First of all thanks for creating the specific thread - as you say, interesting discussion between friends but getting quite seriously OT! ^^

On the countries you mention above I agree with some, less to others. There is no doubt that the US is the single most self-referential country in the world. If I were to meanly caricature, unlike France or the UK, we are not along 'our country is the best' lines but rather, sometimes, verging on the 'what rest of the world???' lines which is yet a category in its own right! (my limited experience of China would put it in the same category and I have also faced the same 'we don't need others' argument in Russia).

About the rest, however, I would still say that while very open-minded, France is really a far less cosmopolitan country than the UK is. To take a simple example, we academically know that the content of foreign news is much higher in the UK than in France (also more in Germany than in France, and more in France than in the US). It doesn't mean that there is no self-satisfied, jingoist, nationalism in Britain - there is indeed plenty - and in the other countries that you mention too - but external references are, in my view more dominant. I think that this also shows in the workplace, and there are far more foreign executives, industry leaders, academics, etc in the UK than in France (notwithstanding the fact that France is progressing on that front, but let us say that they started much later). In terms of the consequences, maybe for linguistic reasons, there is also, I think, a greater difficulty for some categories of French 'brains' to sell themselves because (with very few - albeit very important - exceptions) we originally learn about what we are and what we do using a series of concepts which are not the ones used elsewhere. I must say that the few French people who live and work in high profile jobs in London often (not always) share this analysis and that a few cannot really imagine themselves returning to work in France after doing it abroad. Again, this perception is frequent but not universal and some people certainly strongly disagree too.

Anyway, what I really want to stress here is that there is absolutely no French-bashing intention in what I wrote above in that I absolutely don't think that French society is less open-minded or even more self-centred in intent than others. On the contrary, most people I know are actually unbelievably willing to know about the rest of the world, discover others and accept difference, but what I am saying is that this 'otherness' is simply not sufficiently 'there' in public discourse or so distorted that it creates unfortunate misperceptions about others. Finally, I should add that this is still partly true of my generation (mid-30s) but not of younger people who have often been more exposed to - at the very least - the rest of Europe through European experience, academic exchanges, and learning foreign languages from a much younger age than my generation did.

PS: I agree about your other point. I think 'rebelling' may have been a misleading word. By that I meant that I know many French people who have come to the same conclusion as NickB and myself that public discourse in France is too French-centric and seek changed ways. And while I do think that public discourse in the Netherlands, or Scandinavia are more cosmopolitan overall (which is not to say that they are not narrow minded in some ways too), and the UK is also in some ways (but not in others), I also know of people in all those areas equally working hard for people and elites around them being less self-centric.