Uriah

Alpine peoples are obviously very different from other (French, North Italian, German, Slavic) but to me the one striking mannerism they all share is a tendency, during argument, to invade the personal space of the other guy and go nose to nose like Tony Soprano.

Everyone has an invisible bubble around them which strangers aren’t supposed to enter without permission. The size of the bubble, dictated by stress, informs a person's intuitions about “rights” and “privacy”, in Norwegians the bubble is huge, in Alpines it’s tiny.

The lack of fear Alpines show makes them willing to boldly approach others, especially in Mediterranean countries, and this sometimes manifests itself as a kind of Pepe LePew rapiness. They're vulgar, laugh loudly at dirty jokes, and speak bluntly about everything.

Some peoples have genuinely unique personalities, like the Jews and Irish, but most national characters were not selected for per se but emerge from unusual combinations of traits. To give one relevant example, the Germans:

Northwest Europeans have a distinctive mental style, an nerdy memory for facts and little details and a way of seeing the world autistically, abstractly, to store facts about human beings in the same mental compartments as fictional characters or animals.

The Germans are uniquely dangerous people because they combine this kind of nerdy facility for organization and planning with a hardness and racial arrogance more typical of Slavs. They are very much like other Alpines with one important exception: they are competent.

The kinds of cruelty, on a national or individual level, that Germans are capable of is related to this sort of crossroads personality. NW Euros are autistic and inhuman, but this is mitigated by their softness. Slavs are hard, but also warm. Germans are neither warm nor soft.

Russians too have a character that is the result of an unusual combination: an Alpine ease around people mixed with a stoic, unemotional harshness shared with other northern peoples like Scandinavians.