Pew Research Center released a report this week about decaying sentiment in the European Union, based on its polls showing disintegrating support for the mission of the union. Of all the tidbits in the report, though, this table is probably the most interesting:
It's kind of like the superlatives page in your high school yearbook: respondents in each country were asked “In what European Union country, if any, are people the most/least trustworthy/arrogant/compassionate?†The responses are of course influenced by longstanding cultural stereotypes, but probably also driven by recent frustrations in the European debt crisis.
Check out the first column: Everyone thinks Germans are the most trustworthy, except the Greeks (who name themselves for this superlative). And residents of every country consider themselves the most compassionate. Almost everybody thinks the Germans are least compassionate, except France and Germany. The data in the chart above refer to which country got a plurality of the votes for each question, but in the case of the “least compassionate†question, the Germans got a clear majority from Greek survey respondents (57 percent of whom named Germany as least compassionate).
And Germans would need a lot of compassion to understand the economic pain visited upon its neighbors. After all, the Germans report that they themselves are still doing relatively well:
Pew conducted the polls in eight European countries in March, by telephone or in person, with 700 to 1,100 adults surveyed in each country. Each poll has a margin of sampling error of either three or four percentage points.
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