I was pointing out that, starting from a largely-developed world like the modern one, geographic distance must be a better assurance of security than statehood; most conflict is related to local-regional tensions. And then you realize that no matter how you reorganize the ethnic map (to the point of mixing and matching nations across continents, such as moving northern Nigerian tribes to Mongolia and Rohinggya to Belize), conflict will re-assert itself. Because conflict is not dependent on specific historical grievances but rather on local tensions, which conform to the geopolitical context.Originally Posted by Viking
In other words, closing one threat opens another.
If you fragmented the states, Bhutan and Nepal could well still be clients of larger neighbors. On the other hand, Vietnam would look something like 1947 Israel to accommodate all its minority tribes. Indonesia and Malaysia would not exist at all.Conceivably, yet countries like Bhutan, Nepal and Vietnam still exist today.
Is this in the sense that a hermit in the woods has autonomy? Small states bound by obligation, necessity, or threat to an alliance or to a large patron would not have retained this autonomy.That depends on how well the different countries cooperate on military defence. Again, note that such cooperation doesn't need to reduce the autonomy of the ethnic group; and even if it did, the remaining autonomy could still be magnitudes greater than would be the case within a larger state.
Such defensive alliances could also include relatively large countries that could benefit from being allied to smaller countries, like being allowed to have military bases there or gain access to resources etc. Again, this can happen without great loss of autonomy.
I know that local Germans (particularly Nazi-friendly ones) were elevated to power, returned their imperial privileges, and organized into paramilitaries, following the occupations of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and so on. Prior to 1939 Nazi Germany was using their position to dominate the diasporas with funding and personnel, 'pre-purging' the opposition. During the invasions the Wehrmacht absorbed the borderlands almost immediately, so the main impact of the diaspora must have been during the occupation period, and toward overall manpower.How did local ethnic Germans respond when Nazi Germany expanded its borders? I don't know if any of them contributed through sabotage or similar, but it seems very many or most of them were happy about it, which should make consolidation and further expansion much easier.
Then there's all the youth living in Europe that have been radicalised and travel abroad to join entities like IS; such individuals could conceivably be recruited for sabotage by different means under certain circumstances - and there are many of them.
If a Muslim citizen harbors a generalized hatred for the home country, that amounts to a terroristic threat in the worst case - as we're already familiar with. It sounds like you're suggesting Muslim minorities could be a vector for European countries to sabotage each other, which seems like a wrong interpretation.
First, it's important to establish that the refugee crisis affected Europe as it did because the EU failed to proactively manage the refugee population abroad before it spilled out. It's not surprising that such an influx strains the system and exposes or exacerbates pre-existing deficiencies and pressure points; if one has to calculate policies around potential dividends for the hard right, then the problem is already out of hand and bound to get worse before it gets better.The idea is not to feed the immigrants to anyone, but to halt problem-causing immigration. Granting asylums to huge amounts of people from poorly developed countries is very costly for a welfare state that prides itself on 'high' ethical standards. These groups of people (the first generation, certainly) tend to end up highly over-represented in category of jobless people in countries where education tends to be important to get any job at all. Already, this is bad news for the state; we don't even have to look at radical nationalists.
These money have to come from somewhere, and the consequences of this re-balancing of state budgets of could again benefit radicals.
Then there is the security situation, of course. If many immigrant-heavy suburbs become increasingly dominated by criminal elements, that benefits radical nationalists, who can play the security card. The money required to 'pacify' such suburbs could again benefit radicals; once more, they have to come from somewhere. The rise in crime in specific suburbs could, by expanding the black market or by making it easier to bribe officials, potentially also benefit the radicals via any criminal and shady business they take part in or rely on.
Therefore, the argument from not pissing off the fascists doesn't work by the analogy of closing the barn door after the cattle have left.
Beyond that you can debate both the moral and economic dimensions of domestic refugee policies, but we can set that issue aside for now. Most intend to return to their home countries, contingent upon local conditions in the coming years, so in your anxieties you share a stake in the quality and appropriateness of policies toward existing refugees.
So as a matter of fact don't we see that an entity has more autonomy if it is a protected minority in a democracy, as opposed to nominally independent in an environment where "might makes right"?If an entity is autonomous, it can make decisions and act independently of other entities. In, this case, there was no autonomy to begin with, because the other group also has a say; they must find out if they are big enough before they can do anything.
So definitionally this is some democratic or similar process, right? An ethnic group has not necessarily more autonomy under a native despot than it does under a foreign one.When I speak of the autonomy of an ethnic group, I am thinking of the collective decisions that this group makes - either through consensus or what the view of the majority is. This is concrete.
A couple of things this assumes:The reduction or loss in autonomy is then ability of other ethnic groups to alter the outcome of the collective decision on a national level (once again, this is concrete - either the other ethnic group voted in a way that changed the outcome, or it didn't).
1. A binary outcome.
2. Discrete decision-making divided amongst ethnicities, then subject to potential veto by others.
But that's not how we live, is it? Outcomes are not binary, and possibilities are not gerrymandered by group identity. They are diffused throughout the body politic, which is divided by many different characteristics.
The only place where your schema applies is in constitutional matters such as secession. By analogy, if there are more men than women, this does not mean in itself that women have less autonomy than men, since men and women are not voting separately on men's issues or women's issues and then validating the other group's opinion. However, if men and women in combination were to vote to strip voting rights from some women (but not a corresponding subset of men), then women would be losing autonomy even as they participate in that loss.
If a population is 100% members of a single ethnic group, then their decisions are inherently collective for that group: there's no one else. But you must realize that in our world what this means is that decisions are pretty much never collectively ethnic decisions. It's not a meaningful description. Moreover, people have any number of distinguishing characteristics beyond ethnicity, and single ethnicities eventually cleave into multiple new ones.Now, if we can assume that the collective decisions of an ethnic group are more likely to be ones that benefit or protect the ethnic group, then many specific shifts in the collective decisions at the national level could be harmful to that ethnic group. Note that even if the first assumption is correct, the opinion within the ethnic group could often still be split close to the middle.
You can't get caught up in the numbers of states, since before the 20th century in the modern period most states in the world were European states and city states.Before the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia, agglomeration looked like the long-term global trend, because that's how (European) states became effective at fighting wars and provisioning for their citizens. Speaking of, the modern model seemed to be not of nation states (this is an accident of ancient European tribal demography, and for the most part non-existent outside of it), but of national states.This should not be viewed as an all-or-nothing proposition. Already, the world consists of very many approximate 'ethnostates'; to some extent, my argument is simply to not dilute the existing ones too much. The wisdom in creating new ethnostates has to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis (and relative to the current situation), not just generally.
The trend in Europe since WWII, and to some extent elsewhere in the world, is for the number of countries to go up (I don't know how the numbers would compare between e.g. 1800 and 2017), and most or all of these closely follow ethnic divisions to some degree, even if they aren't all ethnostates by any good approximation.
While countries like Sweden and Hungary are close to nation-states, major countries like France, England, Russia, Germany, and China stray from this ideal. These latter are, however, successful national states: centralized, autonomous and institutionally-differentiated sovereign organizations with coercive power and influence; distinct from households, kinship groups, churches, and businesses; have priority over all other organizations within a bounded territory.
In fact then, the largest and strongest states in Europe (and previously, the world) are not simply natural "ethnic groups" but agglomerations of numerous groups and tribes united under a negotiated, nationalized identity.
And then we recall one of the most important truths in politics: small states or groups do not have the power or resources to make decisions that benefit their members, regardless of these members' demographic makeup or divisions.
When you say "stable", let's be more precise. The stability of borders is determined by the international consensus. The permeability or integrity of borders, that's another issue. In that sense you are more or less right, but at the same time there's no meaningful comparison to make, given the newness of the contemporary order.So, to me, what I am advocating seems to be happening on its own a significant extent, and borders are perhaps more stable now with regards to military might than they have ever been.
Obviously, you can expect there to be a lower limit. Creating a country of a few thousand might not be the best idea, and such groups might be better off trying to get some degree of autonomy within a larger state.
Then there is also ethnic groups that are closely related - the more closely related they are, the more natural closer union will be. For some ethnic groups, it might seem favourable to form a state based on a 'super-ethnicity', and view each other as distinct variants on a common theme. Ultimately, perception is key when it comes to ethnic boundaries.
Why is "super-ethnicity" such an important characteristic to you, that no other perception or external fact seems worth taking into account?
Why should they need to collectively defend themselves as Jews? Why shouldn't they defend themselves within their countries or origin?1. In the case of Jews pre-Israel, the case seems obvious. Scattered about different countries, they could not collectively defend themselves; divide and conquer, in other words.
Now if for some strange reason a Jewish state was somehow located in Europe and bordered Nazi Germany, could it have defended itself against Nazi Germany? It would have been really difficult, but at least the Jews would have been capable of putting up a collective fight. Since it seems improbable that Hitler's genocidal ideas should suddenly appear in his head and be kept secret from the rest of the world until he wanted to execute those ideas, this hypothetical Jewish state would have had time to fortify and militarise. Indeed, such a state could have prepared for such an event decades or centuries ahead if the ethnic group had experienced hatred for the duration that time. The government could also helped organise mass-evacuation once war seemed imminent - there would probably be some suitable destination.
The very post you quote also describe how it could be easier to intervene on behalf of an ethnicity if has its own state - do you dispute this? This is, of course, more for the contemporary era than pre-WWII.
2. This is based on an ideal - such institutions can collapse or be hijacked. I could just as well suggest that we should aim towards having the larger countries take the lead in the role of world police and step in when smaller states behave in a wrong fashion. To some extent, this is already happening.
The 'opposing Jewish state' scenario gets increasingly silly without specifying its geography and neighbors at least, but it should be enough to point out that unless this Jewish state were nestled in the Alps it would have been overrun by the German military within days regardless of preparedness. The cost to the Germans, and the prospect of guerrilla war, are all well and good, but do not contribute to Jewish safety. Mass evacuation sounds nice, until you recall the world is highly parochial and stratified by ethnicity. Would the UK, Sweden, and Switzerland take in millions of refugees in this kind of world?
Without specific geographic and political circumstances to examine, I do not see why in general segregated states would make intervention easier. Indeed the infrastructure of large states, namely the absence of such, would tend to make it more difficult overall.
This ideal has proven to offer the surest protections for minorities in human history. There is plenty of room to expand it. To be sure, the state has the characteristics of the populace and vice-versa, so the citizens individually and collectively need to have solidarity indoctrinated in them through civil institutions; this will ensure both self-reinforcement of solidarity and the effectiveness of the state in mitigating harm.
I'm not sure what you mean. My response was to your discussion of a potential dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the fate of the Russian nation. The Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic empire dominated by the Russians, so if this empire were itself absorbed into other empires, then the Russians would lose their place at the top - in addition to being subject to the whims of another imperial ruling class.I don't see what the argument here is. For what reasons do the average ethnic group not have their own state other than imperialism, either in a narrow or broad sense?
Ultimately, I hope you recognize that the reasoning you present is almost indistinguishable from that used by all the various white nationalists...
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