Good story; I do find the “Australians are just the little guys” narrative a bit frustrating and a self-fulfilling prophecy though.
Swings and roundabouts.
Aussie and NZ compared to the US are completely different worlds in my eyes.
(I'm a Kiwi btw)
I am French and we are a country with a great past - but not looking ahead. We still assume that we radiate across the world and that our voice counts.
It does not, and this has to be clear. There are countries that can influence events, but this is not ours.
A typical example is how angry we were after the recent pirate act of Lukashenko (Belarus forced a EU plane flying form one EU country to another to land when above their territory to arrest an opponent of theirs). Our president said that there would be consequences and there are no consequences.
This is not to spit on my contry but sometimes egos are much bigger than the reality. We are in good company there.
If Brexit showed us anything it is that the UK is no way near as important as they like to think they are. Watching the UK and [redacted] at loggerheads has been a mix of frustration and amusement for someone like myself clearly caught in the crossfire.
As an "outsider" in [redacted] my biggest complaint is the staunch opposition to change. Any change. As you say they simply cannot look ahead. It is as if they only know how to live in their past glories rather than working towards future ones.
The UK is sort of the opposite but in a terribly executed manner. They have dreams of the future but do everything possible to make those dreams harder to achieve due to arrogance they can "do it alone". Harping back to "the good old days of the Empire" and "Blitz spirit!" as if the Blitz was some wonderful time (wtf?).
The sad thing is the [redacted] could learn a lot from each other but seems both sides are too myopic to do so.
I am French and we are a country with a great past - but not looking ahead.
I feel the same as you about both the British and the French.
The right-wing in India are obsessed about our past, and worse, desperate to associate everything about it with "Hindu religion" or "Hindu culture" despite the huge influence of Buddhism, Islam and the imperialists (largely the British who finally got the upper hand on our sub-continent).
"We were the richest country in the world till we were looted by Muslims and Christians."
"We had brilliant Hindu brahmin scientists who excelled in mathematics, medicine and astronomy / astrology.
"Look at these huge ancient temples built with extraordinary artistry that have survived for centuries."
And so on, are proof of our "great past" that they believe automatically should earn us the respect of the world.
In their obsession with the past, they totally disregard the achievements of modern independent India just because our freedom movement were lead by people like Gandhi and Nehru who opposed their idea of a theocratic-fascist state, and chose to create a secular state that treated everyone as an equal and gave every citizen equal rights.
For a country that won its independence in a non-violent manner from the most powerful empire of the world, and a country that has lifted millions of its citizens from poverty and is today self sufficient in agriculture (one of the largest in the world), and one of the few countries with an active and self-sufficient space, nuclear and defence program we have really made a lot of strides.
But for the right, India is not "respected" by the world because anti-Hindus chose secularism and thus since "we Hindus" don't respect our "Hinduness", the world also ignores Hindu cultural achievement and denies us our true place.
France is a major actor in African and regional conflicts.
It is the third largest exporter of weapons ( After the USA and Russia ) to conflict zones.
For Roman there is no way back after that. It's an atrocity, but ultimately Belarus authorities are responsible for those and the torturing.
Europe needs to ensure its planes are not hijacked mid-air like this in the future, to protect all of us and foremost journalists and activists.
It was the case up to the 2000's, I think, but I can't even remember the name of a new French director since then. The last one I remember is Luc Besson. Kind of similar story for actors/actresses, are there some major French stars popular across the world?
I feel most of the influences are leftovers from a different era, folks like Depardieu.
TV/film - is there something new even remotely popular across the world that's French?
Zone Blanche Lupin L'ascension Le grand bain
I'm a Kiwi too - but living in Aus.
The obvious examples that come to mind would be sports. NZ excels in Sailing, Cricket and Rugby against much larger countries.
Though it could be that in general, Aus/NZ have the same skill distribution as other countries, but they just stand out more because there are lower expectations or highly skilled people are rarer overall due to lower populations.
Those are niche sports, very popular in that part of the world. They're not major sports, though.
Cricket is sort of a major sport, but it's also very culturally concentrated. Outside of UK & some former UK colonies, almost nobody plays it/watches it.
Does New Zealand have any famous footballers, basketball players, athletes, etc.?
I'd group countries in 4 categories:
1. Continent sized (Russia, Canada, China, US, Brazil, Australia).
2. Large countries: anything below 1 up to probably about 500k sqkm.
3. Middle of the pack countries: everything from 500k down to about 100-200k sqkm.
4. Small countries. Everything below 100k sqkm (200k sqkm if you want to stretch it out).
The categories are somewhat fluid since for example Indonesia is not continent sized in landmass, but it's an archipelago that does stretch over the area of an entire continent, when you consider it end-to-end and include its territorial waters. Plus having a very high population for your group also moves you up. Germany is average in size but in population it's a large country. Same for Japan.