"Culture in EU external relations" : overcoming stereotypical stances

National stereotypes plague the relationships between nations everywhere in the world, not just in Europe. Hence any publication that seeks to present informed analytical understandings of the stereotype in a universalist spirit ought to include findings on the operation of national stereotypes in all the regions of the world. As I myself was born and bred in India, it might have been taken for granted that my contribution to this volume would contain a contrastive analysis of extra-European phenomena. Unfortunately, however, having lived in Europe for the last forty-six years, I have never had the opportunity to observe the functioning of national stereotypes in Asia and cannot therefore rise to this particular challenge. To tell the truth, I have not studied the phenomenon of the stereotype in any depth in any context. For this reason, I offer here some tangential reflections inspired by a recently undertaken project whose ultimate purpose was to mitigate the negative impact of stereotypes held by Europeans and others. The project in question was the inquiry "Culture in EU External Relations," whose findings were published in June 2014 by the European Commission.