Trump likely to acknowledge Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel

[Montmorency]

Superficially, it makes perfect sense that it would; so I would just as well look for things that would go against it, as I'd expect it to be true.

But why do you believe so?

If the same or similar amount Jews were present in Europe in the early 1900s, and we also had a state of Israel created at some unspecified point earlier, then:

Hitler might forcefully deport all Jews to Israel
a large amount of Jews could migrate voluntarily in response to the deteriorating situation in Germany, making 1. a more likely outcome for the smaller group that still remains
the state of Israel might offer to resettle all German Jews, including footing the bill for the whole thing. For those that refuse to resettle, 1. can still be a later outcome (rather than death)
the state of Israel can alter the outcome in yet different ways: helping Jews escape occupied areas in different ways, like sabotage and other clandestine operations, maybe even strategic bombing raids once the war has started if they can get to any friendly airfields close enough; they may also use diplomacy to make the allies put more effort into stopping or reducing the extent of the Holocaust, both before and during the war, and so on

This depends on distance - if a Jewish state exists bordering Hitler's Germany, or Germany's neighbors, they would be quickly overrun. And if you have one place concentrating most of the Jews already, extermination becomes easier.

Superficially, what your idea advocates for is shuffling around mutually-hostile groups until they're sufficiently geographically distant from one another. This sounds familiar...

Many or all of the larger nations would lose a lot of their territory and population if we started carving them up, and would be weakened.

China would clearly dominate Asia east of India, which would itself be gravely weakened. Maybe Japan and China could carve up Southeast Asia and the Pacific among each other.

Furthermore, small nations could form defensive pacts à la NATO. If one country buys one fighter jet, then 500 small nations is 500 fighter jets. This organisation leaves not a good fundament for independently projecting power (a single fighter jet makes no invasion), but for the given ethnic group, that's probably not worse on average compared to if they had formed a small part of a much larger country (and smaller groups of small individual countries can still agree to project power, obviously).

Economies of scale suggest that a single force of 50 jets could overpower 500 individual air forces. Either a central power dominates, or the organization has no practical effect - and that's what the historical evidence shows.

In the most basic forms, this is straight forward. If we have two approximate ethnostates A and B, and a huge chunk of people migrate from B to A to form 10% of the population there, then if B later (e.g 10 or 100 years) declares war on A, those 10% may leave A in a weaker position than A would have been without them, because of significant sympathies for B from these 10%.

Or it may not. "5th columns" have largely been a myth, and invaders who hoped to rely on them have often ended with egg on their faces.

Note also with the loss of autonomy trough democracy that the majority will have, in the last paragraph; which could impact the security of the original population negatively, even if it remains the majority.

How would they lose democratic autonomy?

Yet if the indirect problem is easier to tackle than the direct one, tackling the indirect one can be the way to go.

But at this point, feeding immigrants to fascists would only serve to grow the fascists. Eventually they will grow big enough to eat you, and you will have no one left to feed to them.

Pragmatism aside, peacable immigrants may hold higher moral value than monstrous locals.

To say that something is "not really the problem" is only relevant for the solution as long as solving the "real problem" is feasible and desirable (given potential downsides).

If one perceives that immigration is both more problematic and more easily resolved as a problem than fascist resurgence, irreconcilable differences in values may be at play.

If the immigration is large enough for long enough, the minorities will become the new majority. Long before that point, they will also have a large power potential in democracies: if 10% of the population was from a certain immigrant background and most of them voted in a distinct fashion, that can mean a lot influence in a democracy and reduce the autonomy, or whatever you want to call it, of the original population relative to that it would have had without the immigration.

Again, how?

Imagine there are no immigrants. 50% of the population wants to declare the aspen the country's national tree, while the other 50% want to declare the oak their national tree. If, in a few years, 40% favor the aspen and 55% favor the oak, would you say that aspen-lovers have "lost autonomy"?

Autonomy is concrete, and not a mere function of this or that demographic. You have to point out specific policies or structures that increase or decrease it.

[Viking]

But why do you believe so?

See this debate.

This depends on distance - if a Jewish state exists bordering Hitler's Germany, or Germany's neighbors, they would be quickly overrun. And if you have one place concentrating most of the Jews already, extermination becomes easier.

Superficially, what your idea advocates for is shuffling around mutually-hostile groups until they're sufficiently geographically distant from one another. This sounds familiar...

I was thinking of a state of Israel locate in the area where it is located today - the most logical area. It could have been created by, say, a generous Ottoman sultan (probably without Jerusalem) with a Jewish wife that he was very fond of, or by the British in the 1920s, because they somehow were concerned enough already then about the security of Jews in Europe to create such a state (would leave a bit of short time to prepare for the war, but maybe Britain could have wanted to groom this state as a future ally and sell/lease military hardware, or something).

The idea is not to put hostile ethnicities far away from each other geographically, but to give each a patch of land where they can say "this is my land, that is your land", and then they leave it at that; as they seem largely capable of in the Balkans nowadays (Bosnia and Herzegovina doesn't follow this model very well, and seems the most troubled state in the region (apart from Kosovo, perhaps, but that entity presumably suffers significantly from limited, regional in particular, recognition)).

Maybe Japan and China could carve up Southeast Asia and the Pacific among each other.

Conceivably, yet countries like Bhutan, Nepal and Vietnam still exist today.

Economies of scale suggest that a single force of 50 jets could overpower 500 individual air forces. Either a central power dominates, or the organization has no practical effect - and that's what the historical evidence shows.

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.

Or it may not. "5th columns" have largely been a myth, and invaders who hoped to rely on them have often ended with egg on their faces.

The world is getting increasingly connected, both in terms of transportation and communication. In the past, an offshoot of an ethnic group in a distant country would be relatively disconnected from its origin and could develop in a very different direction - today, much has changed. Some first-generation immigrants (like some Pakistan families living in Europe) travel halfway around the world to their country of origin to get "suitable" spouses for their children.

Satellite TV also deserves a mention here.

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.

But at this point, feeding immigrants to fascists would only serve to grow the fascists. Eventually they will grow big enough to eat you, and you will have no one left to feed to them.

Pragmatism aside, peacable immigrants may hold higher moral value than monstrous locals.

If one perceives that immigration is both more problematic and more easily resolved as a problem than fascist resurgence, irreconcilable differences in values may be at play.

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.

Again, how?

Imagine there are no immigrants. 50% of the population wants to declare the aspen the country's national tree, while the other 50% want to declare the oak their national tree. If, in a few years, 40% favor the aspen and 55% favor the oak, would you say that aspen-lovers have "lost autonomy"?

Autonomy is concrete, and not a mere function of this or that demographic. You have to point out specific policies or structures that increase or decrease it.

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.

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.

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).

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.

One problem is that you appeal to contemporary conditions, but then imagine a contemporary world that is basically an alien planet in which nothing of contemporary conditions need be expected to apply.

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.

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.

You have not done two things:

1. Explained how any given "ethnicity" would be less exposed to violence or oppression ("safer") than they historically have been in practice.
2. Explained why we shouldn't seek the benefits of national unions or conglomerates, while improving protections for minorities? In which case, the first question becomes moot; whether or not a majority later becomes a minority, they are still secure by the strength of institutions.

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.

But here's the mistake,and I warned against it in my first reply: if an imperial ruling class at some point becomes subject to another imperial ruling class, of course they would be less safe. They're no longer the overlords! That's an argument against empire/colonialism, and nothing more.

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?

[Gilrandir]

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.

Many countries in pre-WWII Europe have been witnessing Hitler's growing military ambitions (Czechoslovakia among them) supported by propaganda for quite a time, but no fortification nor militarization helped to stem the German tide. On the contrary, the mentioned fortification and militarization spurred Hitler to act sooner.

[Viking]

Many countries in pre-WWII Europe have been witnessing Hitler's growing military ambitions (Czechoslovakia among them) supported by propaganda for quite a time, but no fortification nor militarization helped to stem the German tide. On the contrary, the mentioned fortification and militarization spurred Hitler to act sooner.

The point is that anti-Jewish sentiment has been a thing in Europe since long before Hitler. While Hitler was still an aspiring painter, fortification and militarisation could have been the default for many decades in this hypothetical Jewish state.

[Montmorency]

The idea is not to put hostile ethnicities far away from each other geographically, but to give each a patch of land where they can say "this is my land, that is your land", and then they leave it at that; as they seem largely capable of in the Balkans nowadays (Bosnia and Herzegovina doesn't follow this model very well, and seems the most troubled state in the region (apart from Kosovo, perhaps, but that entity presumably suffers significantly from limited, regional in particular, recognition)).

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.

In other words, closing one threat opens another.

Conceivably, yet countries like Bhutan, Nepal and Vietnam still exist today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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"?

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.

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.

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).

A couple of things this assumes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why is "super-ethnicity" such an important characteristic to you, that no other perception or external fact seems worth taking into account?

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.

Why should they need to collectively defend themselves as Jews? Why shouldn't they defend themselves within their countries or origin?

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 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?

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.


Ultimately, I hope you recognize that the reasoning you present is almost indistinguishable from that used by all the various white nationalists...

[Viking]

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.

These conflicts currently tend to happen within countries, and to the extent they spill across borders, it is because the central authorities are unwilling or incapable of properly enforcing those borders. Part of the point of splitting up countries is to create new borders that are more easy to enforce, but also ones that central authorities really want to enforce.

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.

Who are running Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Andorra? Aren't they managing their own internal affairs?

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.

I am not thinking about that, but about a hypothetical powerful muslim aggressor. Imagine that in Turkey, emboldened and aided by an Islamist resurgence, a theocratic strongman takes power. He sets in motion massive military build-up, and with a combination of military might and sympathetic coups, takes control of most of MENA. This doesn't have to be an entity relying heavily on Turkish nationalism; it could be declared a caliphate, and the official language could be Arabic. He (or his successors) eventually sets his sights on the decadent, Muslim-oppressing continent to the northwest: Europe.

In such a scenario, the agressor country is not merely a country, but also ideological and religious hub. This is similar to the Soviet Union and the role it played for communism.

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.

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.

The issues with immigration is older than the current 'refugee crisis'; second-generation immigrants play an important role in those. The relevant immigration has been going on for decades, and the ongoing immigration is going to exacerbate the issues caused by the previous immigration.

I seriously doubt that the net outcome is beneficial.

Many may return, but I expect that many will also stay.

I don't know how things are in Germany, but here labour migration is very extensive. You can even find people travelling all the way from the Phillipines to harvest strawberries (not to mention the strange case of Nepalese sherpas being hired to build mountain paths left and right). Contrast this with asylum migrants who do not come because they are needed, but because they have been given a favour (that they cannot expect to return).

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"?

It cannot be taken for granted that might makes more right in a more fragmented world. For example, there could be a mutual understanding between bigger powers that "I don't expand, you don't expand", much like now.

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.

It is intended to be implicit in what I write that democracy is the ideal that is being strived for, with leading Western ethical ideals in some form accompanying it. Much of this debate wouldn't make that much sense otherwise.

A couple of things this assumes:

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.

Whether the variable under consideration is continuous or discrete, whether or not a change has occurred is binary. If the variable is continuous, then small changes may not matter much on their own - though they may accumulate.

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.

This seems to be more about using a larger magnification than correctness of concept. If you go to a small enough scale, groups of people do not exist, and there would be no minorities to protect in the first place.

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.

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.

I was thinking particularly about Europe, where a lot of countries have come out of and into existence over the recent centuries.

As far as I am aware, France, Germany and China are ethnostates up to an approximation; it's just that the ethnicity in this case is a very diverse 'super-ethnicity' or a very wide ethnic continuum, or whatever you want to call it. Russia is numerically heavily dominated by ethnic Russians and the UK likewise by England and the English. Both countries are also creaking at the seams that are the ethnic borders and boundaries.

The way I see it, multiethnic states have a fundamental destabilising element that is more or less inherent in its multi-ethnicity. Groups of people want to rule themselves without outside interference, so minorities within a country may demand power in some form. The result of this may be parliaments or lesser entities that go on about wanting independence, like in Scotland and Catalonia, or that interfere with the affairs of the central government, including foreign policy, in some other way. If you do not grant the minorities power, you risk civil unrest. Either way, you have the unity of the country undermined.

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.

The modern state is also fairly new, as is modern democracy - both have gone through dramatic changes during the centuries they have existed. They are also both likely to change significantly as technology and ideology change with time.

Why is "super-ethnicity" such an important characteristic to you, that no other perception or external fact seems worth taking into account?

Don't know what you are referring to here. There are always many things to take into account.

Why should they need to collectively defend themselves as Jews? Why shouldn't they defend themselves within their countries or origin?

If they are defending themselves together with an ethnicity that is equally likely to be the target for genocide, then the difference is smaller. On the other hand, if the other ethnicity could be treated well under the new rulers, surrender is of course a much more acceptable alternative for them than for the Jews.

When multiple groups are pulling in a similar direction, a smaller group might still have made more progress in the precise direction it wants to go if it were pulling alone.

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?

Once we enter alternative history, there are so many things that can change. One of the advantages Nazi Germany had/got, was advanced technology. If a Jewish state had existed and was very paranoid, it may very well had been technologically advanced (that's not even thinking about nukes and Einstein).

One important aspect of my argument, is that a state is a powerful entity: it has tax income, it has diplomatic relations (more or less by definition), it has a police force and can have a military. So a Jewish state could negotiate on behalf of its refugees - this matters a lot. There is no guarantee that it would succeed, but it could have the ability to offer things in return, like gold or technology.

Another important and relevant aspect is also how this hypothetical European Jewish state came into being: if the Jews were native to Europe, why would there be so much more animosity towards Jews than e.g. the Basque? If they, as in reality, were not native to Europe and somehow had had a kingdom in the Middle East since ancient times, there probably wouldn't have been many Jews in Europe, and probably not that much animosity towards them there either.

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.

Can you provide a probable example from the post-WWII world where an ethnic group would be easier to protect when its killer is a foreign state rather than its own state?

'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.

It seems to me that there were more Russians than Germans at the start of WWII, and an approximate Russian ethnostate could still be very resourceful and capable of putting up a decent defense against Nazi Germany. Other countries to the west could also help by forming a buffer instead of being territory that should be defended.

In sum, it is not simply the fact that the Russians were running an empire that would have made them safer. Indeed, if an ethnicity builds an empire, it was likely very strong to begin with.

Ultimately, I hope you recognize that the reasoning you present is almost indistinguishable from that used by all the various white nationalists...

Euro-American ethnonationalists face two issues:

1. They themselves represent a group of people that overran other groups of people already living there. Two wrongs don't make a right, but this weakens their argument.
2. Their country is already very diverse, so what are they going to do about that?

In Europe, the first point is reversed. It is the non-Europeans that are colonising Europe, and carving out their own spaces against the wishes of many of the natives.

The second point is increasingly becoming the case in several Western European countries. In terms of ethnic sovereignty; then, unless you somehow find deporting citizens ethical, assimilation may be the only realistic way to regain sovereignty lost this way, and may take a long, long time.

[Gilrandir]

As far as I am aware, France, Germany and China are ethnostates up to an approximation;

I wouldn't call it an ethnostate. As for Germany and France, it must have been true in the 1960-70s. Now with the influx of immigrants (Turkish in Germany and Arabic in France) your definition hardly holds.

It seems to me that there were more Russians than Germans at the start of WWII, and an approximate Russian ethnostate could still be very resourceful and capable of putting up a decent defense against Nazi Germany.

I hope you loosely call "Russia" what in fact was the USSR and I hope you realize that it consisted of more than just "Russians".

[Viking]

I wouldn't call it an ethnostate.

More than 90% of the population of China is Han Chinese; the largest ethnic group on this planet. The Chinese state generally seems like it can easily curb its enthusiasm when it comes to the ethnic minorities of the country, and probably would want them to give up their religions and identities.

As for Germany and France, it must have been true in the 1960-70s. Now with the influx of immigrants (Turkish in Germany and Arabic in France) your definition hardly holds.

German institutions seem still to be dominated by ethnic Germans, and likewise France with 'ethnic French'. Importantly, these states were built during times when this dominance was even greater and presumably thought of as natural.

I hope you loosely call "Russia" what in fact was the USSR and I hope you realize that it consisted of more than just "Russians".

There is no mention of Russia in the text you quote, but of a Russian 'ethnostate'; which per definition would be populated mostly by Russians.

[Gilrandir]

More than 90% of the population of China is Han Chinese; the largest ethnic group on this planet. The Chinese state generally seems like it can easily curb its enthusiasm when it comes to the ethnic minorities of the country, and probably would want them to give up their religions and identities.



German institutions seem still to be dominated by ethnic Germans, and likewise France with 'ethnic French'. Importantly, these states were built during times when this dominance was even greater and presumably thought of as natural.

So, which is your understanding of an ethnostate - the one that has 90% of some ethinicity in its population (according to the China approach) or the one whose institutions are dominated by one ethnicity (the France and Germany approach)?