towards greater dominance of major languages.
- type0 6y agoYes University courses are held in Englilsh, mainly because of Bologna Process. Some companies in non English speaking countries do conduct their business in English, but to the jump from that to some sort of dissolution of national borders and melting of national identities is no where to be seen. EU will never be a United States of Europe of any kind, no matter how much French and German politicians are wishing that.
- Ekaros 6y agoI worked in company with culture which could be considered international and working language was English. But still when locals were alone they switched to local language... Ofc, when non-natives were present it was English. I don't see European nation states going anywhere.