Don't mention the wars

In the 1930s, psychologists carried out a survey of 100 American college students on their views of various national and ethnic groups. A majority concluded that the Germans were hard-working, methodical and intelligent, the English were fair-minded, sportsman-like and tradition-loving, while blacks were superstitious, lazy and musical.

The researchers greeted the results with dismay. Not because of the findings as such, but because at such an early age college students could not possibly have formed such opinions on the basis of real-life interactions. Stereotyping, they sighed, was evidence of a breakdown in society.

I have been thinking a lot about stereotypes. It all came about when I approached an Irish publishing company to see if I could “write something” about my time covering EU and European affairs for the Irish national broadcaster. We tossed around a few ideas, but the publisher concluded that worthy books on Europe tended not to sell too many copies.

Why don’t you write a book on European stereotypes, he said. I wasn’t so sure. It sounded like a exercise in frivolity at best, or perpetuating insulting caricatures at worst. The publisher insisted (he was German). I’d love a book, he said, where we visit a German firm that makes beach towels.

This tweaked my interest. Why not apply proper journalistic exactitudes to something as clearly crass as European stereotypes?

Over the next 18 months I went on an exhausting 18-month tour of Europe, visiting people, events and places which might somehow illustrate the stereotype. I had to look at the stereotype forensically, dismantling or confirming it where possible. So I trawled German comedy clubs (Germans have no sense of humour, right?), hung out in posh and not-so-posh Parisian restaurants (French arrogance is exquisitely expressed by French waiters, no?), met Finns on the booze cruise to Estonia (those Finns, with their daylight-deprived vodka habits!), and discussed the English work-ethic with Polish plumbers in Warsaw (aren’t they great, those reliable, cheap Polish worker-bees?).

Of course, by the end of the odyssey the picture was much too confused and confusing to arrive at a pat conclusion. The more I looked into stereotypes, the more I realised how complex the whole process is. I had to start from my own childhood.

I had grown up, you see, an Irish catholic in Northern Ireland, and that brings a wealth of cultural baggage. In my native Derry the only foreigners we ever saw were on television, but even that medium was contradictory. In films the Germans were baddies, the Americans were heroes and everyone in between simply lived in a nicer climate and ate better food. In comedy, however – and this, remember, was the golden age of the British sitcom – we were taught to laugh at foreigners. But to me, my 1970s surroundings were so grim that getting abroad was the only way out. And since abroad was where foreigners lived, I was smitten by an early age, and resentful of how British TV told me to laugh at them.

The Irish inherit their stereotypes directly through British influence, even though we were supposed to have pole-vaulted our dependence on British attitudes (and cattle markets) when we joined the EEC in 1973. So rather than holding benign views of foreigners, the caricaturing of our European partners is as subtle a reflex for us as our friends across the Irish Sea.

The first port of call in any examination of stereotyping is the 1922 Public Opinion article by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Lippman. Stereotypes, he wrote, were “pictures in our heads”, too much reliance on which would lead to tension and then social conflict. This was a time when mass media was sending its roots into society; humans were coping with rising literacy, teeming cities, consumer expectations. In the background was the Great War and ever fashionable notions about racial supremacy. “For the real environment is altogether too big,” wrote Lippman, “too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

Social psychology spent the rest of the 20th century trying to work out why we enslave ourselves to these pictures in our heads. Humans are quite capable of putting an entire population in a box based on a handful of stimuli. The stimuli are usually distinctive or novel, and even if the user often does not actually believe in them, the impulse is so powerful they still govern the overall mental picture.

Stereotyping can become more pronounced the higher up the hierarchy you go. Chief executives tend to have poor opinions of their ethnic underlings simply because they spend less time and effort seeing the person as an individual than a one-dimensional category.

Even though much of the research into this phenomenon has been done in America, we do not have to look too deep into European history to see how stereotyping, when it runs amok, can have genocidal consequences. Scapegoating is a common result when particular ethnic groups feel under threat and when you contemplate – even for an instant – how so much of European history is about just that, then you realise how appalling an impulse stereotyping can become.

Of course some experts believe that stereotyping is harmless enough. It is simply how the brain operates at its best, where we relegate the complex stuff to the simple picture-in-the-head, freeing up brain power for more pressing tasks (cognitive efficiency, it is called).

Much depends on the context. An American study found that Asians were regarded as awkward in social situations, but in the working world they were hardworking and upwardly mobile. In other words, socially they were irrelevant, but economically they were threatening. British university students were asked their views on Italians and the results were balanced. But when asked about stereotypes of the British and the Italians, their perceptions of Italians worsened while their own self-image was somewhat radiant.

Having worked my way through the Blackwell Book of Social Psychology I then realised (to my horror) that I could not bluff my way through European history if I wanted to get beyond simply British stereotypes of the French, the Spanish, the Germans and the Italians. I needed a better understanding of how the rise and fall of European empires affected the social self-esteem of their constituent parts and how that in turn fed into stereotyping and prejudice.

There was a whole other set of relationships there. What on Earth do the Poles think of the Czechs? What is a Slovak stereotype? These were questions my education could not begin to address, and which the Iron Curtain had shrouded from the western European mind and mindset. So it was intriguing to learn about the Hungarian self-stereotype (depressive geniuses), Polish national self-esteem (should they have gone for yet another uprising in 1944 since the previous 18 were failures?) and so on.

By the end of the exercise I was much wiser about European history, but still fuzzy on human nature. Every time we still come back to the “kernel of truth”. Of course the French are better lovers, but that is largely due to how the sexes have interacted socially and hierarchically, all the way from Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 12th century (she who borrowed love poetry from captive Saracen women), to Nicolas and Carla in the present. “In America,” one Parisian art dealer confessed to me, “the attitude is very different. You date lots of people till you meet the one, then you marry the one, then you have children with the one and stay together for the rest of your life with the one.

“In French culture that sounds like death. You meet someone, you marry them, you build a life, you have a family, but your romantic life doesn’t necessarily end there. You fall in love during a metro ride. You can fall in love every half an hour!”