Italians are lazy, Balkans steal, and Greeks are bad in finance. Are stereotypes becoming real boundaries for Europeans?
If you are from a South European country living or traveling across North Europe, you may often have encountered typical stereotypes that describe the Mediterranean life as slow and loud. On the side, Eastern Europeans usually face harder stereotypes, that pictures them as thieves and rough people. Although Europeans are a united in the European Union since the Treaty of Maastricht of 1992, stereotypes never died and seem to have become stronger.
Martin is an 18 years old from Romania. The first time I met him he refused to say where he was from. He said people tend to judge him based on his nationality, and that there is a lot of bad stereotypes about his co-nationals. Since he is in Germany, almost six months, he has been feeling judged by local people and has felt very lonely. After struggling the first months working in a steel company, he has now found a job in a mechanical workshop, where despite the language barrier, he felt welcomed and appreciated.
Natalie is 27 years old from Ukraine. She moved to Italy in 2021 and works as makeup artist and hairstylist in Milan. On her TikTok account (13k followers) she talks about her work and her culture. Though, the most visualised video is one about post-Soviet life, where she asks to stop romanticise Soviet life, and how poverty and struggle shouldn’t be portrayed as aesthetic. As a working self-made entrepreneur, the stereotype she finds the most annoying is the one that describe Slavic women as gold-diggers not willing to work at all. In her opinion, Eastern Europeans have actually more work experience as they start earlier compared for instance to Italians.
These are just few examples of a feeling shared by many Europeans. The eternal battle between North and South is not just an internal national experience of many countries in Europe. It happens in Spain and Italy, where the economic social differences between south and north become real discrimination. In Italy, the South Italian Feminist Movement calls it “antimeridionalism”, a specific discrimination directed towards Southern Italians, that has historical, social economic, cultural reasons, where the backwardness of the South is a direct consequence of the material and cultural poverty of Southern Italians themselves.¹
British author and historian John Dickie studied written and visual representations from the Grand Tour, a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, embark on upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank when they had come of age, from the 17th- to early 19th-century. He found that the Mezzogiorno, the south regions of Italy, was widely seen as barbaric, violent or irrational, an “Africa” on the European continent. ²
A very popular TikTok and Instagram trend portrays South Italy, especially cities like Naples, Palermo or Catania, as the “Ghetto Italy”, the poor criminal side, where La dolce vita cannot be fully enjoyed as a consequence of the ugliness and backwardness of this part of the country. Eastern Europe is often described with grey images, poor neighbourhoods that become part of the brutalism aesthetic trend that romanticise the post-Soviet Union side of these countries. The gaze of influencers that travel across South Europe often stumbles into the laziness of Greece, Spain and Portugal.
The text-book psychological definition of stereotypes views them as a “widely held but fixed and oversimplified image of a particular type of person or thing”. ³ Each social science declines this definition to the context of the scientific field. Stereotypes are ubiquitous and have a long history: current tensions and power struggle seems to have brought to the rediscovery and re-utilisation on media, by politicians and ordinary people.
The empirical questions that rise is how and to what extent stereotypes overlap with discrimination in its different manifestations?
While Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish migration to Northern Europe have traditionally not been immune from xenophobic attitudes, guest workers from these countries are considered culturally similar ad more prone to integration in comparison with non-European labours, enjoying a privileged position in the existing ethnic hierarchies.
However, the Euro debt crisis revived resentful stereotypes about the alleged national character of Southern Europeans across Northern European countries. Media and political discourse on the Greek and Portuguese crisis, as well as on Spanish and Italian ones, often presents moralistic tones in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and other Northern countries. The “PIGS” acronym, popular in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis, resumes the attitude of Northern European politics that associated the economies of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain with failure and incompetence. Do these stereotypes still affect today’s Southern European applicants in the search for a job?
A socio-economic study published by Oxford in 2023 found that discrimination against Southern Europeans persists in Northern European job markets. The study draws a sub-sample of the Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets discrimination study (GEMM), the largest field experiment on ethnic discrimination in hiring ever conducted in Europe, testing whether young German, Dutch and Norwegian nationals of Italian, Greek and Spanish descent are discriminated against when looking of employment in their own country. ⁴
The study found that the largest levels of targeted discrimination in Netherlands, where applicants of Greek and Spanish (but not Italian) descent are significantly less likely to be call back compared with applicants of native descent, whereas there was not specific aversion towards applicants of French descent. The discrimination is sizeable for Greek and Spanish descendants, particularly for the last ones who would have to send 45% more CVs to get the same callbacks as applicants of Dutch descent. This suggests that Dutch employers use targeted group stereotypes to fill formational gaps about the potential productivity of individual applicants of Greek and Spanish descent.
The call back ratio is even larger in Norway, where the evidence suggests that discrimination is not targeted against Southern European ancestry but responds to a general mechanism of in-group favouritism, as Norwegian employers seem to prefer applicants of Norwegian descent over everybody else.
On the other hand, while most children of Southern European migrants in Europe live in Germany, against the predictions, there are no signs of discrimination against Southern European descendants. This may be due to the stricter hob-application process, that requires more information about applicants, and partly due to the specific migration history of Southern Europeans in Germany, that could have provided a neutralisation of negative stenotypes over time.
Recent literature on intra-European boundaries finds that these barriers seem to reinforce as a consequence of recession driven South-North migration and the Euro debt crisis, main triggers of the current stereotypes’ dynamics in Europe. This seems to have led to the spread of Eu-scepticism across Europe, with the rise of far-right parties. Since its creation, the European Union and its Member States have been through socio-economic and ideological fractures, consequences of the Eurozone crisis of 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic and the current international tensions and threats to security.
It is in uncertain times like the ones we live in, that is important to revive that sense of community that brought to life the European Union. As Robert Schuman said once “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity.”
References:
- Claudia Fauzia, Valentina Amenta. Femminismo Terrone. Per un’alleanza ai margini. Tlon Editor, 2024
- John Dickie, Darkest Italy. The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860-1900. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 1999.
- Oxford Dictionary definition, Walter Lippmann in 1922.
- Javier G Polavieja, Maricia Fischer-Souan, The boundary within: Are applicants of Southern European descent discriminated against in Northern European job markets?, Socio-Economic Review, Volume 21, Issue 2, April 2023, Pages 795–825, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwac047
By Irene Falcone
