Naw, that’s more like LA vs SF when talking about Californians. Different beliefs, social behavior, dialects, history, architecture, etc.
You guys really need to get away from lumping Americans in the same bin in conversation. The US is huge and covers more diverse cultures in a single state than most people understand. We’re friends with Europeans, regardless of what country you’re from. We love you guys! Stop falling victim to propaganda and remember that we are allies.
I’m from Connecticut, now living in Germany. You know how small towns develop strong rivalries with their neighbors? Europeans have been doing that (and making requisite dialect, ritual, and ingredient changes) for centuries longer than Americans have. That’s one way of distinguishing cultures, but others are through different migration or conflict patterns, both of which Europe has also been practicing for centuries. Americans do have European friends, but probably not the ones living in rural communities where things get very different. I met a guy from Germany recently (not Bavaria), and in his village, they playfully beat you with sticks for being unmarried at 30. The group I was with (all also non Bavarian Germans) were more surprised than I was, because that sounded insane to them.
Depending on location, Germans: drink beer or wine; eat sausage or fish; drink tea or coffee (no tea drinkers in the US afaik); are totally cool with nudism or really not; embrace their dialect, try and get rid of it, or insist that it’s the best dialect; are very Catholic, very Protestant, or not really any religion; have been coexisting with immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Turkey for 80 years, or have only
received refugees in the last decade; are very into trendy, liberal foods, are very into guns, beer, and meat in a conservative way, or are very into guns and veganism in a leftist way. I could go on, but I already got carried away.
It really is the case that on a large enough scale (both places are imo large enough), you’ll get the whole range of humans. Give them 1-4 millennia of coexisting with poor communication ability, and they’ll differentiate themselves more than they will in 500 years of relatively good communication. Is it not evidence that European cultures have diverged more than American cultures that the Latin spoken in different areas of Europe got so heavily influenced by different cultures, that it’s now several mutually unintelligible languages? (The difference between a language and a dialect is nebulous, but even though someone from Worcester, MA and someone from New Orleans might not be able to understand each other, they are considered mutually intelligible).
What the US does have going for it in this regard is openness towards other cultures in the tiny things. I have no idea whether xenophobia is a bigger problem here or there in general, but a school in my state recently decided to stop singing Christmas carols in school, because about 25% of their students don’t celebrate Christmas. My in-laws literally didn’t understand why those two things are correlated.
As a Virginian living in Sweden, I think it’s actually true that that the US is more culturally homogeneous than Europe. Someone from the East Coast and the West Coast still watches the same TV shows, goes to the same restaurants, and votes for the same president. It’s hard to tell the differences in accent between the West Coast and the East Coast.
There’s probably a bigger cultural difference between Richmond, VA and Lynchburg, VA (home of Liberty University), than there is between Richmond and Seattle.
In Europe, you can go 100 miles and find people who watch different shows, have different political parties, and speak an entirely different language.
The US was founded all roughly at the same time under the same government, with minor differences based on immigration and former colonial history. In contrast, Europe is dozens of different countries with widely different histories and language groups.
Other countries, like Russia and China probably have more cultural diversity than the US due to their languages and histories, but not as much as the EU.
One of the goals of the EU is to bridge these gaps between countries so that business can be conducted across political and language barriers, to make Europe have as much unified strength as the US. The EU has a larger population than the US, and nearly as much GDP, but you couldn’t tell on the global stage, because it’s not a unified force.
I’m from CT living in Germany here and thank you. I’m so ashamed of Americans who are clearly ignorant and condescending to others about their ignorance. The person who thinks Alabama is a different planet needs to take a slow drive around the poor side of upstate New York, because it’s just an urban/rural divide, which Europe also has (though what that divide means will be different in every country- it took a while for me to understand middle class and rural culture, because in CT, the rural areas are either in the bottom or top decile of wealth).
Köln to rural Bavaria seems to me like about as big a divide as between San Francisco and distant suburbs of Dallas to me. I’ve been to all of those places, and to be fair, Texas (and Bavaria) are different from my typical experiences, but that level of difference is actually normal.
Naw, that’s more like LA vs SF when talking about Californians. Different beliefs, social behavior, dialects, history, architecture, etc.
You guys really need to get away from lumping Americans in the same bin in conversation. The US is huge and covers more diverse cultures in a single state than most people understand. We’re friends with Europeans, regardless of what country you’re from. We love you guys! Stop falling victim to propaganda and remember that we are allies.
That’s more like Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.
I’m from Connecticut, now living in Germany. You know how small towns develop strong rivalries with their neighbors? Europeans have been doing that (and making requisite dialect, ritual, and ingredient changes) for centuries longer than Americans have. That’s one way of distinguishing cultures, but others are through different migration or conflict patterns, both of which Europe has also been practicing for centuries. Americans do have European friends, but probably not the ones living in rural communities where things get very different. I met a guy from Germany recently (not Bavaria), and in his village, they playfully beat you with sticks for being unmarried at 30. The group I was with (all also non Bavarian Germans) were more surprised than I was, because that sounded insane to them.
Depending on location, Germans: drink beer or wine; eat sausage or fish; drink tea or coffee (no tea drinkers in the US afaik); are totally cool with nudism or really not; embrace their dialect, try and get rid of it, or insist that it’s the best dialect; are very Catholic, very Protestant, or not really any religion; have been coexisting with immigrants from Italy, Greece, and Turkey for 80 years, or have only received refugees in the last decade; are very into trendy, liberal foods, are very into guns, beer, and meat in a conservative way, or are very into guns and veganism in a leftist way. I could go on, but I already got carried away.
It really is the case that on a large enough scale (both places are imo large enough), you’ll get the whole range of humans. Give them 1-4 millennia of coexisting with poor communication ability, and they’ll differentiate themselves more than they will in 500 years of relatively good communication. Is it not evidence that European cultures have diverged more than American cultures that the Latin spoken in different areas of Europe got so heavily influenced by different cultures, that it’s now several mutually unintelligible languages? (The difference between a language and a dialect is nebulous, but even though someone from Worcester, MA and someone from New Orleans might not be able to understand each other, they are considered mutually intelligible).
What the US does have going for it in this regard is openness towards other cultures in the tiny things. I have no idea whether xenophobia is a bigger problem here or there in general, but a school in my state recently decided to stop singing Christmas carols in school, because about 25% of their students don’t celebrate Christmas. My in-laws literally didn’t understand why those two things are correlated.
As a Virginian living in Sweden, I think it’s actually true that that the US is more culturally homogeneous than Europe. Someone from the East Coast and the West Coast still watches the same TV shows, goes to the same restaurants, and votes for the same president. It’s hard to tell the differences in accent between the West Coast and the East Coast.
There’s probably a bigger cultural difference between Richmond, VA and Lynchburg, VA (home of Liberty University), than there is between Richmond and Seattle.
In Europe, you can go 100 miles and find people who watch different shows, have different political parties, and speak an entirely different language.
The US was founded all roughly at the same time under the same government, with minor differences based on immigration and former colonial history. In contrast, Europe is dozens of different countries with widely different histories and language groups.
Other countries, like Russia and China probably have more cultural diversity than the US due to their languages and histories, but not as much as the EU.
One of the goals of the EU is to bridge these gaps between countries so that business can be conducted across political and language barriers, to make Europe have as much unified strength as the US. The EU has a larger population than the US, and nearly as much GDP, but you couldn’t tell on the global stage, because it’s not a unified force.
I’m from CT living in Germany here and thank you. I’m so ashamed of Americans who are clearly ignorant and condescending to others about their ignorance. The person who thinks Alabama is a different planet needs to take a slow drive around the poor side of upstate New York, because it’s just an urban/rural divide, which Europe also has (though what that divide means will be different in every country- it took a while for me to understand middle class and rural culture, because in CT, the rural areas are either in the bottom or top decile of wealth).
Köln to rural Bavaria seems to me like about as big a divide as between San Francisco and distant suburbs of Dallas to me. I’ve been to all of those places, and to be fair, Texas (and Bavaria) are different from my typical experiences, but that level of difference is actually normal.