All this talk of who nominally controlled what, when is irrelevant. These people are never going to live peaceably together.
You might as well expect the Israeli’s and Palestinians to live together in a United Palestine or Greater Israel just because the land was administratively joined in the Ottoman Empire or Kosovo to go back to being part of Serbia.
Whoever has the upper hand is going to put on the chain mail glove and start pounding on their enemies. I’m sorry people don’t like the term but until you come up with a better one these people act like savages towards each other. They give a shit about stuff the rest of Western Europe grew out of decades ago.
There is no democratic politics in the way we understand it - with rules of the game and respect for the rights of others. It’s winner takes all and all Georgia wants is to embroil NATO in its primitive ethnic feuds. Which is how the last two World Wars happened. Big Powers drawn into or using ethnic conflicts as an excuse.
If and when places like Georgia, Serbia, the Ukraine etc can conduct themselves in a civilised fashion with regard to ethnic minorities or somehow come to a mature democratic solution that doesn’t mean ‘we win and you’ve got this coming’ then they have no part of NATO.
NATO is not there to hold their coats while they settle ethnic scores.
NATO is not there to enable former soviet republics to trigger ww3 whenever they feel like kicking the shit out of a minority.
If Georgia wants to be part of NATO then they can drop their specious claims to other ethnicities and preferably establish some sort of track record. Put up a sign at their border maybe:
300 days without ethnic cleansing.
If they don’t want to be called savages they can stop behaving like them. Particularly when there is a bear-like savage just itching to be provoked.
The proper response of Georgia now is to quietly accept they have lost big time, that all the provinces that they have never controlled and don’t want to be with them are gone. What happens in them now are none of their or the West’s business.
The proper response of the west should be a plague on both your houses and whatever diplomacy it takes to keep an independent, peaceful, unprovocative Georgia for the oil pipeline.
I’m not clear. Would you say that those ethnic Russians remaining are predominantly assimilating? Learning the language and, more gradually, the culture of their “new” homeland?
Which ethnic Russians, and where? I suppose the answer is “it depends.” Most of the ethnic Russians have left Georgia proper, but they were never as close to being a majority there as they were in, say, Latvia, or even northern Kazakhstan.
I meant in the places where they had more of a presence, like the Baltics or Kazakhstan. I assumed that the Russians in a place like Georgia were pretty hopeless anyway (except in a Russian enclave like S. Ossetia, where clearly they’ve been ramping up again).
Treating other ethnic minorities as second class citizens is never right. Germany used it as an excuse to start WW2. Russia is clearly itching to ‘protect’ Russians wherever they are. But still, in the Baltics and the other former soviet states minorities are being openly persecuted. Lithuania seems an exception.
I’m sure this will all resolve in time but these ethnic conflicts were frozen by Soviet repression and intensified with the fact that many minorities enthusiastically sided with the Nazi’s - storing up further hatred like with Croats and Serbs.
But for now they are unresolved and as supposedly western democratic Georgia showed with its repeated history of severe violence towards its minorities, nowhere near solution.
It is simply no use the West trying to fit such complex situations into simplistic Black Hat, White Hat narratives.
Good heavens! Were you a Babylon 5 watcher? It’s always a shock to encounter a Night Watch!
I can understand the Russian viewpoint, but at the same time, for someone who has spent their entire life in Estonia to not speak Estonian and then gripe about losing a job working with the public seems a bit naive. You’re right - no one should be second class citizens, but the fact is, Russians were artificially supported in these Baltic states for decades, permitted to avoid learning local languages and customs, and to effectively lord it over the local people. They’re getting a small taste of their own medicine, and in general, they usually have the choice of leaving to return to Russia if they find it unbearable. That’s more than most Estonians had in the Soviet era.
What Estonia is doing doesn’t differ all that much from what Montreal has done to preserve French as the primary language there. Are they savages in Montreal? Oh wait, they’re French. Don’t answer that!
And robbery with violence is robbery with violence. But there is still a clear distinction between a mugger who beats the victim over the head until he gets their wallet and then quits, and a mugger who gets the wallet and then spends the next fifteen minutes kicking the victim into a pulp. In the case of Kosovo the Serbs knew from before it started exactly what they needed to do in order to end the NATO attack - get our of Kosovo. It’s still not clear to me exactly what the Russian objectives were when they went on the offensive, or if there were any demands the Georgians could have acceded to which would have halted the offensive.
Kosovo was part of Serbia, they were not invading it - it was part of their country. More so that South Ossetia was part of Georgia because at least Serbian writ had actually run in Kosovo. Unlike in SO. If it is okay for a superpower to snip off one part of one country to protect a minority that wants out then the same is true elsewhere.
Georgia could do what all countries losing a war badly can do - they can surrender. They lost. Sucks to be them but they should have thought about that before attacking in the first place. Anything short of being re-incorporated into Russia is getting off lightly.
Seconded. Is it really so horrible to ask people to speak a bit of the language amd know a bit about the country of which they are citizens (and in the case of ethnic Russians, in which most have lived for most, if not all of their entire lives)?
Let me tell you, though - I was in Estonia for a few days in 1989, and things between Russian-speakers and Estonian-speakers were…tense. In fact, though participants in my academic program had to sign a pledge that we would only speak Russian except in case of emergency, that pledge was suspended for the excursion to Estonia. And good thing, too - the one time anyone in Estonia was nasty to me was when I accidentally bumped someone on the street and said “excuse me” in Russian.
One classmate tried to buy some candy in Russian, and was asked to show proof that he lived in Tallinn (which the Estonain-speakers were not; many food items were in shortage in Russia then, and so many Russians would cross over to go shopping in the Baltics, where the food situation was better than in northern Russia). And one of our (RUssian) professors, who was born and raised in Tallinn, offered to go make dinner reservations for us in a famous old restaurant in the Old City in Tallinn, and was told “no tables are available,” though the restaurant was completely empty. So one of the other American students went back with a Berliltz Russian phrasebook, pretended to stutter and speak Russian much worse than he actually did, and make reservations; our group got the best table in the house, and lots of curiosity and chatting and personal attention from the waitstaff.
I can’t tell you about Estonia specifically ATM - I have to get back to work - but I’ve had to research a Latvian residency issue for work recently. Soviets residing legally in Latvia at the time of independence are eligible to naturalize in most cases (though they do have to pass a language and a civics exam, both of which are fairly basic). If they don’t naturalize, that doesn’t mean they have no rights or ability to travel, however; they can get a non-citizen passport and are allowed to live and work in Latvia and travel freely otuside of Latvia (and return to Latvia). Here’s more on Latvian non-citizen status.
Frankly, I don’t consider having to learn the local language and history to be persecution.
So you support disenfranchising Hispanic-only speaking Americans? You support them having their jobs taken away? You support ‘English Only’ rules? You’re generally okay with persecuting ethnic minorities in the way Russians are in Estonia.
And no - you don’t get to redefine what is going on with that sentence.
If the Hispanics had come in to the US over the past 100 years and done to us what the Russians did to the Baltic states, refusing to learn English and maintaining rigid superiority over people who’d been here for years, I’d feel pretty comfortable in making some fairly basic minimal language and history requirements for Hispanics to become citizens here now, especially assuming they had a single, large, much-better-off-economically country they could go to if they wanted.
The thing of it is, tagos, yes she does get to parse it. The situation is not exactly comparable.
Then you are playing into Russian hands by leaving an excuse for intervention. The Baltic states have been independent for 15 years. Add on 18 years for childhood and therefore no one under the age of 30 or so had any part in whatever ‘lording’ you think went on yet it appears you are both okay with persecuting them too.
I think it stinks any way you look at it. Morally and pragmatically.
I’m not sure what your point is. Everyone has to show English proficiency and pass a history test in order to become a US citizen now. No one is talking about “English only”-- that’s a strawman. And there is no such thing as a “Hispanic-only speaking American.” All that Eva said was that she is not too sympathetic to Russian speakers who have lived in Estonia all their lives and never bothered to learn the local language. I agree. I’d say the exact same thing about Americans who spend years living abroad and don’t make an effort to learn the language of their adoptive country.
Nobody is talking about the analogue of English-only rules. We are talking about requiring people in jobs that require public contact to speak the local language. Nobody is keeping Russians from learning the local language. Frankly, it boggles me that people manage to live somewhere for decades without learning the local language - and that goes for Spanish-speakers in teh U.S.
What, you believe people who don’t speak the language of the majority of the people they are serving should have the right to hold jobs that normally require speaking ability?
I can, and will, clarify my opinions in any way I believe they should be clarified - you don’t get to define how I express my opinions.
The Russians don’t need an “excuse” for intervention. I’d have thought that the events of the last week made that clear, and if not, their dealings with the rest of Europe in the last two years ought to have. What happened in Georgia has nothing to do with protecting ethnic Russians and everything to do with intimidating former Soviet vassal states, eager to free themselves from the yoke of their old oppressors.
Update: just spoke briefly to one of my best friends, who served as an OSCE election monitor during the Georgian Presidential election a few months ago. (Too briefly - he is about to board an international flight, but I hope to have a good long debriefing when he gets back to the U.S. in a couple of weeks.)
His take on the current situation: Russia will not occupy Georgia proper for any extended period of time, but will take South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He believes the Russian military is in the process of “neutering” the Georgian military (his words): blowing stuff up, sinking ships, taking equipment back to Russia, etc.
Let me tell you one thing about Caucasian males - they don’t take kindly to being neutered. And one thing about Caucasian politics - this ain’t gonna end here.
ETA: this is all quite surreal to type as fighter planes are flying outside my office window; the Air and Water show is this weekend, and the U.S. military spends the couple of days before doing practice runs.
His feeling was that they were as kosher as any election in that part of the world is likely to be.
Haven’t gotten to poke around much today - darn work! - but my favorite quote so far on this conflict was from NPR last Sunday (I think it was Sergei Lavrov): “sometimes leaders become obstacles.”
