Re: Re : Re: Beijing 2008, or: who else isn't watching?
CommunistOriginally Posted by Louis VI the Fat
Countries, cultures, in my opinion, are difficult to group in exclusive clusters. To speak of Europe as divided in 'Latin', 'Germanic', or Catholic / Protestant / Orthodox is fruitless. Too many overlaps.
Better is the analogy of a ripples in a pond. A certain cultural trait will usually have a clear centre, and ripples out. Europe then, is a pond with many different ciricles, of many clusters of cultures.
The marriage of language and the nationstate in the nineteenth century, at the exclusion of most other cultural identities, has diminshed the prominence of many of these underlying cultural belts, or clusters. But they are still intact.
France is clearly 'Latin', but it also falls within the circle of Northern Europe. Beer drinking Germany and Britain belong to a separate cluster from France, together with the Czechs, Danes and Belgians. As opossed to the wine drinking countries to the south, or the Vodka belt to the east and north. Britain is sometimes Anglosaxon, and sometimes European. Etcetera.
What then, this is my question, is the common denominator between your five countries? Apart from sharing in the fortune of being Belgium's immediate neighbours, is there a common denominator, a North Sea culture?
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