Baker panel's mention of Palestinian "right of return" raises eyebrows
 

Two wrongs don't make a right. If you get kicked out of your house that doesn't give you the right to come kick me out of mine.

I think they kicked out the Palestinian refugees. In other words, the Palestinians that had been kicked out of Isreal, came to Jordan and tried to overthrow the government. The Palestinians want to go back to Isreal because that is where they are from, not the first place they went when they were kicked out.

You can say that a Palestinian return to Isreal is not gonig to happen, but to pretend that the expulsion never happened, or that the Palestinians weren't wronged when it happend makes you lose any moral crediblity. They had a moral right to return to their homes which was denied to them. Right now it may be unrealistic to grant them that right but it should be acknowledged that their rights were infringed upon, and something should be done to mitigate the damage that was done to them by having their rights infringed upon. If you don't acknowledge that how can you argue that the palestinians should stop doing anything because it is "immoral"?

I agree that many nations (in the traditional sense) share a common language. Towards the outset of the conversation, I recommended a book by Benedict Anderson called Imagined Communities, and now that we've been talking let me plug it again. A lot of the book is about the spread of the printing press and newspapers, and the shift among elites to use the vernacular languages. Centuries ago, it was common for the upper class to use a different language.

When a nation (again, in the usual sense) shares a language and a common ethnic background, it's easy to understand why it coheres as such. To me, the interesting cases are where this doesn't happen.

You also were making an argument that economic development tends to compel nations (in the usual sense) to shift to match ethnic and lingual concentrations. I still don't get why this would be.

Baker panel's mention of Palestinian "right of return" raises eyebrows
 

My maternal great grandpa is from an Indian tribe that was moved out of Northern Cali. Are you saying my family can stay at your house when we are in the area?

The Spanky Group: - irridentism it is the wave of the future
 

I've been told that before the Civil War, people would say "the United States are . . ." whereas afterwards they would say "the United States is . . . ."

I think we agree on most of the underlying history and are talking past each other because we are using words like "nation" differently.


I guess I picked the wrong example with Sikhs, since religion is the salient thing there. Except that the push for an independent Khalistan cuts across an ethnic group, per your explanation, and finds people wanting to define their nation by religion instead. With suggests that ethnicity is not as central to nationalism as you say.

But the big question is why do nations form that way? What causes them to become unform ethnolingquistic states (nation states) as oppossed to just states that have various ethnicities and languages. The odds of these unform ethnolinguistic states forming randomly has to be a couple trillion to one. So what is this force? What fuels this force? and is this force that caused so many uniform ethnolinguistic entities to form still at work today pushing for more ethnolinguistic uniform states to form? Newspapers, liteature and the press explain why the languages congealed with in borders but doesn not explain why borders were moved to mirror ethnoinguistic borders. Some more practical force had to cause that.

I have been saying the force is still out there. You seem to disagree with that.

But you seem to be saying that this force isn't in play today or isn't that strong. So if that is the case isn't the big question why did it happen at all? Until four hundred years ago there were very few ethnically linguistic uniform states and now there a many in Europe. Europe is almost completely comprised of them. But the Middle East and Central Asia have very few. So the question is, will the rest of the world become like Europe, or has this force died so the rest of the world will not follow Europe's lead? You seem to be saying that the rest of the world will not follow Europe's lead. So what existed in Europe to cause this change that doesnt' exist in the rest of the world today?

Something pushed the nations of Europe towards these ethnolinguistically uniform states. Something caused England, France, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Slovkia etc. to form. These countries not ony absorbed areas that spoke their language but expelled areas that didn't. And the lines congealed. As opposed to the Middle East and Central Asia where multiethnic countries or not uniformally ethnolinguistic countries like Afghanistan, Persia, Pakistan etc. formed.

What happend four hundred years ago when these countries started dividing along ethnic lines. Newspapers, liteature and the press explain why the languages congealed with in borders but doesn not explain why borders were moved to mirror ethnoinguistic borders. Multiethnic states 1) broke up - like Austria-Hungary, the Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, 2) lost their ethnic minority areas like Russia losing Poland, Finand and the Ukraine, 3) Irridentism, or countries absorbing the same ethnic group from bordering countries like Prussia with Bavaria, Spain unifying, France unifying, italy unifying etc.

Moving borders and changing border usually takes massive force. That is what wars are fought over. So why did people start wars, and fight and die so they could live in a ethnolinguistically uniform country, and to absorb all the similar ethnic communities around them?

I believe the force that arose to change these borders (not just change what happened with in these borders) came from the rising middle class. For some reason this new class demanded uniform ethnolinquistic states. Prosperity creates the middle class. As prosperity hits the rest of the world and the middle class in these countries starts to form, you will see this force spring into action.

The Spanky Group: - irridentism it is the wave of the future
 

India is not really worried about a Khalistan forming. They are worried about the Terrorism that concept encourages. But India is very scared of India following apart along ethnic lines. That is why India will not give up on Kashmir or Assam. They are like the Russians with Chechnya. They think once they let one ethnic group go, all the other ethnic groups (like the Punjabis) will get national aspirations.

National ethnic aspirations are what the Indian government fears the most. The question is will they get weaker or stronger as India industrializes. I think it will get stronger.

Baker panel's mention of Palestinian "right of return" raises eyebrows
 

You can definitely move into Slaves house.

We agree that having a shared language and ethnic background makes it more likely that people will conceive of themselves as a community. But what I'm saying is that this is not necessary or sufficient. After its time in the Twelve-Year Reich, Austria went back to being a separate country from Germany. As we've said, Switzerland has been a nation for a long, long time with four languages. To some extent, the reasons will be specific to each country.

When borders change, sometimes it has to do with deals made between governments, but sometimes it reflects facts on the ground. Or both.

I don't disagree that there are good reasons for political borders to mirror the distribution of ethnic groups and languages, but it's not inevitable.

Nations arose in Europe. Where people see themselves as belonging to a national community, it's hard for other kinds of states to persist. In Asia and Africa, other conceptions of states persist. Maps of nations show borders. Maps of traditional Asian governments (e.g., Siam) show the hubs of power -- central and regional governments.

Political boundaries in much of the rest of the world reflect decisions made in Europe. Particularly in Africa, colonial boundaries did a poor job of fitting how people in those areas saw things. Not surprisingly, a lot of nations in Africa don't function particularly well.

It's not just that borders shifted to mirror languages and ethnic groups. People change, too. I said above that elites in many countries started speaking the vernacular. With the development of various communications technologies, you have new reasons for people in a country to speak the same language. (Analogously, think of the way regional variations in American English have disappeared with the spread of TV.) So with industrialization, minor languages tend to die out.

And then there are population movements. E.g., ethnic Germans all over Eastern Europe headed for Germany after WWII. People move constantly.

The Spanky Group: - irridentism it is the wave of the future
 

But it's interesting, is it not, that Sikhs want a nation defined by religion, not ethnicity or language. Many Islamists feel the same way. And that would be the salient split in Northern Ireland.

More Hot Air
 

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Nationalism = bigotry
 

S--

Don't you answer your own implied question--Why do people want to be governed by people who have the same native tongue? at the end of this post when you say: "It seems to be part of human nature to not trust someone whose native tongue is unintelligible to you or at least hard for you to understand."? Seems rational enough to me. If you don't speak/read the language of your government, then you don't know what your government is doing to you.

How would you feel if the official language of California (or the US) was changed to Spanish, so that all government business was transacted in Spanish and all publications in Spanish only? I would feel excluded and if I were a part of a large community of English-speakers who couldn't get the Spanish-speaking government to accomodate us, I would want my own country with English as the language of the government.

Nationalism = bigotry
 

FWIW, the Swedish-speaking Finn I know has no apparently loyalty whatsoever to Sweden, and every apparent loyalty to Finland, notwithstanding that most of his countrymen don't speak his first language. OTOH, he is bilingual (tri-, including English), which is maybe more common in other parts of the world.

Nationalism = bigotry
 

Isn't the US around the bottom of the list of industrialized countries for the percentage of citizens who speak a second language? From my recollection, isn't Italy the only country even close?

Quote of the Day
 

Nice smart-ass sound bite, but who the heck says Bush was hearing anything from his ground commanders in Iraq?

Everything -- everysinglefuckingthing -- was filtered through Don Rumsfeld. After all, that was the chain of command. His absence, if Gates has a different style, may very well be a significant factor in making things better.

Rumsfeld was and is a very smart and hard-working man, but his ego and micromanagement proved disastrous with regard to the Iraq operation. They would have been relatively harmless in peacetime -- perhaps even helpful in enacting systemic reform -- but in a time of war you simply can't have the SecDef (for example) _personally_ managing the deployment (i.e. personally deciding precisely which units would deploy and when, with what personnel). It screws everything up.

S_A_M

More Hot Air
 

Spanky --

Riddle me this. If the key decision-makers with regard to Iraq really had and have all the information they need to do the rigth thing, how did it get so fucked up? What does that say about the performance of Bush and his senior staff, under your theory?

S_A_M