Taiwan is a great example of how formal recognition is not essential to real functional statehood (and how failure to recognize such just gets increasingly silly). Even some Taiwanese still share in the fiction that they are a province, yet everybody functionally treats Taiwan as an independent state in every way, except language and protocol.
But what if they don’t have common ideals and a shared history? Most places with foreign-drawn borders don’t.
That depends on there existing an interest or desire to be “united by common ideals and shared history” . That does build great nations but is damn rare in any continent.
None of the Kurds are enemies of the US. Turkish actions against Kurds in the former Syria are seen by the US as undesirable fighting between two allies.
It’d be nice if there were an easier-to-achieve alternative.
But the only real alternative is states bound together by ethnicity, and in modern times that’s been a recipe for atrocity. Maybe in some make-believe world where equally sized homogenous ethnic communities lived on neatly divided plots of land that each had a port, a road and an oil well, it would work.
But in reality ethnicity is a complex, shifting landscape and there is no way (short of ethnic cleansing) to unstir the melting pot of modern cities and villages. And there is no way to neatly divide the randomly distributed resources of the earth in a way that won’t cause grievances and conflicts.
Trying to make things fair for every ethnic group doesn’t work. It’s like trying to get a sister and brother to stop fighting by drawing a line in the center of the room-- it may seem like an elegant solution, but in reality it just gives them something new to argue over. The only way to get the kids to stop fighting is to instill a sense of being a family.
People have to decide to work together. You can always find a reason to fight if you are looking for it. Every country has dozens of potential fracture points between ethnicity, language, religion, race, etc. And countries have historically been happy to outright make up fracture points if they are looking for a fight. Likewise, countries can come together despite any number of fracture points. The existence of fracture points doesn’t define how united a nation is, unless you want them too.
It’s unfortunate that the drawing of colonial borders tore apart the nations existing in the area at the time, and disrupted the growth of emerging nations. But we can’t rewind the clock and no amount of redrawing is going to fix that. The only option is to move forward and try to unite.
Taiwan is a curious and special case, as the only reason that it is not recognized (as I’m sure you know) is due to the insistence of its huge neighbour (with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and one of the largest economies) that it really is just a renegade province. The rest of the world, at least through official diplomatic channels, pretends this fiction is correct. If the “One China” policy were revoked, I have no doubt that every UN member would formally recognise Taiwan within a year.
You gotta love the advocates of simple solutions to intractable problems in somebody else’s back yard.
Such a patently reprehensible option wasn’t suggested seriously by anybody whose expertise in the Middle East extended much beyond being able to find it on a map.
A previous masterclass on the scenario:
The acknowledgement by the nations of the world came via independence from Indonesia. The issue of independence from Portugal was moot, since Indonesia was the controlling nation. Since that is the subject of this thread I thought it would apply here. I’m well aware of the history of East Timor and I still think it applies to this thread.
The Soviet breakup happen 25 years ago, loads of countries outside of Europe were created. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to search throughout history and find more nations created globally in just 30 years as has been from 1986. New nations aren’t minted everyday, ever, nor would that be a stable state of affairs.
What a silly premise.
How about 1955 - 1985? There was a massive wave of decolonisation in this period resulting a huge number of newly minted nations.
Why should Country A have any claim to oil revenue for oil located in Country B? If you’re creating three independent countries, then each one owns its own resources entirely.
Yup, that era too. What I’m saying is a bit more perspective is needed.
And the break-up of the USSR was arguably part of the decolonisation process. Imperial Russia obtained its empire by going east and south, rather than overseas to Africa and to south and east Asia, as Britain and France had done in the 19th century.
The USSR inherited that land empire, and when it broke up, the resulting new nations like Kazakhstan can be seen as part of the general decolonisation process of the latter part of the 20th century.
Czechoslovakia split into two nations bloodlessly and by mutual agreement. The only other example I can think of in the modern nation-state era is Norway and Sweden in 1905.
In the rare event that a nation peacefully decides to split into two or more nations (genuine nations, as opposed to pseudo states like apartheid South Africa’s Bantustans) why should the international community object, no matter where they occur?
What is your general opinion of the principle of national self-determination?
If you think that as a general rule, it is a reasonable goal that nations (as in groups of people, not necessarily countries) should have the most influence on whether they obtain statehood, then the creation of new countries seems pretty understandable, notwithstanding unique circumstances of each case.
If you disagree with that principle, then I can see why you think it is confusing. You seem to be in this camp, as you seem to believe Iraq should have been partitioned against the general opinion of Iraqis as a whole and in violation of the UN Charter concerning threats to the territorial integrity of member states.
So what are your thoughts on the principle?
And Iran; both sides backed Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-88. The Iranians armed the Kurds in Iraq and the Iraqis armed the Kurds in Iran.
They’re the ones in Turkey who have been fighting the Turkish government since 1984, set up sanctuaries in Northern Iraq that the Turks bombed when the country was still under Saddam Hussein but he had limited control over the Kurdish North due to the no-fly zones, etc.
I’m acquainted with the PKK. That listing was a sop to the Turks, and never represented genuine enmity between Kurds and the US. It is even less appropriate now.
The KMT got 44% of the popular vote, so it’s a significant portion. It’s harder to determine what percentage of the KMT wouldn’t support independence since that breaks strongly by age.
Taiwan’s geopolitical situation is often compared to being ‘between a rock and a hard place’ but it’s more like ‘standing on a landmine afraid to move’. They can’t not claim dominion over China (double negative is deliberate), because that would mean they’re declaring independence, which would be met instantly by the full force of the PLA’s 10,000 ballistic missiles, 7th Fleet be damned. You can’t make this shit up.
[QUOTE=China’s foreign ministry]
“There is only one China in the world, the mainland and Taiwan both belong to one China and China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity will not brook being broken up.
“The results of the Taiwan region election does not change this basic fact and the consensus of the international community.”
[/QUOTE]
If you are acquainted with the PKK, calling listing them as a terrorist organization is no more a sop to Turkey than listing the IRA as a terrorist organization was a sop to the UK. There was never any genuine enmity between the US and the Irish in general or the IRA in particular either, but that hardly made the IRA allies of the US or any less terrorists. From your own cite on the case for de-listing the PKK as a terrorist organization:
I wanted to go back to the thread opening, to sort of reground things a little here, if I could.
This opening post question, I think, results from a common oversimplification of the actual area of concern.
That is, that as asked, it presumes that breakups of existing states into other smaller entities, is a single kind of event, as well as that there are, or has been, a single unified reason given by observing nations, for why they do or don’t claim to support or oppose the changes.
Several posts above have hinted about some of this, kudos to them, but I think it would help to pint the tail directly on the donkey, so to speak.
The creation of news states in the modern era, has been attempted for a LOT of different reasons. Many are similar to the creation of the United States itself, in that a solid MAJORITY of the populace was never even asked, much less directly supported the creation of a new state.
In addition, each breakup of an existing state into others, has to be appreciated individually, not in the manner of the opening question, as though ALL states are created and accepted for the sake of the same principles. Take the breakup of Yugoslavia. It was not created in the first place, in 1919, because the people living there wanted to unify. It was actually created more as a reward to Serbia, which was the first state European state attacked during world war 1. The reason: to give Serbia a port on the Adriatic. That port, was Trieste, which was at the extreme northern end of what is now Croatia. To do that, the victorious European powers had to give Serbia everything in between.
There are usually intersecting, and unrelated reasons why a new state is or isn’t recognized formally by the rest of the world. The political reasons often have nothing at all to do with the new state itself, or with what it’s people want. Often, new states are recognized because the existing nations see benefit to THEMSELVES, in the breakup or weakening of the previous state. That was certainly true in the case of the USSR. Sometimes existing nations oppose recognition of a new state, no matter what the indigenous population might want, either because of an alliance with the previous state, or because recognizing the new state, might open the door to yet another foe nation, gaining influence over the new state, to their detriment.
In short, wondering if there is hypocrisy afoot in why some nations are recognized and welcomed and some are not, as the opening post narrowly focuses on, is a red herring. Reality of world politics as well as geography, is much more complicated.