[watwut]

This is not about people in Europe not speaking their mind. It is about them not speaking their mind during organized scheduled meeting that has multiple people in it. These people will tell you what they think in one on one or a smaller group. They will tell you what they think spontaneously in discussion. But when you put 8 people of them and formalized it all, they go into formal mode and talk much less.

The two are two different issues, basically. Also, the directness of a discussion kind of depends on a topic. Americans tend to be hierarchical and tend not to want to hear negative things. Eastern Europeans are more likely criticize, express doubts or pessimism. These are seemingly taboos for Americans. But that is kind of orthogonal to the meetings topic.