What makes european, you know, european?

[Mnementh]

invetedlotus123 said:

 

Mnementh said:

First of all: most of europe was part of the roman empire. Even parts that weren't were influenced by it. That lead to the next connection: the christian chruch was distributed by the roman empire and won might and stayed after the roman empire fell. Even for remote parts that still were not christianized the christian conquerors did that more than thousand years ago. So until the protestant reformation most parts of europe were theological under the pope. Only in eastern europe you had the orthodox church. And last but not least: in the middle ages all the aristocracy made weddings with each other. Queen Mary in Britain had an spanish husband. Catherine the Great who lead Russia for a time came from germany. And so on.

So history of 2000 years connects europe. That isn't the case for other continents. You say you're from south america? Well, the connections from 2000 years ago were destroyed at least after the european colonization.

In Sout America, and in Latin America in general, there`s a strong sense of "us" when talking about other countries. And the pre-colonization civilizations are to this day very celebrated as a form of resistance to the european colonizator. With the big excepetion of Brazil, South America has a strong sense of continental identity. It can be attributed for them to have been colonized by Spain, sharing the same colonizator and the same language helped unify this feeling. Even the independence movements had a common hero in Simon Bolivar figure.

Brazil on other hand is a completely different thing, we were colonized by Portugal, speak a very different language and along our history some regions were under heavy influence of France and Holland. Heck, even inside our own territory cultural differences are huge, if we put an average Salvador citizen, an Porto Alegre citizen and Sao Paulo citizen their culture and ethincity couldd be as different that some could even think they are from completely different countries, Brazil is far from having an unified national identity aside some trivialities. And we are so not interested in the rest of latin america that it is much easier to find a brazillian that speaks english than spanish.

So you agree that a strong part of the current cultural identity in south america is formed by the european invasion. That is not as long as 2000 years, because europe discovered America a lot later.