Free but Lonely Europe

According to the last Expat Explorer survey commissioned by the international bank HSBC, the top emotional concerns for expats moving in a new country are to re-establish a social life (41%), and feeling lonely and missing friends and family (34%). Only next come worries about career prospects, language barriers, relocation issues, healthcare, adapting to culture, and many other. Women suffer from those issues slightly more than men:  48% of women and 37% of men have concerns about re-establishing their social life in a new country. But this gender difference is not very large. There is something much more intriguing.

Surprising and massive differences are observed depending on the country where you live. It is surprising because it means that to a large extent this issue doesn't only depends on us. We all feel lonely when moving abroad and leaving family and friends behind, but some places make it even worse!

The percentages of people feeling lonely, without friends and missing their family are particularly high for expats living in many of the European countries, compared to other regions of the globe. The worst scores on the question " do you find it easy to make friends" are sadly won by Belgium, Switzerland, UK, Germany, and the NL (the lowest, with 38%)

There could be several reasons for that. There are language barriers in many European countries where locals don't see English as an international language and assume that everybody who crosses the border should learn the local language. But it's not the case everywhere: in the Netherlands, it's easy to live when you only master the English language, because most Dutch people speak English really well and will enjoy talking to you in a foreign language.

So is there another explanation? Many European countries have more individualistic values than middle East or Asian countries. According to the same survey, expats find it easier to make friends in Bahrain (80%!), Thailand (70%), South Africa, and many Asia countries (overall 80% to 60%), compared to most countries in Europe! These cultures are notoriously collectivist, as opposed to Western societies where independance, rather than interdependance, is valued. I've been a few times in India for my work, and indeed, I was never left alone for a lunch or a diner: my guests took turn to accompany me and my colleagues eventhough they lived very far away from the office. If we were left alone sometimes, it was because we insisted that we were ok to be left alone. We actually felt embarrassed to take private time from them! That's unlikely to happen in Western cultures where locals don't want to 'bother you' and assume that you will actually appreciate being left alone for diner,. They might invite you. Once. Or they may not even invite you at all. It happened to me a few times to my surprise when I visited US academics, also for work. Why? Perhaps it's about valuing freedom versus friendship? The expats in Europe and perhaps the entire Western world would trade friendship for freedom without knowing?

But that's more complicated than that because the survey doens't show bad scores for other Western nations. Why don't we see the same numbers then for the US, Canada and Australia which are also Western cultures with high individualism? Perhaps immigration in Europe is a marginal phenomenon and there is not a strong culture (or respect?) for immigration, and therefore locals lack an awareness of the social isolation of the migrant? In the US, Canada or Australia,  immigration is part of the national history, and perhaps locals are more used to welcome foreigners and provide them with more assistance, including time and friendship? 

But to tell the truth, I don't really know. I don't think anybody has a serious set of data that replicate or explain those differences. 

And actually, when I think about it, I am not even totally sure what we can yet generalize from this survey. The authors indicate that similar results were found in previous years, so it suggests that the results seem consistent, and not just obtained by chance. But we really lack facts and statistics about expats and internationals! So there is probably something true about those results (where there is smoke there certainly is a fire) but scientists still have a lot of work to do to make sense out of those data!  

References: The HSBC surveys are on line. Thanks to the Blijberg International school in the Netherlands for sending me the link!

On individualisms and collectivism: G. Hofstede & G.J. Hofstede, Culture and organizations. A very readable book presenting Hofstede's massive amount of data on cross-cultural differences in organizaitons.