Like many other regions in the world, Europe illustrates contradictions and tensions as the world globalizes. Visitors are struck by the continent's history, aesthetic beauty, and cultural depth. You also experience a relaxed openness and tolerance that is absent from many other parts of the world. Europeans appear to live comfortable lives, with a balanced approach to many areas—work and leisure, the public and private sectors, personal freedom and social responsibility. Europe also feels like the future in many respects, as other cultures move toward the kind of permissiveness and openness that are apparent in many countries on the continent.
Yet increasingly one can sense insecurities and tensions. Long ago, Europeans ceded the role of global leadership to the Americans but now other cultures such as India and China are catching up fast, which leads to a sense that the best years of the continent are behind it rather than ahead. As economic tensions mount, sentiments that challenge the openness of European culture increase and attitudes toward migrant communities and the outside world harden. Strains among European nations—a long-standing feature of the continent's cultural DNA—have started to rise again. Compared to many other cultures, Europe has always tended toward segmentation, division, and infighting. This has ebbed away over the past century or so, but fear of such sentiments resurfacing haunts European political leaders.
In business, European firms have had a long history of engaging other parts of the world. Less parochial and inward looking than businesses from many other regions, European companies are often highly international and derive much more of their revenues from overseas operations than do firms from the United States, India, or China. The European Union is the top trading partner for 80 countries in the world, compared to only 20 for the United States. In addition, it is the largest trader of manufactured goods and services in the world. It is also a more open economy for others. Excluding fuel, the EU imports more from developing countries than the United States, Canada, Japan, and China put together.1 All this makes many European business cultures highly internationally minded and flexible in the way they engage the outside world. In this sense, there is a lot others can learn from the European approach to global business.
However, there are also significant issues emerging. Red tape, slowness to change, and lack of agility make many European business cultures feel cumbersome compared to companies from hungrier emerging economies, as well as many U.S. firms. Having achieved comfortable lives with ample leisure time and social benefits compared to most other global cultures, there is insecurity as to how these living standards can be maintained in a fiercely competitive global economy.
Psychologically, Europeans exhibit a complex and layered set of attributes. Intellectual openness, balance, and comfort with life coexist with insecurities about the future and Europe's place in the world. Deeper still one cannot dismiss the possibility of some of Europe's bad psychological habits—such as a tendency toward out-group aggression—resurfacing if economic pressures and challenges continue to restrict people's prospects. Identifying dimensions in their cultural DNA that have run out of road and those that will help them to lead rather than follow—or be defensive about the new emerging multipolar world—is essential for the future prospects of the continent.
The story of how modern humans inhabited Europe and the challenges they faced on the continent is, as with all groups, critical to our discussion. Surprisingly, it was only 45,000 years ago that modern humans gingerly made their way into the continent. This was much later than the settling of the Indian subcontinent, and 20,000 years later than the oceanic island hopping that took humans to Australasia.
There are a variety of reasons for this delay. First, the barriers of the Sahara and Arabian Desert prevented an easy movement of people out of Africa via the most direct route, through the Levant, into Anatolia, and then Europe. As we have seen, modern humans had to take a beachcombing route virtually all the way around to India before they were able to double back and move north and westward again.
The second, and perhaps more important, reason was that Europe was already densely populated by an earlier version of humans—the Neanderthals. Muscular, strong, and possessing a brain size comparable to modern humans, Neanderthals had been in Europe for the best part of 400,000 years and presented a formidable challenge to other humans entering the continent. As a consequence, modern humans were cautious and slow in moving into the continent. There was at least a 5,000-year war—or if you want to be polite, ‘standoff’—for the ecological space in Europe. Neanderthals were gradually and surely pushed back to their final enclave in the south of Spain, which some believe was where the remnants of their species made their last stand, 30,000 years ago. If this latter date is right, the overlap between the two species could have been even longer than 5,000 years.
Just how and why modern humans triumphed over Neanderthals has significant implications for European cultural DNA, given that this was for thousands of years one of the most important challenges facing new entrants. The simple view that modern humans were smarter and had bigger brains does not suffice—because the inconvenient truth is that Neanderthals, in fact, had slightly larger brains. A second view is that a quantum leap in speech capability, associated with the FOXP2 gene, gave modern humans the edge. This view has, however, been discredited by the recent finding that Neanderthals also possessed this particular speech gene.
The most persuasive theory is one advanced by the likes of evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who argue that it was modern humans' superior social organization that gave them the edge.2 The uniformity and relatively widespread nature of the paintings, drawings, and cultural artifacts—which appear to have exploded in quantity and variety around the time that modern humans entered Europe—suggest that the early groups were communicating extensively between themselves across relatively vast swaths of territory. It is likely that better communication and cooperation beyond the traditional size of hunter-gatherer populations of around 200 to 300 people would have given modern humans in Europe an edge with respect to both technological inventiveness and warfare. Many elements of European cultural DNA—including an openness toward innovation, in-group cooperation, out-group aggression, as well as Europeans' physical size—most likely arise at least in part from the fact that for a significant period of the time that modern humans have been in Europe, they were in a life and death struggle for supremacy against a powerful competitor species.
But just how Europe was populated also has profound implications for understanding its cultural DNA. It is necessary here to piece together the archaeological, climatic, and genetic evidence to shed light on the story. It appears that there were two very distinct paths through which Europe was colonized. One migratory trail came from the west of India around Pakistan, through Mesopotamia and the Zagros mountains, into Anatolia, and then into the Balkans and southern Europe. This represents an extension of the same path that modern humans took into the Middle East. While one splinter group went south to the Middle East proper, other groups moved across Anatolia into Europe. A more northerly route again originated in the west of India—but this time up through Kashmir into the Ural, and then west into northern Europe and Scandinavia.
As noted earlier, these two paths seem correlated with the appearance of Aurignacian and Gravettian cultures. The former seems to track the southern migration and entered Europe earlier, some 45,000 years ago. There is a close relationship between artifacts associated with Aurignacian culture and skeletal remains of modern human beings from a variety of locations across Europe, which suggests that this culture was associated with the first arrival of a new version of human rather than the original Neanderthal inhabitants. The earliest evidence of Aurignacian culture is in places in the Balkans near Turkey. Evidence of Aurignacian culture is also found in the Levantine and Turkey. One can see Aurignacian culture flowing across to southern Europe over a 10,000-year period, before eventually hitting the Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic coasts about 35,000 years ago. Stephen Oppenheimer believes that there is a strong genetic trail that correlates with the spread of Aurignacian culture from the Middle East and into Europe.3
In addition to Aurignacian culture, historical records appear in Europe from about 35,000 years ago that indicate another distinct cultural intrusion. This has been named the Gravettian culture, after the site of La Gravatt in the Dordogne, where some artifacts associated with this culture were first discovered. Unlike the Aurignacian culture, the Gravettian culture seems to enter Europe through a northeastern route. Again, there is a clear genetic trail that tracks this possible route into Europe. Innovations in Gravettian culture include the use of semisubterranean dwellings, stone lamps, and the presence of distinct burial customs. One clear difference between the Gravettian and the Aurignacian culture was the use of new technologies for hunting, including woven nets, boomerangs, narrower and lighter blades, and possibly the first use of the bow and arrow. There is widespread agreement that many aspects of Gravettian culture were designed to help humans adapt to the bitterly cold conditions of their new northerly home.
However, after settling the continent and triumphing over the Neanderthals, an unfortunate conjunction of climatic cycles resulted in such a rapid deterioration in conditions that modern humans must have wondered if they shouldn't have left the continent to the Neanderthals after all. About 20,000 years ago, over a relatively brief period of 2,000 years or so, temperatures plummeted, sea levels fell by over 120 meters, and ice caps several miles thick moved down through Scandinavia and into northern Europe. Much of central Europe below the ice caps was rendered steppe tundra—a cold, dry, and treeless landscape with only patches of the land being able to sustain any form of grass or plant life. Modern humans were forced south—but unlike in China where there was woodland and some rain forest to retreat to, humans in Europe were trapped. The population diminished rapidly and survived only by clinging, it would appear, to four clearly defined areas of refuge. One straddled the mountains between northern Spain and France, another was in Italy, a third in parts of the Balkans, and a final refuge was in the Ukraine.
Humans shivered in these small enclaves for 4,000 years before the weather gods relented and the ice sheets started to shrink. The repopulation of Europe following this warming scrambled up the genetic picture somewhat. So while the genetic trail outside of Europe before the ice age suggests two clear and distinct routes into Europe, the actual pattern of both male and female haplogroups on the continent is now quite complex, because of the bottlenecks and subsequent repopulation that took place. In general, it appears that this led to a greater presence of people across the continent associated with the northerly route.
This repopulation also led to an east-to-west divide in Europe. On the male side, for example, the most dominant haplogroup in Europe is R1, a son of haplogroup F, which is associated with the northerly route. R has two distinct groups associated with it; R1A and R1B. There is considerable evidence that R1B was prevalent in the Spain/France refuge, as rates of its presence in the Basque population are extremely high, near 85 percent. It appears that the repopulation of Western Europe from this refuge initially followed an Atlantic coastal trail upward. Sure enough, we find extremely high frequencies of R1B in Ireland (80 percent), as well as eastern Scotland. Percentages of R1B, decrease steadily as one moves eastward across Europe.4 A contrary pattern is seen for the R1A haplogroup, the prevalence of which follows the original path up from northwest India, through western Siberia, and into Eastern Europe. Interestingly, in England, there is something of a divide separating the eastern, Celtic populations of Ireland, Cornwall, and Scotland, who share genetic similarities with coastal areas of Spain and France, versus eastern England where there is much greater prevalence of other groups associated with eastern and northern Europe.5
Therefore, those settling in Europe had to get used to a cold, forbidding, and inhospitable environment that required new cultural adaptations. However, Europe suffered much more severely from the ice sheets that swept down than did China. It is also clear from European genetic history that the haplogroups associated with the northerly migration into Europe—such as H and V on the mitochondrial side and R on the Y chromosome side—are much more spread out in Europe, in part, because of the movements and repopulations induced by the ice ages. As a result of these factors, while parts of Europe (especially in the south) are relatively benign environments for humans, a substantial aspect of European DNA has been shaped by people who needed to adapt and survive in more challenging contexts.
Strong seasonal variations, bitterly cold nights, and the challenges caused by well over half a year of limited daylight, as well as a dearth of plant life, meant Europe was certainly not an environment where one could just go with the flow. One had to plan, make proverbial hay while the sun shone, as well as store food and fuel for the future. Human groups who did not do that in Europe would quite simply not have survived. In addition, the context required strong mastery of the environment. People had to build shelters, make clothing, and create all manner of practical tools to cope with the conditions. These pressures have driven some clear themes—including a drive for environmental mastery, practical innovation, as well as an instinct for planning within European cultural DNA.
The next significant strand concerns the impact of the agricultural revolution. Intensive, organized agriculture arose in various parts of the world, but probably first some 14,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and spread to India and Egypt. It hit Europe some 7,000 years ago. Again, there is clear evidence of a diffusion of agriculture from the Middle East, up through Anatolia and into the Balkans, and then the rest of Europe. There is evidence of the spread of agriculture in the genetic signature of certain European populations. The male haplogroup J, which finds extremely high levels of prevalence in the Middle East and Anatolia, is also present in significant proportions in the Balkans, Italy, and southern parts of Europe. However, J decreases dramatically as one moves north. This is widely considered to be associated with the spread of pastoralism in the case of one of its subtypes (J1), and settled agriculture in the case of another (J2). On the mitochondrial side there is, confusingly, also a female haplogroup J, which is associated with the spread of agriculture from the Middle East as well. This has moderate representation, in particular, in the Balkans and Southern Europe.
The relatively moderate frequencies of the haplogroups outlined above and other evidence suggest that, while there was some impact, the advent of agriculture was a process of cultural diffusion rather than a population replacement event in Europe. Compared to the Middle East, India, and China, however, agriculture was a relatively late intrusion into Europe—especially in the north and west. I will argue later that European values around individualism and equality have in part been driven by this fact. Alcohol, which is closely associated with the rise of agriculture in most cultures, was also a late entrant into Europe. As the experience of the Native Americans and Australians illustrate, communities need time to develop both biological and cultural resistance to alcohol. This, I believe, is the underlying reason for why rates of alcohol abuse increase dramatically as one moves northward in Europe.
Research by David Reich and his colleagues—investigating the DNA structure of ancient skeletons—indicates that, as well as the original hunter-gatherer populations and the intrusion of groups associated with agriculture, European population structures also derive from an ancestral, ancient north Eurasian population, which occurred probably after the advent of agriculture.6
More recent impacts on European population structures and culture have come from periodic, mainly violent, intrusions of nomadic tribes and armies from central Asia. Like China, but with less severity because of distance, Europe has been vulnerable to intrusion from the Asian Steppe lands. The Huns, Mongols, and Tartars have all left their mark on populations, especially in Russia and central Asia. Ghengis Khan and his sons appear to have been particularly prolific in this regard, as over 16 million people in the regions that he conquered—over 8 percent of the population—share a clustering of genes believed to be associated with his family. Russia appears to have borne the brunt of these raids and, as with China, the inclination toward more authoritarian values on the eastern edges of Europe is likely related to populations that are used to trading freedom for security. Tolerance of individualism also increases strongly as one moves westward in Europe—again because it is a flower that flourishes best in environments where people feel secure.
Another observation about Europe is that the continent's geography—punctuated in various parts by mountain ranges and with a number of out-jutting peninsulas—inevitably created barriers to the establishment of a single unified state, as occurred in China. Some of Europe's dynamism, as well as propensity to quarrelsome fragmentation, undoubtedly arise from the particularities of this geography. Individualism and a propensity for challenging authority were also able to flourish more in an environment where a monolithic state was not able to exert control across a wide expanse of territory, as occurred on the plains of China and India.
A final and more recent point about Europe's population structure is that over the past 500 years or so, many societies on the continent have experienced significant migration to various parts of the world occupied or colonized by Europeans. Although the tendency is to think about migration predominantly as people moving from developing to more developed countries, Europe has sent more people beyond its shores than any other culture. Those who left were not a random selection of people—and the reasons for their leaving affected both the culture created in the new environments and the societies that they left behind. Britain, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal were particularly influenced by these migrations. European psychological attitudes toward class, status, and levels of achievement appear to be significantly affected by this fact.
Iceland has a huge amount to offer tourists. Beyond its vibrant bars and nightlife, it possesses unusually evocative scenery. The island straddles the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates and there are places where you can stand with one foot on each plate, nervously hoping that any movements will not be too extreme that day. The constant geological activity this instability creates means that the country has legions of geysers, waterfalls, hot water lagoons, and volcanic formations. Some 40 miles west of Reykjavik, there is a vast lunar like plain known as Thingvellir. On this icy plain one can see—in the midst of volcanic outcrops and canyons—an area that has been cleared and where platforms have been created using the surrounding rocks. This is the Althing, the site of the world's oldest parliament, founded in 930 AD.
The Althing was chosen early on in the settlement of Iceland as a place where all prominent Icelandic individuals could meet, democratically debate, and lay down the laws of the land. When the parliament was in session for a certain period of the year, large sections of the Icelandic population came to stay in order to participate in cultural and political events. Being Icelandic, they also knew how to party hard. One might have expected the world's first parliament to be in an urban and wealthy part of the world, where democratic rights were the outcome of a long process of social and cultural evolution. To be sure, Ancient Greeks and Romans had their versions of parliament; but these were restricted to tiny elites. The gatherings at Althing in Iceland, however, were open to all. Here, in a bitterly cold, windswept, and sparsely populated land, a group of relatively unsophisticated individuals created a form of decision making that was to become the norm for many European countries, as well as their cultural offshoots in the New World. Although surprising at first, there are good reasons for why this significant step in human political affairs occurred in a place like Iceland. These reasons are also why Scandinavian countries are some of the most equal societies in the world today.
The democratic instincts of the early Icelandic founders appear to be an expression of a strong underlying element of European DNA: a lower tolerance of inequality compared with all other major cultures in the world. On a variety of dimensions, such as sexual equality, distribution of wealth, societal support for the needy, and individual rights, one sees European nations—and other countries whose cultures have strong European roots—being more equal and less segregated. To be sure, there have been and still are today massive inequalities in Europe. However, equality is a relative concept and some societies are more equal than others. Or more accurately, since inequality is everywhere, less unequal than others.
There is, however, a paradox to this equality theme. European cultures are also more formal, status oriented, and in some ways more hierarchical than sister cultures in the United States, Australia, or Canada. A sense of elitism runs deep in many European countries, with class or educational background being a more important determinant of how people are seen and the chances they get than in many non-European, Western nations. In addition, whether around living standards or with respect to social elitism and hierarchy, equality varies tremendously across European societies. Understanding the factors that drive each element of this equality paradox helps explain these differences.
The United Nations regularly publishes statistics on income inequality across the world. One measure is the ratio of income that the top 10 percent of the population earn relative to the bottom 10 percent. In Scandinavian countries this ratio is about 6, in France and Germany about 9, and in Spain about 10. In the United States the figure is 16, in China 22, while surprisingly in India and the Middle East it is only around 10. Latin American and African countries have the highest ratios of all: Argentina is 30, Brazil 40, and Colombia 60. Many African countries are also extremely high, with Namibia having an eye-watering ratio of 106.7
The Gini coefficient, which looks at income and expenditure across all people, is another way of looking at this area. It is a rating system where 0 is perfect equality and 100 is absolute inequality. The World Bank assessment of countries across the world illustrates that European countries lead the world in terms of equality, with Gini coefficients in the 25 to 35 range, compared to the United States at 45. On this measure, Scandinavian societies are the most equal in the world.8
It is tempting to conclude that this is simply a function of the greater economic development of European countries—and this may be a contributory factor. However, the alternative also merits examination: Is the wealth of European countries due to their greater openness and equality? Certainly, one sees that greater levels of equality have persistently been a feature of European culture in historical records. While many cultures in Africa and India developed tribal or village forms of democracy, it was the Europeans in ancient Greece and Rome who created partial forms of it in wider civic societies. When one reads Greek treaties on their wars with the Persians, one is struck by how quarrelsome, vociferous, and independent-minded the Greek states were—but also how much more equal they were than the monolithic, regimented, and more stratified culture of the Persians. In their early, democratic phases, the Greek and Roman states were no wealthier than their Persian, Indian, or Chinese counterparts, but they did seem to have, albeit imperfectly, a greater sense of equality running through their DNA. Similarly, during the Renaissance and before the Industrial Revolution, India and China were fabulously wealthy by European standards, and respectively had something like 25 percent each of world GDP.9 European explorers marveled at the East's wealth and treasures, but these economic advantages did not translate into greater equality in their societies. Rather, it was the Europeans who appeared to have the more open, equal, and dynamic societies.
The point is perhaps sharply illustrated when one considers polygamy as a cultural practice. Polygamy inherently has two forms of social inequality built into it. The first and most obvious is inequality between the sexes. The man gets to have a number of wives, but the wives themselves have to share the man. The women in this arrangement at least end up being looked after, having offspring, and, perhaps, the double-edged benefit of sisterly company. The more pernicious inequality built into polygamy is that between men themselves. In a polygamous society, the fact that one man has multiple wives means that many others must go without. There is no possibility of siring offspring or of finding a companion to help one through life for these men. Ultimately, it is pressure from other men that pulls down polygamy—and it is on the wane in many societies, including in the Middle East where it is still culturally and legally acceptable.
While there are plenty of historical accounts of Chinese, Indian, Turkish, and African rulers having literally hundreds, sometimes thousands, of wives, this kind of situation is largely absent from European records. Ancient European rulers and Emperors sometimes did have multiple wives, but they did not run into the numbers seen in other cultures. For example—despite presiding over and ruthlessly creating one of the largest empires in ancient history, Alexander the Great had only three wives. Had he been a Persian ruler or a Chinese emperor, it is unlikely he would have settled for such a paltry number. This is not to say that polygamy did not happen in ancient Europe, but rather that its presence was controlled and extreme expressions of it were lacking. While polygamy was historically allowed in Jewish culture, Ashkenazi Jews banned it in 10,000 AD. Sephardi Jews, however, continued to practice it for much longer. It is likely that the Ashkenazi were incorporating elements from the European culture that surrounded them, whereas the Sephardi were influenced by their own Middle Eastern sister cultures.
There appear to be three fundamental factors that have come together in the early history of European settlement to drive a greater sense of equality within European culture. Other global cultures typically possess none, or at the most one or two, of these attributes. The first point is that, as outlined earlier, Europe has much less genetic variability than many other global cultures, especially Sub-Saharan Africa and India. As we saw earlier, the much greater sense of genetic variability in India finds at least partial expression in the Indian caste system, which represents a rigid and highly regimented approach to layering in society. Europe lies at the opposite end of variability to India, which drives a fundamentally different orientation toward the creation of hierarchical barriers between others. However, this sense does not extend to European attitudes of other peoples. As will be outlined later, the other side of the coin of in-group equality is out-group domination and aggression.
The second and perhaps more important reason is that, as outlined earlier, Europe posed significant environmental challenges for modern humans, whether in the form of aggressive competitor human species, or the task of surviving in a less-than-kind environment. As discussed in prior chapters, people who live in a relatively benign environment are more easily able to put their attention to matters of how social relationships need to be organized in order to distribute rewards. Modern humans entering Europe faced no such luxuries; their biggest challenge was to metaphorically bake the cake or, more accurately, scramble hard to create anything that resembled a cake rather than arguing about who got the bigger slice. The challenges they faced fostered cooperation and drove modern humans in Europe to focus on external challenges, whether in the form of Neanderthals or the weather Gods. This fundamentally drove a greater sense of we're all in this together equality.
A third factor is that the environment, at least in northern Europe, was less conducive to settled agriculture or dense concentrations of human settlement. Europe, as we saw earlier, was relatively late in moving into such patterns of settlement. It is generally agreed that the move to agriculture and settled civilization created much greater opportunities for individuals to diverge in terms of their land ownership, control of food resources, and access to power—which quickly led to the development of a much more hierarchical society. In their analysis of cultural differences, Geert Hofstede and his colleagues argue that the advent of agriculture not only drove greater power distance in cultures, but also a higher level of collectivism as opposed to individuality.
All three of the above factors become accentuated the further north and west one moves into Europe. It is therefore not surprising that greater levels of equality are evident as one moves in this direction across the continent. If the arguments above are correct, the parliament at Althing represents an extreme version of a trend that was occurring throughout Europe: a self-selected, relatively homogeneous group of people, facing intense environmental challenges, living in a low density, predominantly nonagricultural society, coming together more or less as equals to make decisions and set rules for governing their relationships. When one stands on the icy plains of Thingvellir, it is difficult to envisage any other arrangement making sense.
However, there is also another side to equality in Europe that is worth considering. While on many measures of income and wealth distribution European countries have stronger institutional mechanisms for driving equality than other cultures, many societies on the continent are also socially more formal, hierarchical, and status driven than, for example, the United States. Here, I believe, the offshoots from European culture—the United States, Canada, and Australia—have an edge on Europe with respect to equality. The reason for this is another theme that has influenced European cultural DNA more recently: the selective migration from the Old to the New World. Those who were dissatisfied with hierarchy, or their own social exclusion from the elites, were more likely to chance their luck elsewhere than those who were more comfortably entrenched in the social order of their society. Hierarchical barriers created over time and through continuity of living were also disrupted by movement to a new environment. Pressures to break down privilege were released through the escape valve of migration—thus preserving social formality, elitism, and class or education-based barriers in European society.
This effect is particularly relevant to the UK, as Britain has sent more of people beyond its shores than virtually any other major country in the world. That is why English is, to use a paradoxical phrasing, almost the lingua franca for the world. While there are only 65 million or so people in the UK for whom English is the mother tongue, there are close to 400 million outside the country for whom this is the case. As we saw earlier with the story of who went to America, the migrants were not just a random cross section of the population. They went for particular reasons—one of which was to escape their position in the hierarchy of British society and to try their luck in a new environment. It is interesting to note the British reputation for social hierarchy and class consciousness became much more accentuated over the period that large swaths of the population were leaving. Other features of British society such as intellectualism, bureaucracy, slowness, and even the loss of the country's great engineering tradition might reflect this selective loss of certain dynamic layers of society through migration. In a lesser way, I believe this process affected other European countries also.
This sense of equality and social elitism resonates in a number of ways in business life. In many cultures, including the United States, CEOs are frequently treated in highly reverential ways, with their utterances or commands carrying the weight of religious edicts. This just happens less or rarely in Europe. Having been a CEO a long time myself, I know that my status landed very differently in different parts of the world—and reverential is not the word that springs to mind for how people responded to the title in the UK. In some parts of Europe, such as Scandinavia or Holland, the very term leadership evokes considerable discomfort, as it is seen to erode a sense of team. Leaders in Europe have to tread gently and exercise power carefully.
Decision making can also be slowed down by the need to create buy-in and let multiple people have their say. Outsiders need to learn to “go slow to go fast” in Europe, as inappropriate efforts to force things through simply backfire. The chances of decisions being smoothly implemented—always an issue in European corporate cultures—are especially low if people have not been consulted or treated as equals in the decision-making process. Organizational expressions of democracy, such as town hall meetings, open disagreement, and vociferous debate, as occurred on the icy plains of Iceland, are a regular feature of corporate life on the continent. While this can create a sense of untidiness, it can also lead to a high level of intellectual liveliness and a Darwinian process by which ideas are tested and the best ones taken up. Involvement is a more significant motivator for European leaders. By contrast, while things are changing, European leaders operating in other cultures can underestimate the barriers to the open expression of opinion or indeed people's desire for it. At times, efforts to solicit people's views can create the impression that the leader does not know or is out of their depth.
Leaders in Europe also have to work at alignment more so than in any other culture. This is not the same as investing in relationships, which actually is less necessary in Europe than, say, Indian, Chinese, or Middle Eastern business cultures. Rather, this relates to the extensive efforts required to get people on the same intellectual page. You have to convince people with data, argument, and a willingness to adjust your perspective in the light of their views. In my experience, European leaders are attuned to this early on in their role but over time, as they get used to their positions, they can slip into a less inclusive and more directive style of operating. Nevertheless, European leaders scored most strongly out of all the regions on inclusive two-way leadership, although scores generally were low on this dimension globally.
However, paradoxically, the sense of social elitism and separation alluded to earlier can also exist in European corporate culture. A while back, I was working with the senior team of the French subsidiary of a major U.S. multinational. It so happened that the U.S. CEO was visiting on the day I had individual meetings with the French leaders. When I asked them how the CEO's visit was going, it was clear that each of the French leaders had been completely taken aback by his informality—and, critically for the French, by the fact that this iconic global leader was going around wearing a sweater and jeans. The French leaders all described with varying degrees of intensity a sense of having been personally insulted by his attire. One particularly well turned-out member of the team even said the CEO had chosen to dress as a tramp to show to the French that they were not that important in his mind. The CEO made matters worse by cutting short a lunch that had been carefully prepared for him. I myself made this mistake once when working with a team in France, and was later told that the chef responsible for preparing the meal had thrown pots and pans around the kitchen in rage. When I relayed the story of the CEO to the European president of the company, he said that the French leaders had in the past been aghast at how much the American CEO was paid and, given this, had perhaps expected he would cut a more impressive figure or at least turn up dressed appropriately for the part of a big leader. Both sides of the equality paradox are neatly illustrated by these reactions.
As a consequence of the above pattern, while European leaders treat people in some ways with respect and as equals, they can also preserve a certain formality and distance in their downward relationships. As such, leaders can feel a degree detached from their organizations: neither very willing to drive a decision through the sheer exercise of power nor inclined to engage or informally interact with staff at lower levels. This can create a sense that many European corporate cultures are loose, with semi-detached leadership and multiple elements going their own way. This can create a significant problem around executional effectiveness and follow-through in European corporate cultures. In fact, European companies are perhaps the weakest in this area compared to other global organizations, where either power is exercised more overtly or leaders are closer to the action in terms of follow-through. Initiatives can take a huge amount of time to be approved and frequently are only ever implemented in parts of the company where the change seed has fortuitously landed on fertile ground. The culture's surface formality also means that people are reluctant to express disagreement and leaders can assume that their plans are being faithfully executed, when in fact a permafrost layer below the senior levels has led to the original intention being morphed out of all recognition.
European companies with cultures that combine reluctance around the overt expression of power with a sense of detachment can engage the global world with greater flexibility, but also with less internal coherence and consistency than, for example, American organizations. On the positive side, other nationalities can experience European business cultures as much more tolerant and flexible than many others. However, as companies become more global, the issue of coherence at scale becomes more problematic. There is also a big issue around driving the right ethics and corporate values when operating in other cultures. Many European companies can be much less effective in this area compared to American organizations operating on the global scale. In spite of their best intentions, leaders at the top can be taken by surprise when it emerges that very different values have been at play at ground levels. The problems that BP experienced in the United States around safety and GSK in China and Poland around sales practices with doctors did not arise because of a lapse of values in their corporate cultures. Rather they reflected a positive, if somewhat overoptimistic, desire to respect people, give them space and treat them as adults.
More generally, equality is one of the great gifts that European culture has to offer the world. No other global culture has traveled further in this direction or for so long. However, the well-documented rise in inequality since the 1980s, as popularized by the European writer Thomas Piketty, means that this area is always a challenge for societies. Equality is also a relative concept—and while Europe may be stronger on this than many other cultures—the human predilection for pecking orders and hierarchy exerts a gravitational pull everywhere. No mainstream political party in Europe would argue that the continent is a paragon of equality. However, the recognition that in the past this aspect of European DNA has imbued its society with a greater sense of openness, vitality, and innovation, as well as natural rather than artificially imposed cohesiveness, could be helpful as Europe starts to experience progressively greater economic challenges from other cultures. At one level, the instincts within the continent might be to pull up the drawbridge, preserve existing practices, and for the rich to protect themselves in their fiefdoms. However, a deeper understanding of European DNA suggests an alternative response to this challenge may be to even further deepen the sense of openness and equality in European society, because it's precisely these values that have given the continent competitive edge over other cultures in the past.
A few years back, I came across a group of Chinese tourists exploring Soho—a bohemian, trendy, but also slightly scurrilous area of central London. The Chinese tourists had stumbled upon a large group of English teenagers dressed up as Mohicans. Their heads were completely shaved except for an aggressive outcrop of garishly colored hair running down the center of their heads. Most seemed to be wearing Doc Marten boots, brightly colored trousers and ragged tops. Much of their clothing was torn and there were plenty of chains, buckles, and outlandishly sized safety pins hanging off various parts of their bodies. To say they stood out would be an understatement. They projected a curious mixture of sullen defiance, boredom, lack of purpose, and simmering hostility—an existential ennui, tinged with aggression.
The Chinese tourists nearest to the group were looking on somewhat nervously, fearing perhaps that they might be spat at or worse. The tourists who were a bit further behind were surreptitiously trying to take photographs, clearly regarding what they had seen as an iconic piece of imagery about London. However, I also noticed that the tourists who were furthest away from the Mohicans were laughing uncontrollably, whilst trying to be somehow discreet about it, in case they caught the attention of the unpredictable Mohicans. The Chinese tourists had stumbled across a representation of English individuality and, in particular, a tradition of teenage rebellion stretching back through modern British history, encompassing groups such as the Skinheads, Punks, Mods, and Rockers. I wondered as I looked on if the British tourist ministry had not paid the Mohicans to act out this distinctive slice of English culture.
The fear, fascination, and amusement this scene caused was essentially due to the collision of the Eastern collectivist mindset with Western individualism. The individualism on show in Soho varies a lot across the continent and is more marked in the north and west of Europe. These parts of Europe have also been where the continent's rock bands and musical icons have come from, although not the more mainstream Eurovision song-contest winners. Unlikely as it may seem, getting underneath the reason for this cultural theme—and understanding why it expresses itself so differently in various parts of the continent—helps explain many aspects of organizational culture, as well as more broadly the Eurozone crisis and the issues facing European integration.
The idea that Western (and, in its original form, European) culture is strong on individuality compared to other cultures is, of course, a well researched and commented upon aspect of intercultural research. On the dimension of individualism versus collectivism that Geert Hofstede and his associates identified, Western societies top the scale for individualism.10 A key finding in attribution theory, a branch of social psychology that looks at how people explain events, is that Western subjects will often explain their behavior and the outcomes that they experience with reference to their own personal agency. People from the Far East, for example, will tend to attribute their actions to the desire to follow social norms or the expectations of others. Linguistic analysis also suggests that the word I is used much more regularly by Western subjects when creating stories or in simple conversation.
However, there is more subtlety to the picture of individualism in Europe than meets the eye, as well as a huge amount of variation across countries. When one looks deeper, on certain dimensions, European societies are quite collectivist. For example, while Europeans are low on Globe's in-group collectivism, on institutional collectivism—defined as the extent to which a society has clear rules and social obligations that all people follow—European scores are among the highest in the world. Only the Confucian cultures of the Far East begin to parallel the European scores. Institutional collectivism is highest in Scandinavian countries with most scoring higher than, for example, China. The United States is lower than most European countries and globally sits in the bottom half of the countries surveyed by the Globe project on this dimension.11 This is not surprising from the earlier analysis of U.S. cultural DNA. A significant number of the early groups who migrated to the United States were escaping various forms of institutional control. Rejection of such intrusion is therefore hardwired into American cultural DNA. American culture has often been described as the most individualistic in the world. However, it is so only with regard to rejection of government control over people's lives. On a number of other dimensions such as patriotism, sexual freedom, or bucking the system in companies, it is far less individualistic than most European countries.
What are the roots of low in-group collectivism in Europe? Some clues appear to lie in how individualism varies in Europe—and specifically, how it increases significantly as one goes north and west to the Netherlands, and then into Britain, as well as the strong sense of individualism in Scandinavian societies. Anthropological research suggests that individualism is relatively high in pastoral societies, but declines significantly in cultures that have a strong tradition of settled agriculture. In particular, the onset of settled agriculture leads to people congregating into small, village-type communities bound by stronger and more widespread collective relationships than occurs, for example, in more dispersed pastoral contexts. However, individualism starts to increase again as societies move through the agricultural stage and become more industrialized and urbanized.
A second feature that drives individualism is the level of external threat that a society has faced. Eastern Europe has had much less security than the countries lying on the western extremities of the continent in this sense. I spoke earlier about how persistent external threat leads to an acceptance of authoritarian control in China with an associated loss of individual freedoms. Both institutional and in-group collectivism tends to be high in such countries and this is exactly the pattern we see for Russia and other East European societies, which mirror, in a paler way, patterns found in China. The geographical barriers to the creation of unified political entities in Western Europe have also probably helped to exacerbate such differences.
England was spared this sense of threat by virtue of its island status on the far west of the continent. It was also inevitably a place where agriculture was late in arriving, as well as being the earliest society to industrialize in the world. The Mohicans the Chinese visitors saw were an expression of these forces that have led to a long ingrained tradition of individualism. However, this individualism also leads to clear social rules being set for governing relationships and ensuring some form of civic society. In his work on the origins of English individualism, Alan Macfarlane describes how, even in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English society was much more legalistic and rule-governed than other European societies.12 The English may be individualistic but there are few countries in the world where people queue in such a patient way or observe all manner of rules and regulations assiduously. One senses if the rebellious Mohicans had wanted to buy a cup of tea, they would have formed an orderly and patient line at a stall.
Proof of the above arguments comes from the fact that there is a strong negative correlation between the two forms of Globe collectivism measures within Europe. Greece, for example—which is the highest in Europe on in-group collectivism—scores the lowest on institutional collectivism. Greeks feel huge loyalty and obligation to their social and familial groups, but very little to wider organizational, national, or cross-national institutions. Michael Minkov's dimension of exclusionism versus universalism expresses this inverse relationship between the two forms of collectivism. Needless to say, European societies' scores on universalism are some of the highest in the world, with Scandinavian countries being at the top globally. Greece is the lowest on universalism out of European countries.
The above themes mean that while many European organizational cultures can be highly tolerant of initiative and creativity, they can also be highly rule-governed and bureaucratic. With respect to the first area, many European business cultures can be strong on innovation at the ideas level. Our analysis found that 30 percent of European executives were seen as strong in their improvement and change orientation and only 2 percent had a development need in this area. American and Indian executives were also high on this dimension, but other cultures were weaker. Leaders managing in a European context have to give people more latitude and opportunity for self-expression than is the case even in the United States. This can lead to a pervasive sense that in European businesses people like to just talk. European organizations are also much more prone to the creation of endless-meetings cultures. Everyone wants to have a say and no one wants to just follow.
However, this creativity also exists in the context of a high level of rule following. A full 37 percent of European executives were strong with respect to responsibility and rule following. This figure was marginally higher than in many other cultures where conformity is considered the norm, such as China and the Middle East. However, the comparable figure for American executives was only 20 percent. So while European cultures can feel innovative and creative at an ideas level, they can also feel a little rigid and bureaucratic. Rule following is subtly different, however, from orienting yourself to a powerful leader—something to which there is typically resistance in European cultures.
When it comes to the actual execution of change, individualism and bureaucracy can combine to make what is always difficult especially problematic in a European context. People do not want to be told how to be; however, they paradoxically also want to follow clear procedures that have been laid down in the past. Change occurs through a patient process of discussion and consultations, following which new rules are laid down. Execution of change has become progressively more difficult as individual self-expression has become more important in European business life. As one executive said to me, “In the past, things happened when you pulled a lever; now the lever just comes off in your hand.” This can lead to an ordered sense of chaos in an organization, which can be beneficial for intellectual innovation but less effective for actually implementing change. Execution at pace is a challenge in many European businesses and means that particular attention needs to be paid to developing this muscle in leaders. In our analysis this is graphically illustrated by the fact that only 24 percent of European leaders had a strength in action orientation compared to 40 percent of American leaders.
Another point about individualism is the extent to which it is an important precondition for effective self-reflection. One of the most consistent findings that we have established from working across the globe is that business cultures vary tremendously in terms of people's insight into themselves, as well as openness to feedback. In Chinese business cultures, for example, people are much less used to talking about themselves, their motives or drivers—or in developing a differentiated understanding of themselves as distinct from others. It is all too easy for Westerners to view this lack of interest in self-understanding as emanating from defensiveness or a lack of confidence. While this is true in some cases, a more fundamental reason is that people in less individualistic cultures are much less used to thinking about themselves as distinct entities with identities separate from the whole.
Sure enough, we find in our research that self-insight is less of an issue with European leaders than it is globally. Ten percent of leaders in Europe were considered to be strong in this area, compared to figures in the region of 3 to 7 percent for leaders in other parts of the world. The comparable figure for American leaders was 3 percent. Only 14 percent of European leaders were considered to have a development need in this area compared to figures in the 19 to 35 percent range for other regions, including 19 percent for the United States.
More broadly, individualism is something that is likely to deepen everywhere as societies industrialize, feel safer from external threats, and the cultural impact of settled agriculture recedes. Other world cultures therefore have much to learn from European and American culture in this area. Organizational cultures the world over will need to come to terms with more fluid, flexible, and person-centric ways of organizing as individualism becomes more and more pronounced. Even businesses in Western societies will need to reinvent their appeal as individualism deepens. One senses that not many of the Mohicans would be attracted by the prospects of a corporate career. The risk for many corporations in the West is that unless they radically rethink how they engage with people, they will become progressively unattractive to more and more people.
As we saw earlier, Chinese culture was responsible for an extraordinary number of advances in practical technology across a swath of areas. Yet despite all this inventiveness, the Chinese never laid down a theory of science or outlined the principles for building a coherent view of the natural world. One sees almost the opposite problem across the Himalayas. Minds in India turned more naturally to delving into the inner mysteries of the universe and the human soul. However, Indian thinking on such matters was often highly intuitive and there was limited interest in empirical or logical proof of these insights. Even when thinking was more coherent—as with Baudhayna's “Pythagoras” theorem—the ideas were casually thrown into religious texts, almost as an afterthought.
European thought, however, combined the best of the Indian and Chinese traditions to create a wholly new and ordered way of looking at nature. There was, like the Indians, a search for the fundamental rules and truths that govern the world. However, thinking about these principles was subjected to the rigor of analysis and rational examination. Theories were proved or disproved using evidence, rather than accepted on the basis of intuitive plausibility. This was necessary because the Europeans, like the Chinese, needed ideas that worked in the practical world. In Europe's much more challenging and hostile environment, people could not afford the Indian luxury of intuitive speculation that might or might not be right. Scientific understanding was therefore, tested logically and then put to use in the service of practical goals. Cultures like the Indian and Chinese, that might have thought that they were in many ways more advanced than the barbaric Europeans, were left trailing behind by this motor of intellectual innovation in which the theoretical and the practical were always two sides of the same coin.
The reason for the West's distinctive and powerful intellectual approach lies in the fact, I believe, that Europe was uniquely influenced by two different types of cultural traditions—through the two routes that humans took in populating the continent. From their Middle Eastern origins, the Europeans inherited a search for the fundamental truths of life. The religious instinct and, in particular, the monotheistic drive to find fundamental answers and ultimate truths, are deeply rooted in the particularities of the Middle Eastern environment. It is the lack of this powerful religious instinct in Chinese culture that explains its inherent pragmatism and lack of interest in theoretical exploration. The other thrust into Europe brought a significant focus on using intellectual inquiry to master and control the environment. Planning in a structured manner was also imperative for survival—if you did not do this, you, had no chance of making it through the northern winters. These twin drivers meant that theoretical insights, empirical testing, and practical application constituted a seamless, intertwined cycle in Western culture. In addition, if one overlays on this other building blocks of European cultural DNA—such as equality and individualism—the basis for ideas being questioned and debated actively was further deepened.
Various pieces of evidence support the above thesis. First, the Western intellectual tradition was nurtured and taken to a new level by the Greek city-states. This is exactly where one would expect the fundamental truths and more mastery-oriented elements of European cultural DNA to have become most intertwined. A Goldilocks mixture of the preceding three elements seems to have been historically necessary for intellectual dynamism in the West. More practical and interested in economic and political power, the Roman Empire was also much more centralized. Unsurprisingly, its intellectual contributions were miserly compared to those of the Greeks. When the religious impulse took hold too strongly, Western intellectual dynamism stalled and was not reactivated until the influence of religion abated in the Renaissance. While interested in fundamental truths, and to a degree practical innovation, Middle Eastern societies too suffered from the fact that the religious impulse grew too dominant, as well as from being more stratified societies where the open debate of ideas was less acceptable.
The substantial contribution made by Ashkenazi Jews to European thought may also, in part, stem from the mixing of the above forces in that community, as well as reflecting the strong concentration for centuries of Ashkenazi Jews in intellectual and commercial activities. With a strong history of argumentation and debate, the Ashkenazi Jews were living examples of a Middle Eastern culture embedded in a European context. When Einstein refused to accept quantum mechanics, he did so because, although the theory worked in practice, it did not make sense at a deeper level. “God does not play dice with the Universe,” was his constant rebuke to the quantum physicists.
Fast-forwarding to the present, the above feature of European culture still gives Western societies great intellectual dynamism in business and more broadly. A highly data-driven approach to business is deeply embedded in European and also Western businesses more generally. In essence, anything that moves is measured—and decisions are rarely made without detailed presentations dripping with analytical justification and data. When a question arises, the near ubiquitous response is to study the subject more deeply by getting data. Legions of consultants are employed to mine internal and market data. Performance is measured in concrete terms rather than more qualitatively. Anything that smacks of intuition in any walk of life is treated with suspicion.
European executives in our database scored strongly with respect to analytical thinking, with 38 percent displaying a strength in this area and only 4 percent a development need. The only other global culture whose leaders matched European levels was China. In addition, European executives were more reflective than executives from any other global region. Scores for this were generally low, but 11 percent of European executives had a strength in this area compared to global scores in the 2 to 4 percent range for other regions. In addition, only 10 percent had a development need in this area, the lowest score globally. Furthermore, 29 percent of European leaders were strong in strategic thinking, the highest figure globally. This compared with 24 percent for American and Indian leaders and figures in the 3-16 percent for all other cultures.
However, the question arises of the domains of business where the European analytical, structured, and long-term orientation works well and where it does not. Global business is now fast moving, unpredictably, and dynamically—a very different environment to that in which the Europeans developed their intellectual orientation toward the world. There is a pervasive and complacent feeling in many European companies that their systematic and structured approach is both professional and sophisticated. Indian intuitive thinking and the Chinese focus on practicalities, as well as the African instincts around flexibility, are all intellectual styles that make for faster decision making and movement in business. One of the most common complaints heard from Indian or Chinese leaders is that European companies can often seem overly slow, ponderous, analytical, and structured in their approach. The need to justify strategies analytically or to debate and test ideas openly before moving into action can be experienced as stultifying. This is not to say that executives from India and China are not also highly commercial or numerate. They often are, but in a quick fire rather than analytically ponderous manner. To cut through the slowness that the overly analytical approach can lead to, we often introduce European teams to the notion of “What do you know that you don't know?” The idea behind this is that often you know the answer but you don't know that you know it.
The inherently structured and long-term approach that European companies and institutions favor does, however, confer some obvious advantages. European companies can be strong in areas requiring patient and detailed analytical research, such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, or technical engineering. One can also build institutions for success at scale patiently over time, a necessary requirement in our global world. Many of the companies from emerging economies have yet to face this challenge of scaling up beyond their borders. Decisions can also be made in a strategic manner for long-term gain.
Many of the actions of the European Union mirror the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. EU institutions have a long history of driving rules in many areas of life designed to make things better and more uniform over time. Compared to all other cultures, Europe is also more prepared to make the sacrifices needed to tackle climate change. This is an issue taken seriously across the continent and there is broad acceptance of the analytical case for global warming, as well as the strategic solutions needed to address the problem.
Yet there is also an inherent inflexibility and sense of ponderous bureaucracy around the way the EU operates. The European response to the financial crisis has been slow and deliberate, relegating many economies on the continent potentially to years of anemic growth. One senses that even if the single currency proved to be a complete disaster for many of its economies, Europe would inflexibly grind down the road, refusing to flex or alter course for many decades.
A second and different point relates to Europe's traditional intellectual strengths. The Western canon of scientific thinking now constitutes a vast and intricate body of knowledge. Creation of such a body of knowledge systematically over several centuries is one thing; absorption of it in one's own lifetime and then building on it is another. The latter requires discipline, diligence, and a parking of one's desire to make an individual contribution. This explains why, in spite of the West's historical dominance in this area, many Western universities' science departments are full of people from other cultures. The Indian intellectual tradition of faithfully memorizing and preserving for posterity voluminous amounts of information is well-suited to the requirements of absorbing current scientific knowledge. Likewise, the Chinese tradition of disciplining oneself to master the knowledge acquired by others makes this a relatively natural task for people from that culture. Western students, particularly from cultures where individualism is high, are more naturally drawn to the social sciences, literature, or other creative arts. It is easier in such subject areas to make one's mark, and the discipline of absorbing a vast body of knowledge is less burdensome. Looking forward, the West cannot assume that because it was responsible for producing and evolving significant aspects of current scientific and analytical thinking that it will be similarly successful in exploiting it or taking it to the next level.
A recurring theme we encounter with executives who have moved to work in Europe is the sense of aloofness and coldness they experience in their interactions—particularly if they come from emotionally expressive cultures. One African executive described how he thought that he must have done something terribly wrong as he simply could not understand why people wouldn't smile at him or engage him personally as he went about his duties in a firm. He eventually realized that this was the norm, but admitted that he never truly felt comfortable in Europe. Another Brazilian executive described to me how she experienced her stay in London initially as a shock to her emotional system because of the measured way people dealt with her. Both ended up slowly but surely retreating into themselves, with their initial naturalness giving way to a more reserved and controlled external front.
Yet paradoxically, when one looks at cross-cultural personality research, European and other Western nations typically score far higher on sociability and extraversion than do people from other cultures.13 This finding comes as something of a surprise to overseas executives who have had the kind of experiences described earlier. To be sure, one has to be careful in that people's responses to self-report personality measures are driven by the norms within their culture—making it difficult to form conclusions about cross-cultural differences. However, behavioral observations around sociability also support the notion that Western nations are higher on this dimension.
The answer to this paradox partially lies in the earlier quoted Chinese observation: “Westerners treat their family like strangers and strangers like their family.” There is a tendency in European culture for relationships to be more diffuse and extensive but also less intense and personal than is the case with other cultures—particularly those that are high on in-group collectivism. While one might expect people who live in such cultures to also be social, this is only partially true. They are social with family and those who are part of their close networks; but they treat others with a degree of suspicion. In more individualist cultures, the social net is thrown wider but in a less intense or deep way.
In terms of differences in naturalness and emotional expressiveness, it is relatively easy to see why European culture might be stronger on suppressing emotions than some other cultures in the world. Various studies have shown that emotional expression in southern European countries is higher than in, say, Scandinavia or the north of Europe.14 Interestingly, studies also indicate this to be the case in the extreme west of the continent, extending through to Ireland. For example, a U.S. study of emotional expressiveness in people with Irish or Scandinavian heritage found the Irish to be much more emotionally expressive.15
It is relatively clear that those European cultures predominantly influenced by the northernmost entry into Europe, from the west of Russia, show high levels of emotional suppression and regulation. The reason for this is the exact opposite of why Sub-Saharan Africans show high levels of naturalness—survival in an unfamiliar environment requires a suppression of one's natural emotional instincts, which were originally formed in our ancient African context, and the substitution of these by a more controlled and planned approach to engaging one's environment.
This reserved sociability has an important impact on the culture of most Western multinationals. Typically, the culture of such firms emphasize not just individual rights and professional relationships between people, but also the development of relatively extensive, but not necessarily particularly deep, networks of relationships. In my experience, executives from the West regard this as pretty normative and are relatively unaware of the fact that many others may find the social world that these values create somewhat alien or difficult to navigate. In particular, those from more emotionally expressive cultures can feel disoriented and experience such a culture as something of a cold shower.
A second issue relates to the ease with which people from other cultures are able to navigate the complex pattern of relationships that exist typically in multinational companies. For example, one often sees that executives from cultures where the social net is tighter genuinely struggle to establish the necessary influencing channels and globally networks, regardless of their networking or social skills in their domestic environment. In part, this relates to a natural difficulty that anybody from a nondominant culture might have in penetrating an environment driven by different cultural norms. However, it likely also reflects an inherently more cautious approach to wider relationships. People from such cultures are just not used to throwing the social net out so widely and so quickly—and this can lead to a genuine barrier for career progression for people from cultures where relationship networks are more tightly circumscribed.
For their part, Westerners can also be caught by surprise when their efforts to engage people they do not know are treated with a degree of apprehension or suspicion. Even more frustrating for Europeans is the notion that they have to build relationships with connector individuals who have networks of relationships in the culture they are seeking to engage before anything can happen. Chinese culture specifically emphasizes this, but it is also evident in other parts of the world. The Western sense of professional propriety naturally rebels against investing time and money in people who have no tangible value other than that they are connected to the networks that they need to access. However, such connectors are needed and provide comfort to those one needs to engage. In my experience, the open, direct, and move-quickly approach to building relationships that Western executives prefer can all too often hit a brick wall of “Slow down, I don't really know you.” Understanding that they are the ones who are different and something of an outlier when it comes to global norms on this dimension, is likely to be helpful in smoothing out some of these difficulties.
On May 20, 1498, the Indians experienced their first formal contact with European explorers in the form of Vasco da Gama. The Zamorin (King) of Calicut received the Portuguese navigator with polite attention. However, the cloaks of scarlet cloth, hats, assorted corals, and foods that the fair-skinned visitor had brought distinctly underwhelmed him; he had expected something more substantial like gold or silver. He did not have to think too hard before refusing Vasco da Gama's request for a formal commercial treaty and the creation of a small outpost. Since the Portuguese navigator had only arrived with four ships, he was forced to accept this rejection and reluctantly return home, his mission a failure.
However, the navigator was not going to give up so easily. He had shown great ingenuity in mastering the seas, circumventing the African continent, and coping with immense hardship and loss as he sought to find a route through to India. He returned in 1502, this time with a fleet of heavily armed ships, intending not to take “no” for an answer. During this voyage, he inflicted considerable acts of cruelty on a string of rulers and states. In one notorious incident, he raided a ship with 400 pilgrims traveling from Calicut to Mecca, looted its cargo, and then locked the pilgrims into the hold and set fire to the ship, ignoring pleas from the women and children for salvation. Da Gama himself apparently watched with pleasure through a porthole as the pilgrims burned. This brutal and unprovoked attack both terrified and perplexed the local population.
When he arrived in Calicut, Vasco da Gama demanded the expulsion of all Muslim merchants who had been trading peacefully there for centuries. When his demand was rejected, he bombarded Calicut for a number of days. He captured several rice vessels and cut off the crew's hands and noses, sending them as macabre gifts to the Zamorin. When the Zamorin sent a high priest as an ambassador to try to smooth things over, Da Gama had the high priest's lips and ears cut off and sowed a pair of dog's ears to his head, before sending him back. Subsequently, after a series of battles and the use of extreme violence, the Portuguese managed to gain a foothold in India. The arrival of these Europeans on the west coast of India was particularly bad news for the Jews of India, some of whom had lived peacefully in the region from the time of King Solomon. The Portuguese initiated a virulent campaign against them. Over time, this religious intolerance also extended to Muslims and Hindus, and eventually significant proportions of the population in the area were forced to convert to Christianity.
The above story illustrates two related aspects of European psychology. The first concerns a relentless and restless drive for environmental mastery. The Portuguese had spent centuries improving their ships, navigational aids, and knowledge of the seas to help them explore and travel far beyond their shores. They were not content to simply stay where they were and live off yesterday's technologies. The Chinese, who had developed even greater sophistication in ship construction and navigation, lacked one thing the Europeans possessed: the desire to explore and master the world. Admiral Cheng Ho's famous voyages in the fifteenth century were brought to a halt by the Royal court in China that deemed such exploration frivolous and unfruitful. To boot, the authorities destroyed all the maps and records of the Admiral's voyages so others would not be seduced by his exploits.
The second aspect relates to a drive to master other peoples, including a propensity to violence against other races. The first substantial Indian contact with Europeans on the Malabar Coast foretold the experiences that many other cultures were to have the world over as Europeans spread their wings. Native American Indians, Bantus, Aboriginal Australians, Aztecs, Incas, and the Chinese all experienced largely unprovoked European aggression. When the Chinese sent out fleets in the fifteenth century to explore the world, the ships were filled with gifts and recordings of Chinese history and knowledge in order to show the power of their civilization to others. When Christopher Columbus arrived in America, his first instinct was to kidnap a number of the natives and forcibly take them back to Europe. This set the pattern pretty much for all European contact with people in the New World and more generally, as European powers built their empires and a system of slavery.
Out-group aggression was also not purely a matter of European attitudes toward the cultures they met on their travels. The history of the Jews in Europe illustrates that it also applied to minorities within the continent, with Hitler's attempt at the extermination of Jews being just one recent, obvious, and grotesque episode in a history of persecution. There was a feeling in Europe that something like that could never happen again. However, in the 1990s, much of the continent looked blithely on as the Muslim population of the former Yugoslavia was hounded and persecuted. Mass extermination and the use of concentration camps happened again. They were fortunately nipped in the bud, not by the European powers that were blithely complicit—but by U.S. President Bill Clinton deciding that enough was enough. Within Europe, a never-ending dance of armed conflict has also characterized relationships between the various subgroups and nations on the continent from time immemorial. In fact, the global empires the Europeans built were brought to an end principally as these aggressive instincts turned inward and the continent was convulsed by two epic conflicts.
I believe that two factors primarily explain the hardwiring of a greater drive for mastery in European culture than in others. The first is that the settling of Europe required an intense and prolonged period of competition both against a forbidding and challenging environment, as well as against a well-established and strong competitor human species. The process of the colonization of Europe by modern humans appears to have taken several thousand years or so before evidence of Neanderthals vanished from the European landscape. There was powerful selective pressure during this period toward both the predilection and skill for armed conflict against other humans.
The second, and possibly more important, factor concerns the ecological niche that humans were forced to occupy in Europe. For many, particularly those settling in the north of the continent, the hunter component of the hunter-gatherer strategy was initially a far more viable option than the gathering part of the equation. In fact, the rewards for mastering big-game hunting were huge, as Europe was teeming with such species. Again it is easy to see how, over tens of thousands of years, this mix of opportunities and pressures would lead to an aptitude and skill with respect to hunting and warfare. An inclination for warfare does on the whole seem to be greater in parts of the world where settled agriculture penetrated less easily, such as in the tropical parts of Africa, the Mongolian Steppe, and with the nomadic desert tribes of Arabia. The idea of powerful, selective pressures for proficiency with respect to both hunting and warfare in Europe also finds support in the simple fact that on average, Europeans and Americans are physically bigger than people from most other cultures, with the possible exception of parts of Africa. It would be surprising if the same selective pressures that drove skills with respect to hunting and warfare did not also drive an increase in physical size. In fact, there is evidence that the onset of farming everywhere led to a reduction in the size of humans.
The mastery aspect of European DNA has driven huge levels of curiosity, creativity, and technical innovation in the past and the same is true today. Western firms still lead the way with respect to innovation, with many businesses from other cultures copying such innovations, or finding ways to more efficiently make Western products. European firms are still highly exploratory and lead the way with respect to engaging global opportunities. Like Vasco da Gama, European leaders think internationally more naturally compared to even American executives, for example—who can seem more parochial and inward looking.
However, there is evidence that this dimension of European success is fast diminishing. One of the dimensions that Shalom Schwartz has framed in his cross-cultural research is labeled mastery–harmony. This essentially refers to the extent to which people in a society are interested in dominating their social or physical environment or living in harmony with it. Today, the Anglo-Saxon countries score highly on mastery, with the United States scoring especially high. Other Latin European or Central European countries now tend toward the harmony dimension.16 The sense of comfort and complacency, as well as interest in the good life, is a pervasive feeling in many European corporate cultures. Wages are high, lunches long, and holidays extensive. If you visit continental Europe in August, you do not see much evidence of the mastery drive propelling the continent ahead to ever-higher levels of achievement. It has been pushed to the far western corner of the continent and is pretty much on the way to being shipped across the Atlantic.
In part, this is no bad thing. Relaxing and enjoying life more will not threaten survival in the way it might have done long ago when the continent was being populated. Yet people in many parts of the world find it hard to live in the moment, just be, and enjoy the journey. The more relaxed orientation and focus on the quality of life gives Europe certain business strengths in aesthetics, design, and with respect to leisure and cultural activities more broadly. It is not a coincidence that the world's two premier spirits companies—Diageo and Pernod Ricard—are European. Europe's edge in these areas is likely to become even more important as other global cultures start to value these dimensions more.
A second point is that the European mastery drive was originally oriented toward physical domination of the environment as well as out-groups. This propelled technological innovation and a sense of restlessness in European culture that was perhaps unmatched by other cultures. However, as environmental mastery is achieved, motivation in more settled societies inevitably pivots toward competitive success against others and hierarchical advancement. Success here may require qualities that are not necessarily deeply embedded in European cultural DNA. The level of drive one sees today in executives from other cultures is often higher. In our analysis only 20 percent of European leaders showed a strength in achievement drive whereas figures for other global cultures were in the 40 percent range. The rates for leaders from the emerging economies of India and China were especially high. In part, this may reflect the compensatory drive of people trying to catch up. However, there may be a deeper issue here; people in such societies may be more oriented toward societal competitive success.
In their book The Triple Package, authors Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld identify a series of groups that have achieved extremely high levels of success in America. These include Indians, various Far Eastern nationalities, Lebanese, Greeks, and Jews.17 All these communities come from cultures where settled civilization has been around longer than in most Western countries. Do people from these cultures simply have a more profoundly ingrained set of instincts for succeeding in settled societies? Self-discipline, propensity for academic learning, and commerciality may all be more deeply embedded in cultures that have had a settled civilization for longer. Indeed it would be surprising if thousands of years of having to compete in such contexts had not developed such psychological instincts.
A third point is that the out-group mastery element of European cultural DNA discussed above appears at one level to contradict some of the themes discussed earlier. How can strong values for respecting individual rights and for treating people with equality be reconciled with aggressive instincts toward out-groups? The answer to this question lies in the psychology of intergroup empathy. As recent research has demonstrated, we have powerful, evolved mechanisms—some at the level of mirror-neuron suppression—for reduced out-group empathy. While all groups unfortunately exhibit this effect, the European tendency for greater in-group equality on the one hand and for a degree of aggression on the other means that the process of empathy suppression potentially has more far-reaching consequences in European culture than in many others.
The capacity to commit atrocious acts of violence against others, while believing one's group to be highly principled, is a consequence of this bifurcation of emotional responses. It leads to significant psychological themes around hypocrisy and rationalization to which Europeans are potentially more prone than others. Historical examples are too plentiful to go through here. European colonialism, for example, was always wrapped up in various rationalizations around promoting religious values, ending slavery, or protecting the colonized from their local enemies. Even iconic symbols of positive Western values can display breathtaking levels of double standards. Winston Churchill, who could wax lyrical about tyranny falling across Europe, had no compunction in vehemently opposing Indian independence and encouraging severe repression of any movement opposed to British rule. Across the Atlantic, America's founding fathers did not appear to have had much difficulty in reconciling their fine sentiments around individual rights with vicious wars of extermination against the Native Americans or the existence of mass slavery in their “country of the free.”
This channeling of the mastery drive toward domination of others was probably one of the most important factors in giving Europe a competitive edge over cultures like Indian or Chinese civilization. However, this route to competitive advantage has run out of road. Today's international community simply will not accept the invasion, domination, or wholesale displacement of other peoples. In some respects, Western instincts still run in a more expansive direction than do those of other global cultures. Other than as part of UN missions, there are very few Arab, Indian, African, or Chinese troops operating outside of their own natural territories. However, American and European troops are active in a swath of countries. But the energy for this kind of adventurism is muted, and there is considerable ambivalence around many of these involvements.
Now that they can no longer obtain a shortcut to competitive advantage just by being more aggressive and expansive, the West and Europe, in particular, may find themselves challenged to maintain their edge against other cultures. The temptation to resort to traditional ways of triumphing may still arise at some point if Western standards of living continue to come under pressure. In addition, it is quite possible that, particularly in Europe, as has happened countless times before, this frustration may be turned on the continent's own ethnic minorities. Understanding and appreciating this aspect of their underlying DNA may be helpful to Europeans as they negotiate these pressures. The push-and-pull tension of resorting to strategies that have worked before, while accepting the reality of what is possible in the modern world, will be a process that plays out in a complex way psychologically within Europe.
The deep sense of equality, tolerance of individuality, and a rigorous and systematic approach to thinking have allowed Europe to provide many intellectual, material, and cultural gifts to the world. These gifts are likely to be even more relevant as many of the forces that drive equality and individualism gain momentum across other cultures. In many senses, Europe still feels like the future that other cultures are reaching toward. The original drive for environmental mastery and the resulting dynamic creativity in Europe will also continue to be sources of strength.
However, Europeans need to recognize the uncomfortable truth that at least part of the reason they surged ahead of the likes of India and China was due to the continent's external aggression and colonization of new lands. This has now run out of road and can no longer be a legitimate form of competitive advantage in the modern world. Europe has to learn to live and thrive by relying on other cultural strengths. Europeans recognize this, and the mindset of the continent is toward engaging the wider world in a more constructive and collaborative manner. This natural sense of exploration, when coupled with a tolerance of difference, will allow many European companies to engage global opportunities with flexibility and open-mindedness. However, such companies will need to recognize the limitations that their structured and, at times, overly analytical and ponderous approach may expose in the context of a fast moving, changeable global context.
Another challenge arises from the fact that the psychological characteristics required to thrive in stable and peaceful civil society are more deeply embedded in some other cultures than in Europe. In particular, European cultural DNA is strongly oriented toward environmental mastery, as opposed to competitive success within more-settled contexts. We recently conducted a survey about how graduates from different national cultures perceive each other. An overwhelming finding was the extent to which people from India, China, the Middle East, and even Africa saw their European peers as being lazy, self-indulgent, as well as semi-addicted to alcohol. More broadly, one feels a sense nowadays of a continent that is comfortable with itself and psychologically focused on maintaining the status quo, as opposed to driving hard to make itself even more competitive. Comfort with their lives and a lack of urgency around change could lead to Europeans sleepwalking their way into relative decline.
How will Europeans react to the fact that other powers, or minorities within their midst, may start to close the competitive gap and eventually surpass the continent? There are two potential dangers here based on Europe's underlying psychological DNA. First, European's tendency to engage in out-group aggression when their backs are against the wall could easily come to the fore if the continent's economic problems persist. There are already significant signs of this in the rise of far-right groups across the continent. The relatively high levels of racism that exist within parts of the European continent—such as Eastern Europe and Russia, which have done less well economically—is potentially a harbinger of what may happen more widely across the continent. The ability to suppress empathy for other groups and to rationalize actions could easily lead to a rise of virulent nationalism across the continent.
The other danger centers on Europe losing one of its traditional strengths: its capacity to be an open society. Facing the challenges of the global economy, the siren call of putting up the shutters, withdrawing from the world, and retreating into a little England, France, or Italy could be all too tempting. Such a path, however, would only provide a temporary respite, and would ultimately lead to Europe losing the exploratory, outward-reaching features of the continent's cultural DNA that have been responsible for its past, and likely future, success.