Cultural DNA. Bains Gurnek

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of people's experience. People are not better than one another, or always very different, just sometimes so. As the world globalizes, it is likely that some of these differences will be ironed out. However, it is also likely that we will become more conscious, rather than less, of differences below the surface.

      The Psychology of the Eurozone Crisis

      The problems in the European Community around creating a single currency illustrate the tensions that can arise when overoptimistic globalizing sentiments hit the rock wall of deeply ingrained psychological differences. When the Euro was introduced in 1999, many multinational businesses greeted the idea of a single currency across the consenting EC countries with enthusiasm. A significant number of multinationals essentially dismantled their European national operations in favor of regional structures. There was massive investment in the European project from outside. For example, in spite of the prominence given to emerging markets, more than half of the investment of U.S. multinationals abroad in the period 2002 to 2011 actually went to Europe.1

      However, the initial optimism quickly faded as the problems in the Eurozone surfaced. It is rare nowadays to meet a CEO of a global company who does not see their European operations on, at best, a slow plateau of growth, or more often as a disaster zone, irrespective of their organizational strengths or the talent of their people in the region. None of these factors can override the problems caused by the huge divisions within the Eurozone economies. The European operations of multinationals came to be inundated with specialists from treasury, accounting, tax, legal affairs, and human resources – all tasked with the job of mitigating risk should the situation deteriorate even further.

      Essentially what happened was that everyone got taken in by the heady catch-up growth of the southern European and Irish economies without discerning whether the momentum was sustainable or the euro project viable. People overlooked the relevance of deep-seated cultural factors to the issue of economic sustainability. The exact same thing is happening with respect to gauging the economic prospects of India, China and other emerging market economies today. It is easy to get caught up with the high, catch-up growth figures in all these regions and not to see the cultural problems bubbling underneath the surface that will, over time, influence whether this performance is sustainable. Global CEOs need to become cultural experts, psychologists and historians if they are to make the right long-term calls for their companies.

      The importance of this is illustrated by looking more deeply into the Eurozone crisis. The drive to create a single economic entity with a common currency, free movement of people and consistent rules is predicated on the unstated, but nevertheless strong, assumption that there is a high level of cultural similarity across the nations involved. In one sense this is true; but in another sense the cultural and psychological instincts of Greeks are not the same as those of Germans. This is not to pass judgment on either, but rather to say that beyond obvious and superficial differences – like Greeks being more persistent and ingenious in circumventing EC rules around smoking in public places – there lurked deeper differences in attitudes toward financial and economic matters that the creators of the common currency failed to recognize or were blithely optimistic about. It is now apparent that many of the problems arose from the very different attitudes toward economic management, payment of taxes, attitudes toward borrowing and orientation to work that exist in the Eurozone and which may prove fatal for the project or at the least threaten to stymie growth in the region for some time.

      Going a bit deeper, many of these attitudinal and behavioral differences arise from profound differences in some underlying values. In particular, as will be discussed later, southern European countries have at their core a more religious, relational, and in-the-moment set of values – versus the northern countries where more secular, individualistic, and long-term psychological instincts are more evident. Individualistic cultures require mechanisms other than religious authority or the sanction of one's community to regulate people's behavior, and hence place much greater emphasis on the rules set down by the state or other institutions. In the more relational cultures of southern Europe and Ireland, it is easier to trump rules imposed by more distant institutions; it is the obligations to one's immediate circle that count. Furthermore, if you live in a culture with a more short-term orientation, you are likely to take the plunge when economic opportunities created by, for example, money being available at low interest rates present themselves without thinking too hard about the long-term consequences. This is the case whether you are a government doling out pensions and benefits or an individual making a property investment. As a result, a different and more flexible attitude existed toward the interpretation of fiscal and financial rules – not only at national levels but also in the behavior of banks and at the level of individual financial decision making – in the southern versus northern Eurozone countries.

      But where do these differences in underlying values themselves come from? We can go deeper still. Surprising as it may sound, from a cultural DNA point of view, the different psychological instincts in the southern European countries and Ireland versus northern Europe make sense when one looks at how modern humans settled Europe some 45,000 years ago. As will be demonstrated later, the original hunter-gatherer population of Europe came through two clearly differentiated routes – something that's had a powerful impact on the continent's psychological and cultural DNA.2 One path was through the Middle East, into Anatolia, then into the Balkans and southern Europe. The other involved a more northerly route through the Caucuses and Western Russia into Eastern Europe, Poland, and Germany. It is likely that the two earliest modern human cultures recorded in Europe – the Aurignacian and Gravettian – mirror these two movements. The former is named after a village in southern France where relics relating to the culture were first found; it is believed to have first appeared in Europe – in Bulgaria – around 50,000 years ago, and gradually spread across the south of the continent and then along the Atlantic coast. The Gravettian culture, again named after a site in France, is believed to have entered later, perhaps 30,000 years ago. Core features of this culture include specialized weapons for mammoth hunting, the use of mammoth bones for house construction and mechanisms for harnessing fire for heating and cooking – adaptations that all point to a more northerly origin.

      Although subsequent severe ice age events scrambled the picture later on, many of the peoples in northern Europe are descended from the population that followed the second path and those in southern Europe, to a greater extent, the first paths. Furthermore, when expansion occurred from the ice age refuges those who moved north, coped for tens of thousands of years with a radically different ecological environment compared to that which they left behind in the south. Interestingly, there is considerable evidence that a movement of people from Spain went along an Atlantic coastal route to repopulate Ireland and the west of Scotland. Today, there is still a clear genetic dividing line running through the UK that reflects this movement.3 What is interesting is that many cultural traits, including Catholicism, map this pattern of entry and diffusion in Europe. Even in Scotland, Catholicism is more a pattern in the west of the country. Later still the south was the recipient of the first agriculturalists who came from the Middle East – the genetic signature of this migration also distinguishes southern and northern European populations.

      The Eurozone crisis also follows this exact pattern, including Ireland's involvement. A sound argument can be made for the view that the pattern of migration and the different environmental challenges that humans faced in the south and along the Atlantic coast led to their psychological and cultural instincts evolving in a different way from those who had the challenge after the ice age of surviving in the ecological conditions of the north. The detail of all this will be unpacked later in the chapter on Europe. For now, however, the point is that while all this happened so long ago that the relevance to current events seems unlikely, or at best highly speculative, a good case can be made for the idea that the ultimate cause of the current tensions in the Eurozone is that the system ignored the deep-seated psychological and cultural differences between the countries that it encompassed.

      Understanding the deeper reasons for these difficulties

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