Honest foreigners?

This week, some friends and I took a train from Gothenburg, Sweden, to Copenhagen, Denmark. We left our backpacks in the train's overhead luggage rack, located directly above our heads. The backpacks contained passports, money, and personal computers. We stayed awake the entire trip, and when we arrived in Copenhagen, we discovered that the backpacks were no longer there. It was a huge shock, as we had been robbed in one of the countries considered to be among the safest in the world.

We went to the Danish police to file a police report and were treated rudely, to say the least. The rudeness was unexpected, as I thought Scandinavian police officers were polite. The officer informed us that every day more and more people become victims of the same type of theft. I also learned that train stations around Scandinavia are becoming increasingly dangerous and theft of belongings is more common than one might imagine. If we were in Brazil or any other Latin American country, I would never leave my passport and money in a backpack. Perhaps I wouldn't walk around with my laptop everywhere. By imagining I was in a safe country, I neglected basic precautions.

Upon learning of the theft, Scandinavians invariably claimed that immigrants were promoting this type of action in their countries. The locals were making a move to assert their own identity, as if only foreigners stole and Scandinavians were pure, honest, and decent. There's no way to say that an immigrant stole my backpack. The demonization of foreigners is an old and cruel phenomenon, as the Holocaust showed us.

The Iraq War and the involvement of companies linked to US Vice President Dick Cheney in Iraq's reconstruction contracts, Nike's exploitation of child labor, the Enron scandal, the spurious association between British prime ministers and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the strong presence of the Yakuza in Japan, and so many other cases show that dishonesty is not unique to us.

I remember spending nine months observing workers at a large company in England for a research project, and witnessing employees stealing chocolates and pastries from the canteen daily, trafficking in banned medications, and committing numerous other illegal acts. Dishonest people exist everywhere in the world, but there's a perception that only those of us living in developing countries are "outlaws."

The theft of my belongings reminded me that despite all the evidence to the contrary, there is an established view that white people from developed countries do not commit crimes. The general idea is that only we, the underdeveloped, are criminals. This same view is reinforced by us Brazilians, as if we were all dishonest and foreigners were decent. Edward Said wrote a masterful book called Orientalism, in which he shows how throughout history the arts, literature, and other forms of European cultural expression have constructed an image of Arab people as a bestial and underdeveloped people.

We only need to watch the same news story on Al Jazeera and CNN to observe this mechanism in action. The prejudiced view of 'developed' countries regarding others permeates the vast majority of relationships where these different cultures meet. We have problems in our countries, no doubt about it. We are one of the most violent countries in the world, we cannot deny that either. However, generalizations are always dangerous, even more so when they portray some peoples as decent and others as the opposite. Character is much more a matter of the individual than of the nation.

Rafael Alcadipani is an adjunct professor at the São Paulo School of Business Administration of the Getulio Vargas Foundation.