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Comment by rmind | Hacker News Reader

I have to say "Eastern European" is a quite poor and unhelpful generalization nowadays.

It is ethnically and linguistically diverse: Slavic, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Romance (Romania) as well as Albanian and Hellenic. It is religiously diverse: Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Muslim and even the bastions of irreligion/atheism (Czechia and Estonia). There are significant cultural differences, especially comparing the more reserved north (Finland and Baltics) with the more emotional south (Balkans or even parts of Ukraine). There are also major economic differences, with central/north east being more or less high-income economies compared to the south and east-east. It even has inconsistent geographic definitions, e.g. whether it includes "Central Europe", whether it extends to Turkey or even Caucasus, etc.

Many generalizations really don't work for such a vast and diverse region.

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None of that is really relevant for the post as written though, what were you trying to say?

I had a lot of experience working across mentioned boundaries and the post is very spot on with cultural differences between US and most cultures in Eastern European region. I'd also argue that Germans/Austrians easily fit into the same generalization and would benefit from reading it.

>what were you trying to say

I see this type of behavior a lot as of late, especially on HN. Mostly when someone says "I donated to X charity" then inevitably a brave contrarian comes out of the wood works to say that they could/should have done XYZ

I basically read it as a polite way of saying ‘I can’t work out how this comment relates to the article (which it should) and I would like to give you the opportunity to expand on the connection or restructure your comment to be related to the article instead of using the heading as an excuse to talk about some distantly related thing you care about.’ I could be wrong though.

I think it tends to give better results than just arguing about whether something is on topic and the parent commenter probably does have some more specific things they could say about Eastern Europe here.

I don’t believe I’ve witnessed something exactly like your example though I’ve seen plenty of disagreement on this site. I don’t think that’s what happened here.

Nobody counts Finland as part of their definition of "Eastern Europe".

A guy from South Africa once made the same argument about Sweden. Whether he was right or not, geographically speaking, does not really matter. We all know what everybody means. Nordic good, Eastern bad. Sadly, it's mostly true.

Geographic middle of Europe is somewhere in Poland. Seeing that Sweden is distinctly north of Poland, it makes total sense to count it as Northern European country.

Maybe I didn't make myself very clear. His point was that Sweden is in Eastern Europe.

Now you know how I feel reading all those articles about "Africa".

I was thinking the same thing, but about Asia.

You just made some people’s heads pop off. Eastern Europe being diverse? High income economies? Some folks are stuck in little bubbles where they think of east europe as a weak backwards region. Until a war breaks out and half the world goes hungry, western europe scrambles without energy and some countries shiver at the thought of nuclear fallout. For better or worse east europeans should stick their heads up a bit more often.

In my perception (i come from Soviet Union), the most "East European" Eastern European country is Slovakia. When someone says "Eastern Europe" that's what comes to my mind. Czechia is too rich and too liberal, Poland is too religious and too conservative, Romania has too many issues with minorities and simply does not constitute a single picture (different parts of country look like different continents), Serbia is hopelessly stuck in the past and developed a hermit mentality, Hungary is a true oddball in every sense of it, but mainly is that it has it's own imperial past - not one of it's occupiers - so does not match the humble, hardworking and simple "East European" image.

>Romania has too many issues with minorities

What kind of issues and which minorities?

I think that will be politically incorrect to discuss in detail and will drive us way into downvoting territory...

Why? GP made some pretty bold claims on some nationalities("Romania has too many issues with minorities").

I expect some clarifications for those claims on what those issues are, so I can tell if knows what he's talking about and got right info from reputable sources or if he's just puling stuff out of his ass based on stereotypes and FUD he read on the internet.

Without any details or sources, such comments should be flagged.

And if you put details and sources you get flagged too. It’s a waste of time to discuss this kind of stuff.

Roma (also present in Slovakia and Hungary) and Hungarians mostly.

> also present in Slovakia and Hungary

And Bulgaria, and Serbia, ...

Yeah just listing the countries from the grand-parent comment. Their presence covers a lot of European countries (all the way to Italy and Spain in the west) kind of by definition, since they're a nomad population.

What are the issue with Hungarians in Romania? Besides political FUD.

armchair reader here - but I have 100 year old demographic information from the Hungarian region, in an article about language history. Each Hungarian province sub-division is split between four (or more) language groups - and the splits are quite uneven. Many of those groups had mass conflicts over the last thousand years.

This isn't a very helpful observation. By Eastern European, I presume he means the former Soviet Bloc. It has nothing to do with ethnicity, language, or culture, and everything to do with the lingering effects on organizational and academic behavior imposed by communist and totalitarian regimes. From Romania to Lithuania, this impact can have a remarkable consistency.

A lot of this advices are actually useful for some Western European people, at least France and Germany (and possibly Italy as well).

Yeah, and 'Marta Somethingova' is... well, I'll just call it under-informed rather than anything else.

> Many generalizations really don't work for such a vast and diverse region.

I think the right solution here is to divide the region into Central Europe, The Balkan Region, and The Western CIS and Caucasus:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Map-of-Eastern-Europ...

Nobody lives in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Everyone is Central European.

Now now, we Slovenians change that depending on who’s asking. Also time period.

Wanna talk economic prosperity, work ethic, and things of such nature? We’re Central European, basically German. Wanna talk partying, good food, sense of humor, and having fun? Proudly Balkan. Unless you want healthy food, then we are definitely Mediterranean. Oh good pizza and pasta? Yeah we’re basically Italian.

Funfact: It is unknown quite how large the Slovenian diaspora is because many emigrants wrote down “Austrian” before WW1 to escape slavic stereotypes in their new home.

> economic prosperity .. basically German

> Slovenia

I don't know mate, if Slovenia was so prosperous, then their workers wouldn't be driving 2h/day commuting to work and study in Austria for the chance of making 2k Euros/month. Or just moving to Germany, UK, Ireland, etc. for more. Every slovene I talked to seemed very unhappy about the wages/CoL ratio back home.

Oh it’s far more aspirational than real :D

With a tinge of “We work hard like the Germans! We’re not like those other people from the area. Please hire us”.

My understanding is that under Yugoslavia we were the most prosperous region by far. Then the export market collapsed and we realized “Shit, most of our economy is oriented towards former Yugoslavia!” and we started reorienting towards central europe.

But central europe has plenty other even cheaper markets to import from. So that’s been a problem.

IIRC "Central Europe" wasn't really in usage during the Cold War. The concept re-emerged after B.Wall fell.

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