Can multi-national polities last?

[Vouthon]

A country that has only one language and only one tradition is weak and failing. I therefore urge you to welcome foreigners kindly and to hold them in honour, so that they prefer to stay with you rather than elsewhere

- King Saint Stephen, 1031, (Admonitions, VI)
​

In 1918, many of Europe's great empires collapsed and splintered into a patchwork of fledgling nation-states.

Countries that retained multi-national sub-groups tended to experience instability, such as Czechoslovakia with its Sudeten German populations, which proved to be its achilles heel when Hitler made the Reich into a revanchist, pan-national power. The Nazis occupied and forcibly dissolved Czechoslovakia into its constituent national sub-units. While it became re-constituted as a single nation after the war (only to be subject to a Soviet coup d'etat), Czechoslovakia peacefully broke apart in 1993 into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Yugoslavia, another multi-ethnic 'boiling pot' state formed in the aftermath of WW1, underwent a violent dissolution in the 1980s and 90s. The Soviet Union, then the world's largest country and a superpower to boot, likewise disintegrated into a million pieces after the August coup in 1991: the modern nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan were birthed from its overnight collapse.

Why did so many of these diverse, polyethnic societies prove incapable of holding their subjects of different nationalities together?

Today, separatism still plagues multi-national states like Belgium, the United Kingdom, Canada and Spain.

Now, I am an advocate of an inclusive civic patriotism that transcends nationality and unites a diverse population tolerant of its constituent cultures but I cannot deny that the record in modernity for this kind of transnational statehood hasn't exactly been one of stellar success.

The European Union is the planet's most ambitious example of a supranational union and it is managing to persist, even continue (despite its naysayers) to grow in popularity among its citizens, but it exists in a state of almost semi-permanent crisis: plagued by populism, currency disputes between northern creditor and southern debtor states, Brexit and wrangles over immigration.

Nationalist separatism seems to be a particular feature of the modern world, while the norm for much of history in Europe was huge multi-national empires.

 

[LuisDantas]

It seems to me that people should aim to transcend nationalism as a matter of course. If for no other reason, because nations are such fragile and insubstantial constructs.

A perspective based on the "reality" of nations themselves will not lead to any useful conclusions, either.

 

[Brinne]

It's definitely tied to the rise of Nationalism and National Awakenings, largely spurred on by mistreatment of minority groups in favor of the culture of the hegemon. You could in turn, probably tie this into the larger individualist movements which took hold in the West. However, there are examples of multi-national countries which still exist today, and are (more or less) stable.

Three of the largest examples being Russia, India, and China. As a note, trying to keep this statement as apolitical as possible. While each do have some separatist movements (some much larger than others) they are, for the most part, relatively stable. Though in modern times it does seem there is a trend towards "regionalism" as opposed to "nationalism" -- that is supporting local units of government as opposed to a greater government force.

It should also be noted that in specific circumstance of European history that continent went through phases in terms of political entities. You have period of large Empires and periods of individualistic, regional autonomy. So I wouldn't say large multi-national Empires were the norm, but were certainly the "culmination" of a number of political and social changes that stemmed more or less from the Enlightenment / French Revolution. That is not to say that Empires didn't exist prior but that in the post-Roman era it was more common for local autonomy to trump central authority -- until more or less the end of the Medieval Era and emergence of absolutist centralized states like the Kingdom of France. The story is different elsewhere across the globe.

 

[Estro Felino]

If a certain group of people identifies as a nation, they have the right to call for the right to self-determination.

Catalonia is the most emblematic example in Europe...because they are a nation. Catalan is a completely different language than Spanish.
So they deserve independence

Now, I am an advocate of an inclusive civic patriotism that transcends nationality and unites a diverse population tolerant of its constituent cultures but I cannot deny that the record in modernity for this kind of transnational statehood hasn't exactly been one of stellar success.

If states are replaced by a supranational entity, there are no states any more...but this entity becomes a third.

Nationalist separatism seems to be a particular feature of the modern world, while the norm for much of history in Europe was huge multi-national empires.

Europhiles like myself really love European national identities and want to defend them. I speak five European languages because of this great love.

 

[Sunstone]

I think it is highly arguable that America has been a largely successful example of melding into one nation people of diverse ethnic group. Some folks explain America's success in terms of shared political ideals. To them, we hang together because we all believe in the same rights and liberties, the same constitution, etc.

When we look closer, however, I believe we see that the main reason America has held together has been economics. The huge natural resources and vast territory were all at one time or another up for grabs. And grab is precisely what folks did.

The grabbing influenced everything about America from the political system and politics, to the general social structure and culture. But most important in this context, it was unifying. It reduced conflicts to manageable proportions. You were getting yours, so you didn't care that the guy down the street or the next farm over belonged to a different ethnic group than yours. That is, such animosities were still there, but the economic grab reduced them to the point they became manageable.

Over time, there has come to be only one great cultural divide in America. That division is not between one ethnic group and another, but between Northern culture and Southern culture. In so many ways they look the same, but in some key ways they are opposed to each other.

The divide, simply because it exists, is today being exploited by those elites who wish to themselves get richer, or get more powerful, etc by strategies of divide and conquer.

To sum, I am not in any way suggesting that international polities unify their diverse nations and cultures by creating a system in which anyone and everyone sees themselves as a potential billionaire. But I do think that the American experience shows one means -- maybe the easiest means to implement in practice -- is unification through economic prosperity.

How much prosperity? Probably not all that much. A study some years ago found that most people worldwide thought they'd be happy with "enough to live on plus a bit more for a few luxuries and to save up a bit for rainy days"

 

[ShushersRdamned]

My life is a continual crisis too. But at least there are not so many people voting to exterminate it.