I am not sure this is true. At least some articles I read attribute the successes in many Asian countries to aggressive contact tracing and quarantining. You don't ask people kindly to self-isolate, you move them to hotels and quarantine them. You don't ask them to remember their contacts, you aggressively investigate them using every source of data available.

I think an argument can be made that Europe simply got it wrong in the details. In order to find less invasive means of controlling covid that respect privacy we ended up limiting freedoms much more and for longer.