There is a small town very near to where I grew up where everybody speaks Portuguese. The mayor and his councilmen speak Portuguese in their chambers. There are Festas and bullfights, of which I have attended many, and even played Baritone in an Azorian-tradition marching band. The local grocery stores have food with labels in Portuguese (occasionally Spanish as a second language). The most popular sports team in the entire city is Benfica, and the most popular TV channel is RTP.
This town is called Gustine, and it is located in California.
If you are going to throw a fit about generalizations of Europe, at least have the courtesy to do the same with your generalizations of the US. After having lived in multiple corners of this country, I can honestly tell you that our majority language and our TV stations are the lowest common denominators of our culture...not defining aspects of it.
I live in Romania, and just 40 miles away from me there's an entire different country, Bulgaria, with its rivers , whole mountain ranges, TV channels, folk tales and a different alphabet than ours. We have been each other neighbors for around 1,000 years, give or take, and yet I can only understand at most 5 words of the Bulgarian language and when it comes to "shared culture" I can only relate to some Bulgarian animation that I used to watch as a 5-year old a long time ago.
Now, on the entrepreneurial side of the story, I work for a Romanian startup who seriously considered expanding in the regional market (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria). Now, Polish and Bulgarian are both Slavic languages but use different alphabets, so we would have had to hire different local people in both countries (with all the different laws, accounting and the likes), while with Hungarian (a Finno-Ugric language) we could have hired someone from my city, Bucharest, thx to the local Hungarian minority. We finally stopped the non-sense and decided to focus on a single huge market, the United States.
I addressed all that in my post. I never claimed that Americans were one homogenous group (and by the way, I've lived in California, too). I claimed that US, despite being a melting pot, is an actual nation (which is not the case with the EU) and that there are a least some common denominators - one of them being the language which is spoken natively by more than 80% of the population.
If you want Americans to stop making ridiculous generalizations about Europe, the way to do it is by similarly pledging to avoid the sort of ridiculous generalizations about America made by some Europeans - not by arguing about relative levels of heterogeneity.
Personally, I suspect certain differences between American regional subcultures - for instance, attitudes about the proper role of government in society - are broader than those you'll find between European countries.
Not at all - as long as you're at least generally right. If you're grossly misrepresenting things that apply to one country as "common denominator of Europe" it's offensive. It's offensive to pretend all germans wear lederhosen or probably a couple of americans were annoyed if I'd say that all americans wear cowboy boots and hats, have a winchester on their back and a colt on their belt and speak the worst texan dialect ever.
The problem comes when people think that there is as much variation amoung US states as between EU countries. There are much more common denominators amoung parts of the USA than EU.
This town is called Gustine, and it is located in California.
If you are going to throw a fit about generalizations of Europe, at least have the courtesy to do the same with your generalizations of the US. After having lived in multiple corners of this country, I can honestly tell you that our majority language and our TV stations are the lowest common denominators of our culture...not defining aspects of it.