Attila the Professor said:
I'm afraid I've succumb here to a trap common enough to Americans, in thinking that Europeans must be better informed than us. Which, perhaps, has been shown to be true here, but not in the way I'd think.
As a whole, Europeans perhaps are. But we are also culturally far more diverse than Americans. Over there, one could perhaps find a person who quite accurately represents a theoretical concept called an "average American". Now, over here, you may find an average Finn, German or Spaniard, but you will NOT find something called an "average European". Such a thing does not exist.
Now, like I pointed out, knowing the language is a crucial, perhaps the most critical part of understanding a culture. There are far too many languages in Europe for a single person to take it all as a whole. However, given the status of English as the modern-day
lingua franca, most Europeans have at least rudimentary command of it. Which enables us to study the most-dominant English-speaking culture of this Earth. And that in turn leads to a rather ironic situation where we as a whole may just understand the Americans better than we do our own neighbors.
I can see how that could create some curious pitfalls from an American POV. There's a whole foreign continent of people who seem to know them well, but they in turn are lucky if they know even a small part of it. But in reality, the situation is
exactly the same on our side. Sure, perhaps the proximity does demand us to be slightly more knowledgeable than your average American, but said knowledge is still a far cry from something you wouldn't call superficial.
Now, what it would take to create an average European? You'd have to take away ones language, local culture and customs - and place them in an environment that is English-speaking and still noticeably western. Thinking about that... perhaps an average European
does exist. They are called an "average American".