High Trust and Xenophobia

I had a friend at work who lived for two years in Estonia when her children were preschoolers in the early 2000s. She and her husband were very white, Americans of German extraction and not alarmingly eccentric in any visible way. Neither were they socially accepted in any way, even though the husband brought very useful skills to the university and the wife was intelligent, open, and charming. Other mothers would decline play dates with the brightly-dressed American children, and at daycare the staff discriminated against them and did not insist that the other children treat them fairly. 

The quote that begins Are High-Trust Societies More Xenophobic? , “I found a region and a culture that finishes high in societal ‘trust’ rankings globally, yet has little trust in outsiders,” rang true for me about rural Scandinavia, but not urban.  In contrast, Romania both welcomed and rejected Americans while I was there at about that time, and I was given to understand that this extended to Western Europeans as well. But Romania was not a high-trust society under communism, even as intense nationalism simmered underneath the surface the whole time.  Yes, they hated gypsies, Hungarians, and Russians, not to mention Jews and Germans while they still had them, but they were not correspondingly high-trust with each other either. There was a Casa Noastra in the cities, quite equivalent to the Italians of similar name. Trust only for the narrowest of categories.

I would read the Aporia article with the world outside North America uppermind first, only extending it to ourselves when you finish. The relationship between ingroup and outgroup thinking is much more complicated that we would think at first, and the usual explanations shift between obvious correctness and wild misunderstanding. Peter Frost has given a gift here, of information vaguely known and understood leading to unexpected conclusions that don't fit our pictures of other nations. But...but...aren't these the same people who... Yes. Yes they are.  Their contradictions are different from ours. You will find yourself tentatively thinking "I see that, but I had not thought of it that way."

All of this changed with industrial capitalism and the rise of labor markets in the 1800s. Industrialists found that they could more easily expand and contract their workforce by hiring and firing non-family members. Meanwhile, compulsory education made young people less available as a source of labor. Children became a net cost, and their numbers shrank. Thus ended the West’s population boom, first during the 1920s and 1930s and then for good in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the rest of the world began to experience substantial population growth due to Western advances in medicine, sanitation and agriculture. (Italics mine.)