The revelation that Greece had been fiddling the accounts for so long prompted one of its citizens to exclaim to a reporter that" we gave the world democracy, and we expect the European Union to support us!"

Yes, well… If the democracy we're living with today is anything to go by, we don't have much to thank the Greeks for. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Democracy in Europe is increasingly a case of the tail wagging the dog. Europe's political leaders seriously lack the courage of their convictions, and that poses the question of whether they have any convictions, other than their own interests, in the first place. They too often say one thing to the world and then, looking over their shoulders, do the opposite to appease their electorates.

Charlemagne's columnist got it right In The Economist of February 6 when he said: "Arguably, the problem is Europe itself: its querulous voters and its cowardly political leaders."
The voters are of course querulous, though there is a certain consistency in their concerns: keeping what they've got (and not giving it to Greece), protecting jobs, stemming immigration and the like. At least we don't share the symptoms of the US, where voter mood swings cause the country to oscillate from one extreme to the other. 
The Lisbon Agenda offers lofty ideals for the future of Europe, and the European Commission tries to promote these within the limits of its remit as a regulatory organisation. But we are not going to get anywhere far or fast without the real commitment of the ultimate political decision-makers, whoever they may be. Europe needs to start moving towards closer political union, otherwise the conflicts of interest and muddling through will just persist.
Should we 'decouple' the political elite from the whims of voters? Or should we take a radically different approach to how Europe is governed? A Europe of the Regions? Yet even this may pander even more to the esprit de clocher of the French (malgré their fondness for dirigisme), the campanilismo of the Italians and the Kleinbürger mentality of the Germans (watch Karnaval on German TV!).Not to mention the Little Englanders.

Democracy has to have a purpose beyond reflecting and respecting the opinions of just everyone, which is fine for the rights of man, but far less so for the rights of mankind.
 
If the solution to European democracy is monthly summits, as Herman Van Rompuy has suggested, then God help us all! At least, judging from recent debates, the European Parliament seems to have some convictions. But one is left with the feeling that the European Union is, simply, too ungainly to be governable.

Unless you happen to be American or Asian, there is no such thing as a 'typical' European. The reality is much more complex… and richer. But it does take time and experience to be fully aware of this reality. Its complexity comes out in practical matters like the comparative statistics for average payment terms in business transactions which vary enormously from North to South - Finnish companies have to wait three times as long if they export to Italy, for example. To some extent you see the same factor at work in the statistics for the shadow economies of Western Europe.

Some sense can be made of criminality - and of the problems facing Europe today - by considering the basic orientations of people. The first is the issue of what can be called Rules or Relationships?. Some cultures - Russia, Bulgaria and Greece, for example - are much more motivated by their loyalty to a friend than they are by 'abstract' rules and regulations. Others, in particular the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon cultures, are the opposite. Clearly this has an impact on people's attitudes towards those breaking the rules - whether by helping a friend in court, cheating financially, or indulging in what some people call 'clientelism'.

Edward Hall, an American sociologist, identified the relationship-oriented cultures - what he called the 'High Context Cultures' - with two characteristics in particular: the ability to operate more or less intuitively on 'stored knowledge' and a tendency to do things in a 'non-sequential' way. In contrast, the 'Low Context Cultures' tend to apply direct knowledge (for example by briefing themselves before meetings) and deal with issues in a predetermined and sequential way. The further southwards and eastwards we go across Europe, the more we move from Low Context to High Context cultures.

The second issue, in the context of cultural attitudes to fraud and corruption, is Transparency or Concealment?.  Again, the people of north-western Europe - the Nordics and the Anglo-Saxons - are fervent believers in transparency at all costs. This became apparent when Finland and Sweden joined the Union in 1995, the Finns in particular helping to introduce something like a 'cultural revolution' to the European Commission. Their preference for talking and tackling openly things that people further south would prefer to leave unsaid has caused a great deal of unrest in many circles.

The third issue is what can be called Conformity or Challenge?. Some cultures regard getting around the rules as a 'David and Goliath' scenario, where the individual cheater or defrauder is David and the authorities - and, by extension, the European Commission - are Goliath. Such people tend to admire the offender, either for what they perceive as his ingenuity or his courage. This attitude inevitably tends to encourage the spirit of clientelismo dear to the Italians, mirrored in the enchufe of the Spanish and the rousfeti of the Greeks.

This is not generally regarded as a problem in a well organised society like that of the Dutch, though even they and the Nordics have their 'inner circles': it's easier to great 'clubs' in small countries! Yet, perhaps prompted by their natural sense of frugality, even the Dutch can be tricky (without breaking the law) or, like some Dutch traffic policemen, responsive to bribes from speeding motorists (when they're definitely breaking it!).
 
Specialists - spokespeople, journalists and others - exposed to frequent dealing with the people from other cultures have no difficulty in observing these 'national' cultural differences at work. It is important to be aware of them without letting them become stereotypes!

Many of the world's foreign affairs initiatives are powered and propelled by stereotypes. "Freedom", "evil axis" and the like. We tend to think such things are a product of folk wisdom handed down over generations. After all, didn't the Sicilians have a saying back in the 17th century that "the French are wiser than they seem and the Spanish seem wiser than they are."? It was recorded nearly 400 years ago by two visitors from the British Isles - Francis Bacon in his essays Of Seeming Wise and William Lithgow in his travel book, Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations - and it is as true today as it was then.
Yet quite a number of the world's stereotypes owe their origins to a governmental act of deliberate disinformation about a people. It is a practise that has been perpetrated by most nations at some time, but suffice it to quote two examples.

The first is the stereotype of the Dutch as mean, a perception that is widely shared by perfectly intelligent people. It essentially owes its existence and vitality to a propaganda campaign sponsored by His English Majesty's Government in the 17th century, with the aid of pamphleteers and diarists like Samuel Pepys.

Fearful of the challenge posed by the newly emergent Dutch republic, the court cultures of England and France could only accept the reality of Dutch wealth by linking it to a denigrating stereotype. So they commissioned the authorship of such derogatory phrases as 'going Dutch' and 'Dutch auction' to emphasise meanness, 'Dutch comfort' (thank God it's no worse!), 'Dutch courage', 'talking double-Dutch', 'talking like a Dutch uncle' and the like. Meanness, moralising and other abusive connotations were knowingly grafted onto the public image of the Dutch. 
Some people will say it's all true, but I interpret the perceived meanness of our northern neighbours as a proper appreciation of the value of things. As a long established foreigner in the Netherlands puts it: "I have come to the conclusion that the Dutch are not stingy after all. They just hate to waste anything."

The second example of deliberate disinformation is the stereotype of the Swedes. In response to an anti-USA movement in Sweden during the '60s and '70s, the CIA is reputed to have set in motion a smear campaign attributing Sweden with the world's highest suicide rate, also the highest alcoholism rate. John Alexander, an Australian interculturalist working in Sweden today, says that "the CIA programme proved effective. Ask any American and they will tell you about Sweden's high suicide rate. Even many Swedes believe it, as well as people outside Sweden. It makes you wonder what other cultural myths are out there..." Indeed.

The national political establishments find many ways to undermine the strenuous efforts made by the European Parliament to grab the attention of Europe's publics: gerrymandering the candidate lists, putting forward 'safe' people who will not challenge positions back home, and so on. On top of this, there is every sign that, out of disenchantment with these political establishments, voters in the European elections will tilt in favour of the margins rather than the mainstream.

Regrettably, this and other things suggest a resurgence of nationalism, though not in its old form (at least we can be grateful for that!). The electorate's reaction to dismal economies and unemployment is - with some justification - to put local, i.e. national, interests first. As the title of a famous comedy film about the British class wars of the 1950s put it: "I'm all right, Jack". It's ironic that, of all things, a vote for the European Parliament should be the pretext for people to behave so selfishly.

But, looking further ahead, I see the possibility of a radical return to our roots, in the form of an emerging spirit of regionalism. This has a lot of things going for it, not least the fact that current evidence suggests that the most successful bits of Europe socially and economically are the Member States, notably the Nordic countries, with populations of less than ten million!

In the words of the late A H Heineken of the Dutch brewing dynasty, "We have begun to realize that a state of thirty to fifty million people is hopelessly incompetent, with a deadening effect on provincial culture and a drearily standardizing effect on social life. For all purposes of internal administration we want a government which is accessible and economical, administering an area which is culturally unified and reasonably small."

But, as with all radical ideas, there are a number of problems. The first is the headache of integrating the administrations of the individual components of Europe - currently the Member States - which would be multiplied by the number of entities involved. As Belgium has already found out to its cost, regionalisation results in increased layers of bureaucracy and higher taxes.

A second problem is defining what constitutes a region in the sense of a coherent community, culturally and linguistically, linked with the danger of harnessing a region to an exclusive cultural or linguistic identity and creating a series of 'ghettoes'. A redistribution of dotted lines to respect ethnic, linguistic and cultural realities can also open a Pandora's box of self-interest.  Self-administration is no excuse for selfishness. Moreover, organising the world into units of ethnic exclusiveness is a daft idea which can have a debilitating effect on society. In the words of an 11th-century Hungarian cleric, "a kingdom of one race and custom is weak and fragile."
 
Finally, we come back full-circle to the biggest problem of them all: the national political establishments and the dilemma of persuading them to forsake their power and their privileges. As the Irish author and philosopher Charles Handy said in his book The Empty Raincoat, "national parliaments in Europe's larger countries, which are themselves federations of tribal regions, know that they are likely to be squeezed out if and when Europe becomes a fuller federation. Understandably, they do not relish the thought."

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