• zulu
    zulu
    2020-12-14

    Okay, revisiting four years later, haha. It's walled but I was able to find the full text (apart from the paragraph on enclaves, which was a bit cut off).

    I learned that what really builds a state is administration and not things like patriotism, ethnicity, or language, and that this would make any country who exited international organizations paradoxically weaker and not stronger. The historical stories of nation-building were very neat: that only 50% of post-revolution France spoke French (1789); that only 2.5% of Italians spoke Italian after their unification while its leaders spoke French among themselves, quipping that "having created Italy, they now had to create Italians" (1860); and that Prussia had to "establish who a Prussian was" only when they developed unemployment benefits (1880).

    The hypothesized "future" European map of currently-existing nations (as opposed to states) was also quite interesting:

    https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/mg22329850.600-7_800.jpg

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