The Economist ran a holiday special article on the regional antipathies, titled 'A world of two halves'.
"Regional generalisations suggest some larger truths about human nature. For one thing, people are hard-wired to make relative judgments: defining lives as harsh or lazy in comparison with those lived by neighbours. Also, human beings are overwhelmingly interested by their own societies. That is why so few notice, or care, if their country’s supposedly hot, lazy south sits atop another nation’s chilly, businesslike north. This is no cause for dismay. If over two decades on the road teaches anything, it is that the world is not a machine whose workings can be explained with the laws of physics. Foreign affairs more closely resemble a noisy, ceaseless family argument that outsiders can never fully understand. Faithfully recording that cacophony, and trying to extract some sense from it, is the foreign correspondent’s job, at every latitude"
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