I decline the responsibility, thank-you-very-much.
+1
The Iraqi Kurds appear to know what they’re doing. Amazingly, Turkey has even made noises that it could live with an Iraqi Kurdistan, though they would much prefer a unified Iraq. The idea that the parties involved would welcome foreign cartographic innovators with open arms is ludicrous. The US may be the necessary hegemon, but such power is most skillfully applied with nudges rather than ill conceived mandates.
Incorrect. There are many larger ethnic groups that do not have a ‘nation to call their own’, and get by just fine without. My own country, India, has several.
How are they fundamentally different people? Are Irish Catholics and Irish protestants fundamentally different people?
They certainly think so. In fact many if no most “Irish Protestants” in Ulster would take the phrase as an insult. They prefer the term “Ulstermen.”
Most of the Nationalists don’t disagree.
That said, what constitutes an ethnic group and how people identify themselves is certainly not an easy question to answer.
Nothing. There is nothing that can be offered.
Please. Please. Stop.
Good luck getting Putin to sign up for that.
Then go on ahead. We’ll wait here. Write and tell us how it works out.
Well I guess if it takes very little for 2 groups sharing a territory to have at each other then we can treat them as ‘different people’. Enough actors in the different ethnic/religious groups were at each other’s throats in Iraq PDQ.
And even after all these years of peace in Northern Ireland I don’t think it’d take a lot to reignite things.
On another (game) board I ended up having a heated discussion with a Serb regarding Kosovo and events that happened in the Middle Ages were a burning sense of anger and injustice to him.
This is something we in the West find hard to understand. The Shia-Sunni split is really fundamental and provide dry tinder for any trouble-makers. It’s even more dangerous in places where election results are treated as ‘winner-takes-all’.
It’s utter insanity but anywhere religion and/or ethnicity forms part of a primary identity trouble lies just below the surface. We see it everywhere from northern Ireland, through Eastern Europe to India and Pakistan via the Middle East and Africa.
It just takes so little to put groups of people at each other’s throats. Humans can be really depressing.
edited to add;
And I’m not excluding western europe from this. Hell, in some parts of the UK supporting a different football team will nearly do it.
Just a quick link to note that the Kurds would appear to be (joint) third in number of the ethnic groups without a state to call their own, in terms of population.
Are there many (any) good examples of nations giving up a part of their territory for the greater good?
I’m thinking if some American Indian tribe really wanted to mesh with one in Canada and wanted to take half of Montana with it, there is no way that would happen.
While I do think it would be a great solution in concept, it’s wholly unworkable, so it’s a non-starter.
None come to mind. Plenty of examples of lost lands becoming cases of seething resentment and future wars spring to mind though.
Unfortunately we all know that even if everyone in Iraq magically agreed on the borders of Kurdistan it wouldn’t stick for more than a few years. Kurds on the outside, in Turkey, Syria and Iran would want in.
Then those govts would crack down and nationalist pressures would fan the flames in Kurdistan.
Take a look at this map and see how small the iraq Kurd area is compared to the totality of Kurdish occupied areas.
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An independent Kurdistan built from the Iraq are may be inevitable but it’ll be the cause of conflict on down the line.
And for fun, you can compare maps of Greater Kurdistan to Greater Armenia or Western Armenia. Who gets Lake Van? (In reality, of course, the Armenian genocide largely solved that problem with no lasting consequences for Turkey, a lesson that IS seems to have learned well.)
Armenia will probably wake up one day and find itself part of Russia sooner or later so my guess is -‘President-For-Life’ Putin. I’m sure he’ll look all manly swimming in it.
Just saw on CNN, Farza Zakaria (know I butchered his name) agrees with the consensus of this thread: partition is an untenable solution.
Sweden peacefully giving up Norway in 1905 worked out just fine for all the parties involved.
That’s only because that page is missing plenty of ethnicities. Some from India that I can name off the top of my head are Biharis (80 million in India, some in Pakistan), Teluguites(70 million) and Punjabis(~30 million in India and >50 million in Pakistan).
Ah. Here’s the rub - That page is “a List of the largest groups without a nation of their own for which an autonomist and secessionist movements is known to exist”
That was a dissolution of a union between 2 states under 1 monarch, not Sweden ceding territory. The closest but not very close analogy would be either decolonisation or more likely - the breakup of the USSR. And that’s continually causing trouble as Russia basically intends to get back what it can get away with getting back.