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You just described Europe. Once the national boundaries are established and you have growth then they should get along. It is world wide depression that creates things like WWII. In my opinion the only way to get stability is ethnic nation states, democracy and prosperity (which requires free market systems).

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True, but, absent ethnic cleansing, the only two possibilities in that region are that, or the mixed-bag unnatural "states" that can only be ruled through power or coercion. At least with side-by-side natural groupings, the internal structures of the states can be run democratically, or at least in a less authoritarian fashion.

Mussolini made the trains run on time, but, still, he was problematic.

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Don't know about Belgium, but as for Canada, we had this discussion earlier in the year based on a survey that showed an appparently surprisingly high percentage of western Canada was ready to go it alone. I completed my own independent nonscientific survey of my western Canadian relatives, who told me that survey is meaningless. Basically, they said it is an expression of a basal level of grumbling about Ottawa, which has been going on in the prairies since there was a Canada. Canada most certainly is not falling apart.

As I said, the Belgians may be at each other's throats.

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Didn't the separist vote in Quebec get like 48%. And Quebec is like thirty percent Anglo?

And these two ethnic groups don't really have a long traditional ethnic tradition and culture (unless you count that they are part of France and England).

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My people (the Irish) do very well at living with other cultures. We take the bars, and let the others have the rest. If you look around every major American (and Canadian) city, I think you'll see this is true.

The exception, of course, being Northern Ireland, but those bloody Scots seems to want the bars, too.

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Yes - in 1995. But I just don't see separation making economic sense for Quebec. Recent polls (November) suggest that support for separation is at 54%, up from 43% earlier in the year, but I think that is more anger over the sponsorship scandal than a lasting number. As some have noted, it is a lot easier to vote Yes in a poll than in a referendum. And the referendum is only an approval to negotiate with the rest of Canada over the terms of an association with them. I don't see the rest of Canada as agreeing to make it easy for them to be independent.

Every anglophone Canadians I know would laugh at the idea of being part of England. They see themselves as Canadians. The only link they have to England is the occasional visit from the Queen, which is viewed as a royal pain in the ass (pun intended).

Where the hell is gwinky? She at least was born there. And I heart her avatar big time.

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Hmm. I thought it was the Prince who enjoyed that.

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Wow, the more you talk about your personal conversations with Dr. Rice, the more stupid she sounds.

Seriously, you're scaring the crap out of me. This is the best foreign policy mind the administration has to tap?

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One: Europe has been working on getting its ethnic nation states to settle into a a roughly stable pattern since the fall of the western Roman Empire, call it 500 A.D. So you're saying the Middle East is going to work itself out in abut 1500 years? (Actually, 1400; it seems like the date should start counting from the fall of the Ottoman Empire).

Two: If ethnicly homogenius states are necessary for long term stability, this does not bode will for the US.

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Caveat -- the European states struggled under crimped versions of capitalism, what with the vassal states and all, for most of that time.

Fortunately, when God created the Free Market much later, the resulting growth, prosperity, and true love made today's stable democracies possible.

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A couple points: the Americas (and Australia) are different, in that they have seen the development of new ethnicities (Americans, Brazilians, Argentinians, Mexcians, Australians) from a melange of other identities. Try to find me a place where this has happened in the world as it was known to white, yellow and black people living in 1491.

And, European ethnicities are much more recent than that; I think you're into Elizabethan times before there is a clear understanding of who is English and who is French. And the Middle East has been working itself out in any number of ways during that period as well, though it was interrupted by colonialism and empire building. So, I don't think it needs more than a couple hundred years to sort itself out, rather than a millenium or more.

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I didn't see any caveats like that from Spanky. I'd expect as much from relativists like you and Gatti.

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You actually agree with me? No one agrees with me accept for some people who do acid. My theory that national boundries have to reflect ethnic divisions to be stable is not shared by many people. Almost every foreign policy expert I have ever talked to agrees with Dr. Rice.

An accpetance of my theory would mean a radical change to US foreign policy that I don't think has every been followed.

I appreciate you calling her not smart for not agreeing with me, but she is actually one of the smartest people I have ever met.

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2. The ethnicities in the new world and australia are so new they don't count. Being American, Australian or Venezuelan is not really dependent on a shared culture, shared language, shared ethnic music, dress and heritage. I don't care how many generations and Indian family lives in England they will never be English. But they will become American pretty quickly.

The different Romance languages in Europe didn't even really develop fully until the year 1000 (before that French, Spanish, Italian and portugese were all supposed to be classic latin and were written in latin. These were just phoenetic languages up to that point.) The Anglo Saxons didn't throw the Celts out of England until 700?. It is in the 1200 when national identities really started to form. Nation states soon followed. Although it did take Italy and Germany a while (although Italy could be considered a federatoin of different nationalities - a sicilian does not have much in common with a Tuscan and Germany was the Holy Roman Empire). The nation state became so ingrained in people's thinking that Poland was referred to as a country when it didn't even exist (when it was divided between Russia and Germany before WWI).

And the TV and Radio have really solidified the concept of the nation state. French slowly change to German on its way from Paris through Alsace to Germany. But once Radio and TV came along the stations had to be in a language and it happened really quickly were people either understood it or didn't. That ones that didn't felt like they were not part of the group that did.

It used to be that a Moroccan could not undestand Egyptian Arabic or Saudi Arabic. But now with satellite arabic TV stations like Al Jezeera, all Arabs undersand standard Egyptian Arabic. The central asian turkish republics are all watching Turkish TV and Radio merging all the Turkis dialects.

TV and Radio accelerate the process.

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I agree with you. Also, reading between the lines, I believe Bernard Lewis agrees with you. So, you're in good company.

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There are four ethnicities in Afghanistan. Turks in the North West near Uzbekistan (10%), Dari (persian speaking) that run through the country connecting Iran (Persian speaking) with Tadjikistan (Persian Speaking) (40%). The Pashtuns (where most of the Taliban come from) ( 35%) who are all on the Easterm side of Afghanistan along the Pakistani Border. And in the deep South Baluchis (5%). Every single ethnicity has bretheren in one or more country and there are more of every ethnicity in some other country. These ethnicities also are pretty well segregaged and they all sit next to some bretheren on the other side of the border.

I think Urdu is a trading language (similar to Swahili) and not a native language, but spoken throughout Pakistan. It is very similar to Hindi and both Hindi and Urdu have some similarities with Persian. But I dont think there is any Urdu ethnicity in Afghanistan.

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Do you drop acid?

Does Bernard Lewis?

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Have you read The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, an Afgahn physician living in the Bay Area? It's a work of fiction, but I learned more about the internal struggles in Afghanistan over the last 30 years through this book than I have from any other source.

One of the things that really struck me was a comment made by the protagonist's father early on in the book about his religious education. I paraphrase, but essentially he said of the mullahs that they're teaching a religion in a language that they themselves don't understand, so how can they possibly know what they'e talking about? For some reason, I didn't realize that Islam is still similar to pre-Vatican II Catholicism, and that everything is kept in the original Arabic, despite the followers' lack of understanding of the words.

At any rate, in addition to amazingly informative, I found the book to be beautifully written, and I thought that the story was lovely. I read it over the course of the Thanksgiving holiday, and it's a fairly fast read, I think. I highly recommend.

More useful information from the Economist
 

Bats and balls
Dec 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Bigger testes mean smaller brains


MEN are often accused by women of, to put it bluntly, having their brains in their balls. A joke, of course. But perhaps not as much of one as people might like to think. For a study of bats carried out by Scott Pitnick, of Syracuse University in New York State, and his colleagues, suggests that there really is a trade-off between the two organs.

With about 1,000 species, bats are the second-largest group of mammals (rodents are top), so there is plenty of material for interspecies studies. Dr Pitnick's project, published in this week's Proceedings of the Royal Society, looked at brain size and testis size in 334 of those species. Sadly, the team's research budget did not allow it to jet around the world and gather data directly. Instead of visiting bat caves, the scientists visited their universities' libraries. But bats are a well-studied group, and so the team was able to gather pertinent data on the anatomy and behaviour of a third of them.

The hypothesis they were testing came in two parts. The first was that in any given species, the average male's testis size as a fraction of body weight will depend on the behaviour of that species' females—in particular, how promiscuous those females are. The second was that, given that brain tissue and testis tissue are among the most expensive to maintain physiologically, and that bats have a very tight energy budget, bigger balls would result in smaller brains.

The team knew, from work done some time ago, that the first part of their hypothesis is true in primates. Greater promiscuity in females does, indeed, lead to bigger testes, presumably because a male needs to make more sperm to have a fighting chance of fathering offspring, if those sperm are competing with sperm from a lot of other males. Gorillas, which discourage dalliances between other males and the females of their harem, have small testes. Chimpanzees, among whom females mate widely, have large ones. Human testes lie between these two extremes.

And so it proved in bats. Bat testes range from 0.11% of body weight in the African yellow-winged bat, to a whacking 8.4% in the generously endowed Rafinesque's big-eared [sic] bat. (The largest primate testes by contrast, those of the crab-eating macaque, are a mere 0.75% of body mass.) And the small balls were indeed found in species where females were monogamous (though they might be members of harems), while the large ones were found in species where females mated widely.

Brain size, by contrast, and just as predicted, varied in the opposite direction. Nor was it dependent on the level of male promiscuity. In the bat world, it seems that you do not have to be cleverer to be a libertine than to be a faithful husband. But if the girls are putting it about, it is better to be virile and dim, than impotent and smart.

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The Koran was taken written down directly from the words of Mohammed. They are also very poetic. It is tradition that they lose their meaning if they are translated. Arabic is a sacred language to the muslims. Many don't like it when the Koran is translated.

The Catholic attachment to Latin is a little weird because Jesus spoke Aramaic and the first Gospels were written in Greek. So any Latin text has been translated at least twice.

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I find this somewhat hard to believe. Perhaps not many of the foreign policy experts you know specialize in the Balkins or the former USSR?

I don't know I agree that national boundries must follow ethnic divisions, and even question whether they can with any real efficacy, but I'll agreee that it's certainly true in the absence of some other compelling reason for the groups to stick together (thus explaining the Swiss and the Belgians - its been in their economic sefl interest to stick together, and they aren't divided by and religious doctrines). Other ethnicities' compelling reason has usually been coercive force - which, if applied long and convincingly enough, makes the issue go away (see, e.g. the US, Australia and most of China)

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Right. Because the rise of nationalism in Europe was followed by 200 years of peace.

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Or Switzerland, which is going to bum the Swiss out, since they've been stable for so long.

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My requirement are national boundaries that represent ethnic boundaries, prosperity and growth. Prior to WWI there were not that many democracies and there were many national groups that did not have independence. Poland did not and many countries were tied into the Austrian Hungarian empire. Ireland and Scotland still attached to England etc. It was one of those countrys, Serbia that started the war. After the war the ethnic boundaries were better defined.

The one country that go screwed was Germany. The were ethnic Germans in the Sudentenland, Austria and in Poland that were not attached to the mother country. Then you get a nasty recession and poverty in Germany and you get war. When Hitler started his war it was mainly to pull all ethnic Germans into Germany. First Austria, then the Sudatenland Germans and then the Germans in Poland between Konigsberg and Pomerania and Silesia.

After the war, you still had some nations that were not independent. You had the Czechs and the Slovaks pushed together and all those countries in Yugolsavia and the Soviet Union. They have all broken up. There are really only two multiethnic countrys in Europe: Belgium and Swizerland. The Flemmish and the Waloons in Belgium are always on the verge. Swizerland is the one exception. But I do know that the linguistic groups in Swizerland don't like eachother.

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I guess I'm having a hard time understanding the argument you're making. Spain is another country in Western Europe that you missed. Central and Eastern Europe have many countries where national boundaries do not match where different ethnic groups live.

Moreover, my point was that the rise of European nationalism brought an awful lot of conflict, something you seem to have forgotten. World War I may have been set off in the Balkans, but England, Germany and France (e.g.) did not exactly abstain from fighting. The French Revolution was followed by two and a half decades of war. 1848. 1870. And so on.

So, thinking that nationalism in the rest of the war is going to have everyone singing Kumbayah is wildly wrong. Think about what happened in Yugoslavia. The transition from Communist dictatorship to nation states divided along ethnic lines was a messy one.

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In Eastern Europe there is some cross over but that is because the popluation are so mixed up you can't draw lines. But the Hungarians do have a tough time of it in Bulgaria. And the other way around.

My main point is that when national boundaries follow ethnic lines and countries are democratic and have developed free market economies they will not go to war.

Can you name an exception?

See Balt. Ty thinks I am crazy. He agrees with Dr. Rice. I told you that no one but acid droppers agree with me.

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Well, it depends how "developed" one thinks the free market must be (but then one might define oneself out of a rule if you make the standard too high - getting into the old McDonald's rule that held for so long*), but, off hand, how about the United Kingdom and Argentina?

*There used to be a rule that no two countries with a McDonalds had ever gone to war. Then there got to be too many McDonalds, I suppose.

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Argentina was a dictatorship at the time. Next try?

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Actually, I think this is exactly right, but doesn't lessen the point that the urge toward national states is powerful, and in the case of Iraq, likely one of the major historical themes of its next twenty years. The Kurds seem to have already developed as a nation state, complete with Army. The Shi'ites in the South seem a bit different, since they have much in common with the Iranian Shi'ites but also have distinct ethnic and historical heritage.

And the question for me is how to manage the conflict; we eliminated the last "solution", which was an autocratic central government that repressed the conflicts and dominated the ethnic minorities. My assumption is that the continuing us of the old Iraqi boundries is going to pressure any government toward autocracy to manage the conflicts, and if our goal is to encourage democracy, we are pursuing the wrong overall strategy.

Of course, I do not see much stability in the crystal ball. But that does not mean that I think we can prevent the emergence, in particular, of a Kurdish nation-state.

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That was my point.

Not off the top of my head. But my point was that the process of getting to that ethnically unmixed/democratic/free-market state is one that usually involves a lot of conflict. It's like you're pointing across an alligator-infested swamp and saying, once we get to that rocky point way, way over there, we'll be safe.

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If you limit yourselves to contemporary democracies, it will be hard, because there are so few true democracies. But if you give yourself a little leeway, you can start with the US and England in 1812.

Some of the conflicts between India and Pakistan can also count, though Pakistan seems forever on the cusp between Democracy and Autocracy. Of course, those are boundary wars to a great extent, so they may prove the point.

I don't think development + democracy + ethnic homogeneity = peacefulness toward like countries, but rather that once you limit yourself to reviewing the recent history of well developed European nation-states, you discover that they all learned in WWII to stop beating each other up and to focus on bigger things in the world, so when they have wars they have tended to be oversees in less developed and less Democratic countries (Korea, Vietnam, etc.).

More useful information from the Economist
 

This gives new meaning to SS being the dumbest.

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Good catch. Argentina didn't become even nominally democratic until the next year.

In that case, all I've got is the ongoing perpetual almost war between Canada and Spain that could spill into overt hostilities any day.

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Yes. An alligator swamp with Piranhas and water based mines.

More useful information from the Economist
 

I was going to say:

"What's new? We already knew Penske has huge balls."

S_A_M

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Of course, I believe there are some here who put France just behind Iran and Syria on the lists of Countries We Should Invade.

Conflict is the mothers milk of this board.......
 

This board is getting way to chummy. Everyone is holding hands and singing Kumbaya. We need a hot issue to get people's blood boiling again.

Conflict is the mothers milk of this board.......
 

Let's debate whether we ought to hold holiday parties or Christmas parties.

Conflict is the mothers milk of this board.......
 

So are you on Canada's or Spain's side?

Conflict is the mothers milk of this board.......
 

I prefer it this way, and that has nothing to do with ratios of certain organs to my body mass.

S_A_M