Are minority rights best protected by large, diverse entities?

[cthulu2016]

Throughout the Ukraine story I have seen a lot of opinion favoring granular government... favoring "self-determination" on whatever scale presents itself. 51% of the people in this neighborhood speak Dutch and they want to be an independent dutch-speaking nation so why shouldn't they be?

Two things—first, what about the 49%? Does it mean nothing for them to wake up and find that their government now speaks a different language and their passport no longer works?

Second, and more importantly, there is nothing progressive about separatism.

The one thing the Ukraine government in Kiev tried to do that everybody agrees was wrong (including the people who did it) was trying to restrict use of the Russian language—a very "self-determination by simple majority" sort of thing that was anti-diverse and dismissive of minority interests.

All of our modern ideals and ethics arose from diversity and the friction of diversity... from diverse people being jammed together in cities and nations and governments.

It is not better for every human group to turn inward.

Granularization and self-determination. In America, we call it States Rights.

The smaller we make the unit of government the more prone it is to extremes. Say Anytown, Alabama has exactly two muslims. Where will Muslim rights come from there? They can't plausibly come from the local level. They come from a large diverse entity that has few Muslims, but "few" in that context means millions.

The stress of people living together is great, but there is no way to have a progressive society based on separatism and relocation... or even voluntary deportation.

[theboss]

1. It's possible that the idea of "minority rights" is pretty much an American concept

I'm probably going to be really over-stating this, but in Europe, minorities have seemingly always lived in their own little areas of larger states with the "protection" of some kind of larger political entity within that state. And that protection has hardly ever been based on any kind of natural rights.

And European solutions to these "problems" has always involved separate homelands for everyone. After World War II, Germans and Poles were resettled specifically to avoid large minorities in either Germany or Poland. In recent history, Yugoslavia was carved up into the smallest entities possible. Britain's entire concept of the nation-state seems to be built around this - from their involvement in the creation of the modern Middle East to the partition of India.

I find myself almost always agreeing with European leaders who want to split these small groups off, even though if someone ever suggested that Mississippi become a "Black state" while New York become a "Jewish state," I would think they were insane.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it is expected anywhere else in the world for various ethnic, racial or religious groups to get along - except in the US.

[cthulu2016]

2. I hadn't thought of it this way, but peace promotes separatism

A lot of scale is needed for self-defense in a warring world. Collective defense. Tiny entities cease to be... are eventually over-run or absorbed into an empire of de facto empire like a sphere of interest.

If war is not a threat then small entities can exist.

But Balkanization eventually leads to war, since without an over-arching political/military entity it is easy for one little aggressive state to conquer another little state. And then to build on that, with that now larger state threatening other little states.

So the other little states have to band together to defend against the aggressive neo-empire.

And so on. The continual historical churning of empires suggests it may well be cyclical.

[quinnox]

3. There are some regions where being separated into different countries/areas is probably the only way

to stop bloodshed and conflict. See Iraq for a good recent example. Some of these religious or ethnic factions hate each other, and forcing them to live with their enemies is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen.

[cthulu2016]

4. In the destabilizing context of war, yes

These human divisions are sharpened by stress—economic, military, psychological.

There is some alternate universe where Iraq is a fairly peaceful, stable, heterogeneous state, and where the USA is in constant civil war.

External threats and internal resources and resources allocation change what happens in politics.

America is a melting pot because we had a whole continent of timber to work with. Easy to be diverse when there's plenty of opportunity and room.

Under different circumstances, the discovery of large oil reserves in Iraq could have knitted groups together in shared interest. Or not.

But under the circumstances and history Iraq has today, yes, separating the parties is probably about as good as it gets.

That said, ghettoization tends to be a temporary solution that often merely puts a lid on things that continue to fester. It might be the best solution to something short term but the worst long term.

That said, yes... one has to save lives today because saving more lives "down the road" is a hypothetical and inexact exercise... and one open to selective intepretation.


But I reject the idea that Shia and Sunni and Kurd cannot like in harmony, intrinsically. Hell, only two generations ago there was very little of the religious mania within Islam we see today. It wasn't usual to car bomb people who were a little different. It happened, but it wasn't the go-to play.

[theboss]

5. Obviously, these things can change over time

It wasn't that long ago that Protestants and Catholics were lighting each other on fire all over Europe.

Ultimately, it seems like economic prosperity is what diffuses these issues. (Though, strangely, in the Middle East, economic prosperity seems to occasionally lead to more religious extremism. I don't even pretend to understand Saudi Arabia).