Good. We should be striving for a more integrated world, not a world of separatism.
People are naturally tribal. But tribalism must always be rejected.
People who hold onto tribal identities are excited by the prospect of political independence, but unless real conditions for that group are made genuinely intolerable, there is no excuse for separatism.
Catalan is one of the wealthiest parts of Spain. They are not being oppressed.
Nationalism is okay if the nation is being oppressed (and are somewhat non violent) see Scottish nationalism, Catalan nationalism, and later in this sub-thread about a Russian situation. Tribal and group identity is welcomed and defended if those in that group are at risk. I'm in agreement that tribal and group thinking is bad, and I'm also possibly in disagreement because I see that there is also oppression and marginalisation of groups by other groups. I'm not sure what the solution is apart from talking about this clearly.
The original terms of the Union - England paying off Scotland's debts - and in modern times the Barnett Formula, the West Lothian question, the Blair/Brown government, show that far from the shrill claims of the SNP Scotland has done and continues to do very, very well from being in the UK - far better than England does in fact.
Downvoted... Can someone point me to the HN guideline that forbids requesting an OP to clarify what they are saying?
- is ok legally
- is ok morally
- is ok politically
- is ok strategically
- is ok accord me
- is ok according to most people
- is ok according to the opposition
Tribal and group identity is welcomed and defended if those in that group are at risk.
Welcomed by who?
- welcomed by me
- welcomed by everyone else in that group
- welcomed by everyone outside of that group
- welcomed by some people outside of that group
What are you even saying? Is this a personal manifesto? Is this alluding to some sociological principal, political philosophy, statistic poll?
For a forum geared towards engineers, the quality of thinking here on HN is depressingly low.
IMO, your original comment is too brief, reading as antagonistic. You weren't just politely asking for clarification along with an expression of your understanding.
And anyway, they're just internet points, who cares. I throw my account away when I get to 100, keeps me from getting worked up about it.
Negativo mijo, we must strive to accept cultures that can mesh well together. Imagine a world where everyone was the same, and nobody had a unique identity. It would be incredibly sad and sterile.
Among the countries of the EU, Spain is probably on the top half with regards to protecting the different cultures that form it. Catalan, Basque, and other languages used to be talked in France too.
Okay, then the US will just annex every other country. That way the entire world will have political unity, that's all you want right? Or would you expect your government to fight back on that?
If people are separate now then it's a bad idea to force them together. They should unify of their own accord. It can be a gradual process like with the EU.
But if they are together now I'd want them to stay together, barring severe oppression of one party by another.
The EU isn't unifying people of their own accord. Every time there's a referendum held anywhere on EU policies, the EU always loses yet the policies are put into effect anyway.
I'm not particularly aware of the details of EU politics and couldn't name the major factions.
But I will point out that "integrate further" can itself become a tribal identity -- in some cases a fairly oppressive one, if "integrate" is taken to mean "get rid of any culturally distinctive ideas or practices that might possibly cause friction". Not saying this is specifically true of EU integration, just that it's a possible form of tribalism.
Well that's a bit my point: There's no meaning to "culturally distinctive ideas" in Europe, because all of our cultures are distinct. The only thing joining the continent together and moving the Union towards more integration is a relative homogeneity of values. And preserving our cultural richness is one of those values.
There can only be a relatively dominant tribe if 1. The smaller tribes refuse to join with the larger tribe or 2. The larger tribe refuses to accept the smaller tribes.
regarding 2: there's some nuance needed for what it means to "accept" the smaller tribes -- on whose terms? (Which leads directly to 1 -- if the larger tribe's terms are onerous, unfair, or oppressive, the smaller tribe should reject integration.)
A friend of mine is at an institution which has just started a "diversity" initiative to get people with different ethnic backgrounds in to the institution. But it's unclear whether they're willing to accept different perspectives, or whether they're really just looking for people who think the same but have different external appearances. Does it really make sense to join a "tribe" that wants to wipe out your distinctiveness and make you think and act just like they already do?
The reason why this referendum is illegal is because it attempts to "break the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation” (according to the Spanish constitution).
Larger more inclusive tribalism is better than small scale tribalism. It's a continuous process working towards unity and integration of the human tribe.
The way I see it, tribalism isn't unity. Unity, meaningful and lasting unity, that is, exists between people who are in harmony with themselves and each other. It doesn't require uniformity, it requires the absence of deformation through all sorts of abuses big and small. I don't need to know the backstory a peaceful person or animal to realize they're peaceful and be at peace in their presence. Tribalism on the other hand is people having a lot of ideas about who they are and what makes them valuable, and mutilating each other and themselves to make them seem more real and dignified. Unity is born out of life, tribalism is born out of fear, it's the ghost forever trying to make its presence known to life and failing to move even a match stick. In a nutshell.
The US is more than 300 million people which is nice and big, but the most nationalistic people here have yet to transition into "working towards the unity and integration of the human tribe."
If you're talking about the situation in Spain, you're very misinformed. The judiciary police isn't doing anything at all based on people's political preference. That would be flagrantly illegal.
This is neither nationalism nor separatism driven by the desire to exclude or shut out some "other." This is devolution of power over practical matters like budgets to a more-local level. It is in part enabled by transnationalism as embodied in the EU.
"The Basque conflict, also known as the Spain–ETA conflict, was an armed and political conflict from 1959 to 2011 between Spain and the Basque National Liberation Movement, a group of social and political Basque organizations which sought independence from Spain and France. The movement was built around the separatist organization ETA[4][5] which had launched a campaign of attacks against Spanish administrations since 1959. ETA has been proscribed as a terrorist organization by the Spanish, British,[6] French[7] and American[8] authorities at different moments. The conflict took place mostly on Spanish soil, although to a smaller degree it was also present in France, which was primarily used as a safe haven by ETA members. It was the longest running violent conflict in modern Western Europe.[9] It has been sometimes referred to as "Europe's longest war".[10]"
Catalunya is trying to find a peaceful, democratic path to resolving the issues in their region.
Integration is often just tribalism at a larger scale. In Russia, for example, there's a popular line of thought that basically denies that Ukrainians are a separate nation - the claim is that they're just a "misled" subset of Russia, that their language is just a particularly badly distorted Russian dialect etc. It's not about integration - it's about Russian domination.
For another example, Turkey treats Kurds in a similar vein.
Well Ukraine never actually was a separate nation except very briefly after the revolution, then after the dissolution of the USSR.
Also, Ukrainians are ethnically almost identical to European Russians, and more than half of them speak Russian. Ukrainian is an archaic dialect and probably would have died out if not for a resurgence in nationalism.
Edit - to add to this, the way Ukrainian identity formed in the first place is that "Ukrainians" were the part of the Russian empire that came under occasional occupation by Western powers (Poland-Lithuania and Austria-Hungary), so they developed their own identity by virtue of essentially being Russians cut off from the empire (they kept Cyrillic writing, attempted to keep the Orthodox religion, etc...). Even in Gogol's writings he refers to the Russian Empire, not Ukraine as a nation (even if the current Ukrainian authorities have censored/modified his writings).
Oh, and I'm an ethnic Ukrainian in Canada whose family originated from the part of Ukraine occupied by the Austro-Hungarian empire...
Edit2 - Sorry, just facts. "Ukraine" never was a country until last century. Maybe one of you down-voters could point out a Ukrainian state pre-1919 that identified as Ukrainian. Because Kievan Rus wasn't Ukrainian, it was Rus-sian....
> "Ukraine" never was a country until last century.
Nothing in the comment you replied to clashes with that. At all. The actual point, which stands unmoved, is something for which both Russia/Ukraine and Turkey/Kurds are mere examples.
> Maybe one of you down-voters could point out a Ukrainian state pre-1919 that identified as Ukrainian.
Why would they have to? They gained independence 1991. That's the most significant bit, no?
> Nothing in the comment you replied to clashes with that. At all. The actual point, which stands unmoved, is something for which both Russia/Ukraine and Turkey/Kurds are mere examples.
Except they really are all different situations. Turks and Kurds are completely different ethnic groups with different languages, origins and history. Kurds are closely related to Iranians, not Turks.
> Why would they have to? They gained independence 1991. That's the most significant bit, no?
Because there's revisionist history which states Ukrainians and Russians are different ethnic groups. They're not. They've shared the same history and culture for over a thousand years, they're the same ethnic group. Yes they're different nations now, but they're not different peoples.
> Except they really are all different situations.
That's the point of analogies. You point out similarities, not that things are the same. They're not even possible between things that are the same.
> Yes they're different nations now, but they're not different peoples.
Yes, and? The comment you replied to goes "there's a popular line of thought that basically denies that Ukrainians are a separate nation". Which, seeing how they're a separate nation, is just valid as Turks wanting to lord it over the Kurds.
Thank you for an excellent illustration of what I was talking about.
For those curious about how exactly this is distorted, briefly: Ukraine was not "part of the Russian empire that came under occasional occupation by Western powers". What is today called Ukraine was part of a single unified state called Kievan Rus, very roughly corresponding to today's European Russia + Ukraine + Belarus - indeed, it was its heartland, where the capital Kiev was located.
Once Kievan Rus disintegrated because of feudal strife between its constituent principalities, its eastern parts were overrun by the Mongols, who integrated it into their empire as a vassal state of sorts (keeping the local dukes mostly in place, but using them as glorified tax collectors, and continuing to pit them against each other to keep them weakened), whereas the western parts were overrun by the then-ascendant Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which annexed the land outright, and mostly integrated the local nobility into its own hierarchy. Map:
This is the point at which then-unified (mostly) East Slavic culture and language breaks apart. Western parts get more exposure to European culture, initially via Lithuania, and later also via Poland when the two form a commonwealth; Catholicism partially (but not wholly) replaces Eastern Orthodoxy, and language gets borrowings from Polish and Latin. Eastern parts get more exposure to the (then mostly Turkic) Mongol culture, with Eastern Orthodoxy becoming even more entrenched per Mongols' usual policy of supporting local religions and using them to control the rulers, and the language gets many Turkic borrowings.
If you look at the map again, you'll see that the Mongol parts are (roughly) what would eventually become Russia, and the Lithuanian parts are what would eventually become Ukraine and Belarus.
The parent is technically true that there was no state called "Ukraine" before WW1. But there was definitely a nation, calling itself and its language Ukrainian, and distinct from the neighboring Russians and Poles, whose statehood mostly dominated over the corresponding territory.
The "Cyrillic writing" point is similarly bogus - Cyrillic alphabet and Eastern Slavic language was used heavily in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as well, to the point of becoming the main language for clerical and legal works. First printed books in Eastern Slavic were printed in GDL. However, it would be incorrect to refer to that language as "Russian". It was an ancestor language common to modern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. Historically, wherever that language was spoken, its speakers generally referred to it as "Rusian" (as in "language of Rus"). In Western sources, it is usually referred to as Ruthenian. Conflating it with Russian is one of the tricks played in this kind of propaganda.
TL;DR version is that there's a substitution trick here: Russia claims to be the sole legitimate successor to Kievan Rus, and all other successor states to be "breakaway parts" (ironic, given where Kiev is located). A rough analogy would be if Italy said that it's the Roman Empire, and France and Spain are its breakaway provinces, and do not constitute nations in their own right.
> But there was definitely a nation, calling itself and its language Ukrainian, and distinct from the neighboring Russians and Poles, whose statehood mostly dominated over the corresponding territory.
And which state was that? The Cossack Hetmanate? Which rebelled against the western occupiers and eventually joined the modern Russian Empire?
> However, it would be incorrect to refer to that language as "Russian". It was an ancestor language common to modern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. Historically, wherever that language was spoken, its speakers generally referred to it as "Rusian" (as in "language of Rus"). In Western sources, it is usually referred to as Ruthenian. Conflating it with Russian is one of the tricks played in this kind of propaganda.
So Russian is one of the modern versions of the older Rus language, but isn't? Not sure I follow your logic here, you're pretty much agreeing with me then claiming for some reason Russian doesn't count as being descendant from the older Rusian language.
> Russia claims to be the sole legitimate successor to Kievan Rus, and all other successor states to be "breakaway parts" (ironic, given where Kiev is located).
You're missing a key part of history here: Muscovy, the Cossacks and others all rebelled against various invaders, and formed a common state: the Russian Empire. Which included both Moscow and Kiev for centuries.
> A rough analogy would be if Italy said that it's the Roman Empire
Do you not remember the part where there were a bunch of Italian city states that did eventually rejoin to form the Italian state? Italy wasn't Italy until quite recently. Also, France and Spain were Gaul and Iberia, inhabited by Celtic groups that were invaded by Rome.
This isn't analogous to Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, whose people all came from the same original group.
> This is the point at which then-unified (mostly) East Slavic culture and language breaks apart. Western parts get more exposure to European culture, initially via Lithuania, and later also via Poland when the two form a commonwealth; Catholicism partially (but not wholly) replaces Eastern Orthodoxy, and language gets borrowings from Polish and Latin. Eastern parts get more exposure to the (then mostly Turkic) Mongol culture, with Eastern Orthodoxy becoming even more entrenched per Mongols' usual policy of supporting local religions and using them to control the rulers, and the language gets many Turkic borrowings.
Gotcha, so this is basically the modern revisionist, racist Ukrainian propaganda that Russians = Mongols, and Ukrainians are pure white Europeans, right? Never mind that fact that much of Ukraine (all of Crimea for example, and the south of Ukraine) was ruled by Tatars (one of the offshoots of the Mongol horde) for a decent amount of time. And there was absolutely no intermingling there right? Ukrainians didn't succumb to any Tatar influence or genetics, right?
Edit - also, I'm aware of the entire history of the Rus empire from when the Varangians (Vikings) settled in Novgorod, to when Prince Oleg went from Novgorod to Kiev, to Vladimir the Great, etc... Maybe because my family came during a time long before Ukrainians and Russians were feuding, but even though we've maintained fairly strong Ukrainian identity the modern anti-Russian propaganda is never anything I learned growing up. Just something we see in the media now.
> And which state was that? The Cossack Hetmanate? Which rebelled against the western occupiers and eventually joined the modern Russian Empire?
First of all, I didn't say there was a state. You know there can be nations without statehood? Indeed, I already mentioned one such example - the Kurds.
But, yes, for the brief existence of the Hetmanate, it was an Ukrainian nation-state.
As far as "joined the modern Russian Empire" - it didn't, not quite. It signed the treaty of Pereyaslav with the Tsardom under Khmelnitsky, yes, and which was supposed to preserve their autonomy. The treaty on which Russians essentially reneged, by claiming that the tsar was an absolute ruler, and could not be bound by treaties with his own subjects. In 100 years, the autonomy was dismantled, the local nobles that resisted were suppressed, serfdom was introduced in direct contravention to the terms of the treaty, and Ukraine became, for all intents and purposes, annexed by Russia. Not willingly, either, and not without resisting - does the name "Mazepa" ring a bell?
> So Russian is one of the modern versions of the older Rus language, but isn't? Not sure I follow your logic here, you're pretty much agreeing with me then claiming for some reason Russian doesn't count as being descendant from the older Rusian language.
Russian is not a "modern version" of the older Rus language. It is a language derived from Old East Slavic. So are Ukrainian and Belarusian, but the three have diverged sufficiently over time to be separate languages in their own right. Just as Czech and Polish are demonstrably different languages that diverged from a single common West Slavic language. And just as East and West Slavic, in turn, diverged from a common proto-Slavic.
> You're missing a key part of history here: Muscovy, the Cossacks and others all rebelled against various invaders, and formed a common state: the Russian Empire. Which included both Moscow and Kiev for centuries.
"The others" were mostly conquered, not rebelled. Tver, Novgorod, Pskov, and so on. Ukrainian alliance with Russia was a desperate measure - they needed military support to succeed in a struggle against Poland. 50 years later, they went to ally with Swedes to get military support in a struggle against Russia.
> Gotcha, so this is basically the modern revisionist, racist Ukrainian propaganda that Russians = Mongols, and Ukrainians are pure white Europeans, right?
No, of course not - that's just your own projection, because the propaganda that you're translating includes that bit for "but they're lynching negroes". Russians aren't Mongols, they're East Slavs, same as Ukrainians and Belarusians.
The Russian language does demonstrably have more Turkic borrowings than Ukrainian and Belarusian, though - and the latter two have more Polish borrowings (something, I must add, that people who talk like you do are always keen to point out when they try to make an argument that "Ukrainian is just Russian corrupted by Polish").
None of this has anything to do with race, or make one language "better" than the other. It does, however, make them different languages. And it does make people speaking them different nations.
By the way, while we're at it - there's a difference between "nation" and "ethnicity", too.
Oh, and statehood, too. In theory, there's nothing preventing the three Eastern Slavic nations from having a shared statehood - provided that it's for their mutual benefit. The problem with the Russian take on this problem is that the resulting shared statehood somehow always ends up being called "Russia", has its capital in Moscow, has Russian as a state language etc; while the other two end up as non-descript provinces, and their language, distinctive culture, and any other "separatist tendencies" suppressed by force. That, in a nutshell, is a difference between integration and occupation.
People are naturally tribal. But tribalism must always be rejected. People who hold onto tribal identities are excited by the prospect of political independence, but unless real conditions for that group are made genuinely intolerable, there is no excuse for separatism.
Catalan is one of the wealthiest parts of Spain. They are not being oppressed.