I could not resist sharing this paper. 

"A crystal seen from each of its vertices: European views of European national characters" by James Shilts Boster and Kateryna Maltseva, Cross-Cultural Research 2006; 40; 47. (19 pages). The online version of this article can be found at http://ccr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/1/47

It starts as:

   "In heaven, all the policeman are English, all the car mechanics are German, all the cooks are French, all the hotel keepers are Swiss, and all the lovers are Italian.

    In hell, all the policeman are German, all the car mechanics are French, all the cooks are English, all the hotel keepers are Italian, and all the lovers are Swiss." 

In general, jokes that depend on national stereotypes are in bad taste, but we submit that the one above is an instructive exception. It does not choose a stigmatized group and heap further abuse on it; instead, it targets a number of the most economically powerful nations on the planet and attributes both the best and worst of traits to each of them. But for our purposes, what is most interesting about the joke is that its humor depends on teh audience's knolwedge of a great deal about each of the nations; heaven adn hell are distinguished by whether the assginment of occupations takes advantage of the nations' envisioned best traits or exposes their worst ones. In other words, the joke aligns a collection of nations in a field of attributes. The research reported here has  similar purpose: We explore adn describe what it is that Europeans know (or think they know) about the placement of their own and other nations on a number of attribute dimensions. We also describe patterns in how these beliefs aredistributed. Note that "nation" in our usage is not equivalent to teh nation-state.....