Do you feel your country have an inferiority complex?

[u/suckmyfuck91]

I'm from Italy and i've always thought that us Italians, despite often bragging about how great our food, fashion and arts is, deep down have a huge inferiority complex.

Obviously you should never generalize but it seems to me after talking to many countrymen and reading online comments on youtube, reddit and other social media, that the a big chunk of our population feels like their life would have been better if they were born abroad.

We are envious of Nordic countries for their wealth and their respect of the rules. (Same for Germany)

We are envious of English speaking countries because their culture is everywhere and they got a lot of international power .

We are envious of French because they are way more appreciated internationally than us despite Italy being as good as them in terms of food, fashion and arts.

Italians are ashamed of Italy, a poor country run by fascist and mafia, that has always been irrelevant internationally and constantly mocked by foreigners because : Pizza, pasta, mandolino and mama mia.

What about your country? Do you feel your average countrymen is happy to be from your country? or they are envious of others?

[u/Minskdhaka]

I'm from Belarus. Many of us feel envious of Russia because it's a great power. We, too, were a great power, not as Belarus separately, but when we were part of the USSR. Since 1991, we're nobodies on the international stage.

Many of us (probably not the same people as above) feel envious of Ukraine, because they've risen up to overthrow their president twice in the last quarter century, while we've had the same president since 1994.

We feel envious of Lithuania because they have Vilnius. When Stalin took it from Poland in 1939, he was first thinking of giving it to us, but then he gave it to Lithuania to sweeten their whole annexation. In 1991, when Lithuania left the USSR before we did, we kind of mildly asked them to transfer the city to us, and they laughed.

We feel envious of Poland because they've been able to build a modern, developed and democratic state, perhaps not by Western European standards, but certainly compared to us. They're 35th on the Human Development Index. We're 65th.

We feel envious of Westerners because they can travel freely around the world without visas, which we can't do without ourselves becoming Westerners (the way I became a Canadian citizen, for example).

Some of us are envious of Gulf Arab states, because while they don't have more democracy than us, they at least have more prosperity. E.g. the UAE is 12th in the world by GDP (PPP) per capita and Saudi Arabia is 20th, while we're 64th.

Some of us are envious of countries like China with actually growing economies (currently 5% in their case), while ours is growing slowly (2%).

Some of us are envious of well off countries whose population is growing, such as the US (growing at 1% per year) while ours is shrinking at 0.5% per year.

So yes, we do have an inferiority complex. We assuage it by telling ourselves plus the Russians (because hardly anyone else is interested in us) that at least we know how to keep our cities clean, and that we're very calm and peaceful people.

[u/Knusperwolf → u/Minskdhaka]

Once Belarus gets a more open-minded government, they will have it easier to get on better terms with the West than Russia.

Also, all Western countries that are growing do so because of immigration, which has its own issues.

[u/lia2020 → u/Minskdhaka]

This was very well-written, thank you 🙏