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What Europe Would Look Like if all the Separatists Won

posted by martyb on Tuesday September 23 2014, @09:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the drawing-between-the-lines dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Voters in Scotland have turned down independence for now, but separatist movements continue across Europe, possibly threatening to dismantle Spain, France, and Belgium as well as the UK. The next milestone will be an independence vote on Nov. 9 in Catalonia, the region on the northeast coast of Spain which includes Barcelona; separatists are expected to win handily, but the vote is not binding on the Spanish government. Slate has a neat map showing what a completely redrawn Europe would look like, if accommodations were made for all movements that have joined a loose collective called European Free Alliance; a more complete but visually less satisfying map, including EFA holdouts such as Northern Ireland, appears in Wikipedia. The Washington Post has thumbnail descriptions of eight movements.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:45PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:45PM (#97225) Journal

    But more importantly, the differences are not exactly long standing, nor are the representative of a deep philosophical alignment. The Dixiecrats held most of the South for the democratic party through to the '50's, for example. Rand Paul and Ralph Nader are good illustrations of the divisions even within the "red" and "blue" groups - some love them, some hate them (even on "their own" sides).

    I agree with the rest of your post, but this argument doesn't really hold. The majority party in those regions flipped because the positions of the parties themselves flipped. It wasn't because the majority ideologies in those regions changed.

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  • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:50PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Tuesday September 23 2014, @04:50PM (#97230)

    Which is my point.

    The geography of "who belongs with who?" isn't some fixed thing - it changes over time. In this case, it changed with the change of party platforms. Making long-term decisions based on present-day political boundaries is a fool's errand, because those political boundaries (history tells us) are highly likely to change.

    Oh, and by the way, I'd argue the "parties themselves" didn't flip or reverse positions. It was that the Democrats went from "paying lip service to civil rights" to "actively advocating civil rights" in 1964.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday September 23 2014, @09:31PM

      by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday September 23 2014, @09:31PM (#97345) Homepage
      Very true, the lines on the map are very artificial, and sometimes quite ephemeral. One egregious example of careful cynical drawing of lines is the case of the Kurds who were deliberately sliced up into small chunks in separate countries so that they could not have any real influence over any of them.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:00AM (#97501)

    The parties didn't really flip positions; the Democrats put forward a Catholic candidate, Kennedy. The South was solidly Protestant; the Catholics were in the Northeast. The South switched to Republicans because Lincoln's party wasn't as bad as a northern Catholic.