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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (80497)	3/8/2003 4:05:19 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

<The Quebec separatists are, for the most part, socialists > Nationalism has often been confused with Socialism or Communism. The U.S. repeatedly, in the Cold War, made the mistake of treating national liberation movements as Communist proxies for China or the Soviet Union. In most cases, their socialism/communism was a thin veneer, and the essence of their local appeal was "throw the foreigners out." We could have co-opted a lot of those movements, driven a wedge between them and Moscow/Peking. It would have saved a lot of blood and money. Instead, we threw out the window all the ideals in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and waged the Cold War by allying ourselves with a collection of the vilest regimes on earth. The meme of Nationalism has been gaining strength since the early 1800s. 200 years ago, most people lived in large multinational empires. The direction of history, has been very consistently toward the dissolution of all those multinational units into their constituent national fragments. There is an inexorable trend toward political boundaries and linguistic boundaries converging. This happens, in spite of the economic inefficiency and military weakness of many of the resultant small nations. All frontiers that do not correspond to lingustic/religious/cultural boundaries, are unstable. So, the fact that an independent Quebec doesn't make much economic sense, doesn't mean it won't happen. And socialism has nothing to do with it. Socialism is a dying meme, and is irrelevant.