Good questions that I don’t think I can answer without erecting massive walls of text, but I’ll be succinct. It was the same in some ways and different in others. For example cross-cultural relationships are much more tolerated now than back in the day in line with the global mood. Back in the 80s/90s as soon as a Western girl was old enough to like boys she was hurried onto a plane even if sometimes away from her family. International school administrators watched for that sort of mingling like hawks under guise of “preserving the Western community”. Certain embassies -believe it or not- distributed leaflets/advice to their citizens instructing them not to mingle with Arabs and the reason was to “protect the local culture” and so on. Nowadays it’s much more lax but up to a point. It seems that as long as the white girl is ‘experimenting’ it’s fine, but when and if marriage occurs and children arrive suddenly she’s banished from the tribe. No such restrictions apply to western men, but we all understand how that works I’m sure.

On the other hand due to the higher average socioeconomic/educational level of expats back then in general they were more curious to forge a few friendships with comparable non-Western families. It was a new and exciting phenomenon for all parties involved.

As far as different Anglo communities are concerned the Irish and Scottish are by far the most willing to venture outside the bubble, possibly because of their historical perspective, with Aussies -in my experience- being the worst, but I don’t want to offend anybody. I’ll address the Arabs later.