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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
But why do they go to such drastic ends to form such communities. And why do they want their brethern over the border to be part of such communities?

I suppose it's odd that white Lutherans of Scandanavian heritage in North Dakota feel that (e.g.) Spanish-speaking Floridians of Cuban descent are a part of their national community but that white Lutherans of Scandanavian heritage a few miles away in Sasketchewan are not.

I don't deny the phenomenom. I'm just saying it works in different ways.

Austria was conquered and forcibly separated. Its separation was done at gun point.

So was the marriage. And you don't see a lot of agitation for Austria to reunite with Germany.

It is the exception not the rule. And Europe a very small exception. For every Swizerland there are ten Portugals.

I know what you mean, but this sentence is very funny.

But every time the borders change they reflect ethnolinquistic lines more and more.

Really? You've said this, but I'm not seeing it. The collapse of the Soviet Union doesn't count, it seems to me, since the various SSRs were nominally separate countries. (The EU runs the other way.) Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, I grant you. But borders don't change all that often.

But why did this happen in Europe and not elsewhere?

It happened elsewhere, but in Europe first. Was it the French Revolution? The printing press? I think Benedict Anderson's book has an argument about this, but I can't remember.

As you say the lines of Africa, the Middle East and SouthEast Asia were drawn by colonial empire. Making them unnatural in my mind. In Subsaharan Africa, the ethnic nations (the tribes) are so small that becoming a nation is not really practical. But still, the tribes in each country fight with eachother. But in the Middle East and Central Asia the ethnic groups are much bigger, but where the colonial lines are drawn, the lines are not natural and will move towards the natual borders, ethnolinquistic borders.

Maybe so, but those lines take on a life of their own. Some people start to think they define communities. Politicians draw their power from them. And so on. It's been a while now in Africa, and it's not like you see that many borders being redrawn.

OK. Massive ethnic movements only happened after WWII. And these were mainly people were moved by Stalin. He moved them because he understood what I have been saying all a long. You can draw borders however you want but if they are not drawn along ethnolinguistic lines they are not stable borders. Stalin could have left the Germans in Pomerani and Silesia, and drawn the Polish border around them, but he realized that would create an unstable country. Pomerania and Silesia would push to rejoin Germany and leave Poland after the occupation was over. So Stalin ethnically cleansed those two areas and pushed all the Germans into what is present day Germany. 2.5 million people were forced at gun point to leae their homes and move hundred of miles into Germany. He did the same thing with Konigsberg (East Prussia). He knew if he left the Germans there they would want to rejoing Germany so he expelled them and pushed them into Germany. He replaced the Germans with ethnic Russians. What is ironic is that Kongisberg (now kalingrad) has put out feelers about rejoining Germany, but Germany does not want them because they are not ethnic Germans (if they were German you can bet your bottom dollar that they would want them back). He realized in order to move political boundaries and to make them stable, he had to move ethnolinguistic boundaries. He did the same thing with the Germans in Sudentenland. He moved all them all out of what became Czecholosovakia because he knew if he let them stay they would try and rejoin Germany again. At the end of the war, Austria was occupied. Part of the treaty that allowed the occupation of Austia to end was a promise that Austria would never rejoin Germany. The Allies were very worried Austria would want to rejoin Germany so they made sure it would never happen.

While that kind of ethnic cleansing seems to be the 20th century's gift to world history, mass movements of peoples go way back (e.g., Romans) and have continued (e.g., the colonization of North America, the slave trade, etc.).