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Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
I think I can tell you something about why it didn't happen in the Middle East.
Mobile populations is one reason. In the Middle East, the string of large empires made travel and migration easier (crossing borders is always a bitch and led to lots of no-mans lands full of danger), the society was less focused on a four season agrarian economy and had more nomadism (in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa, well into the 19th century), and the whole society was positioned as a way-station on major trade routes. all of this meant highly mobile populations. Casbahs developed in almost every city where people who originated in other major cities lived (so in Cairo there would be an Isanbul Casbah, a Baghdad Casbah, etc.).
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Good point. I also think this helps explain why there are fewer languages in the middle east. Arabic, Persian and Turkish cover much larger areas than any European languages, and they have much less of the little langues (Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian etc).
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Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy In addition, the Middle East didn't have a "dark" or middle ages period where communications broke down almost completely and deeper localist identities developed. European nationalities are basically derived from old German or Celtic tribes who became isolated once they settled; the Turkic tribes that overcame the ancient Middle Eastern settlements were never so isolated (there's a brief period in Anatolia in the 12th and 13th century where the same kind of tribal developments start going on, but then Constantinople falls and the Ottomans reverse the trend).
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That makes sense.
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Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy Also, while multiple languages flourished in the Middle East, the tendancy was for each language to gain a function and for people to become multi-lingual. Thus, Persian literature flourished next to Arabic religion and Turkish governmental strictures. There was some of this in Europe with Latin, but I don't think it went as deeply into the population (which was, after all, a much less literate population until the very late Middle Ages).
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Good point.
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Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy I'm sure there are other distinctions, but everyplace has a unique history, and the European one focuses on the development of nationalism. I suspect there are also good reasons there weren't similar developments in China, though I don't know as much about East Asia.
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I think the biggest reason why the nations of the middle East and central Asia do not follow ethnolinguisic lines is because, as Ty pointed out, Europeans drew the lines. But as you point out the languages were spread over a much larger areas and it is much easier to create a small ehthnically homogeneous state.
