Ask Lemmy

Something something Emmanuel Todd and endogamous communal family structures, the tight internal clan bonds competing with and thus preventing the creation of a strong overarching identities vs. almost exclusively non-communal structures in Europe (and where there's communalism it's not as strong as in the Arab world, and definitely not endogamous), leading to strong overarching civil societies and identities. Very different assumptions about how society should be organised on a very fundamental, structural, level.

In those terms Europe is culturally way closer to e.g. Japan (just as much stem family structures as e.g. Ireland and lots of Scandinavian and German regions, some in France) than we are to the Arab world. Arabs actually integrating here means, for them, to flip an internal switch, saying something like "oh now my clan is my region, and my profession a secondary one", and that is hard to do because a) you don't actually know most of those people, while you know at least about everyone in your original clan, and b) you're in a foreign land, not understanding what binds people together even though they might not know each other directly, also c) your family clan is still expecting you to be part of it, and not just in the "come to your cousin's marriage" way. Lots of non-prejudicial cultural friction that especially people from absurdly individualist societies like the US don't understand because they don't have an overarching society in the first place. Both sides think the other is weird AF.