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Originally posted by Spanky
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
