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Nation-states came late to history, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest they won't make it to the end of the century
If you'd been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you'd have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the Pharaoh's rule or Christendom or the Ancien Régime.
We are just as deluded that our model of living in 'countries' is inevitable and eternal. Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. This means a blend of 'nation' (people with common attributes and characteristics) and 'state' (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, with borders agreed by other nation-states). Try to imagine a world without countries – you can't. Our sense of who we are, our loyalties, our rights and obligations, are bound up in them.
[...] This is the crux of the problem: nation-states rely on control. If they can't control information, crime, businesses, borders or the money supply, then they will cease to deliver what citizens demand of them. In the end, nation-states are nothing but agreed-upon myths: we give up certain freedoms in order to secure others. But if that transaction no longer works, and we stop agreeing on the myth, it ceases to have power over us.
Polities will return to the city-state, or will multi-national corporations step in?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @08:37AM (6 children)
Chances are that 50% of your patriotic citizens / comrades hate you as much as they hate the enemy / foreigners. What exactly does it mean to be a citizen? Other than a stamp on a piece of paper. Some of us in the EU don't want nationalistic borders. The "hard right" in each country seems to want to support eachother in making us pick fights with eachother - it doesn't make sense! They want us to be against eachother just so we can shut ourselves off and hate eachother inside our own country.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday September 08 2017, @09:17AM (4 children)
If two sides of the country hate each other, and have diametrically opposing views, the rational thing to do is to split the country into two countries, so each can live the way they want.
If there is a clear majority, you can generally brownbeat or crush the minority into conforming (or leaving the country) thereby solving the problem. However if both sides are more or less evenly matched, then either
a) you will forever be compromising, and nothing will get done because the best you can agree on is to do nothing (or one side does something, then the other undoes it ASAP, for the other side to do it again, ad infinitum), until the system collapses
b) you will end up fighting each other for control of the country. This ranges from protests, civil disobedience, boycotts, onwards to full on civil war. At this point one side annihilates the other and takes control, or you end up with the country split in two anyway
so generally the best choice is to split the country peacefully, before you end up splitting it with much bloodletting.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 08 2017, @10:50AM
That doesnt usually work due to physical/geographical issues, cf. Northern Ireland.
(Score: 2) by lx on Friday September 08 2017, @12:14PM (2 children)
They tried that in Yugoslavia.
The term "Ethnic Cleansing" was invented there.
Turns out people don't like to be driven from their homes just because some politician says it's for the greater good.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday September 08 2017, @05:37PM (1 child)
> They tried that in Yugoslavia.
> The term "Ethnic Cleansing" was invented there.
> Turns out people don't like to be driven from their homes just because some politician says it's for the greater good.
Indeed they tried it there. It also worked perfectly. Take Croatia for example, after expelling hundreds of thousands of "non Croats" from their lands, and not ever welcoming them back, they found a long term stable solution for governance and prosperity.
Sure, it sucks for those on the receiving end (and you can bet that those being killed or driven from their homes didn't like it), but that is what happens when you are a minority that disagrees with the majority, and refuse to yield.
You can find before/after ethnic maps of the area, and you can see how it went from a rather intermixed country, to very clearly defined ethnic groups. Fact is, if the peoples could not longer live together, it would have been wiser to peacefully separate. If you just can't live together anymore, best break it of amicably. In the end you still are separate. Difference is if you will do it relatively intact, or after a bloody civil war.
Another example is the mass expulsion of Turks/Greeks from their respective countries, etc... Or even the crap in the middle east. Mass population expulsions are unfortunately a very common way of resolving disputes. Hell, we have the history of the Jews and their expulsion from all sorts of places that show this has been going on for millennia.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Saturday September 09 2017, @10:52AM
You can add the Partition of India to that list. Lots of people died, and many atrocities were perpetrated, but two independent countries were born: India and Pakistan. The division of Czechoslovakia was less bloody. The People's Republic of China is less accepting of the wish for independence of the Republic of China (aka Taiwan).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 08 2017, @11:21PM
Who knew that they would ally with outsiders who support their position and oppose native citizens that in turn oppose their position? Just because you live in the same country doesn't mean that you are on the same side.