In an essay about the Russia of the 1840s, and its relation to the west, Isaiah Berlin once wrote:
To some degree this peculiar amalgam of love and hate is still intrinsic to Russian feelings about Europe: on the one hand, intellectual respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate and excel; on the other, emotional hostility, suspicion, and contempt, a sense of being clumsy, de trop, of being outsiders; leading, as a result, to an alternation between excessive self-prostration before, and aggressive flouting of, western values. No visitor to the Soviet Union can have failed to remark something of this phenomenon: a combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of the west as admirably self-restrained, clever, efficient, and successful: but also as being cramped, cold, mean, calculating, fenced in, without capacity for large views or generous emotion…
Holds true in another context, you think?