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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (95150)	4/20/2003 11:49:32 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

<The elements of such a crisis are all in place, though> Perhaps the most dominant theme of history, for the last 200 years, has been nationalism. Every group of people, of whatever size, who define themselves as a Nation, want their own State, a State explicitly for their benefit. 200 years ago, the world was run by a short list of Empires. One by one, every Empire has been broken up into its constituent ethnic/linguistic/religious parts. The Empires of England, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Turks, Russians, all are completely broken up. Even the little empires, like Yugoslavia, couldn't hold together. So, now, the world is a long list of nations, and almost no empires left. Any State that is not one (and only one) Nation, is unstable, and the stresses eventually tear it apart. When populations are mixed, what usually happens is a prolonged period of violence, settled eventually by population movements to create homogenous nations. So, for instance, almost all Germans now live in Germany, almost all Poles live in Poland, and so on. If Indians defined their nationality by language, then the balkanization of India would be inevitable, with about 10 major languages in the country, each with a distinct territory. But, instead, they seem to be defining their nationality on religious terms. For instance, the Bengali-language area didn't become a Bengal Nation, it got split along the religious boundary. Even when Bangladesh became independant from Pakistan, there was no effort, by either Muslim or Hindu Bengalis, to unite. Every Nation needs a "social glue" to hold it together. For Indians, that "glue" is, increasingly, their religion. Which leaves almost 200M Muslims, along with the Sikhs, on the "wrong" side of the international frontier.