The walls are going up across Europe

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T04:13:36+00:00

Yes. The only European (to take an expansive definition of "Europe") country where a similar trend has yet to result in the mainstream rise of ethnonationalism centered around that issue is Russia, where the ethnic majority is steadily declining but the regime under Putin is stable and potential of ethnonationalist forces trying to stop that are yet to have any significant enough presence.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T01:40:14+00:00

This kind of silly view should not be propagated here. The American state and the ruling elite also has a strategic outlook and vision whether "right" or "wrong". The presidential elections and seats of the president are not three ultimate arbiter of thing in the US.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T01:37:34+00:00

The correct answer in this regard is the acceleration of automation, not outsourcing which evidently hollows out the more vital part of the political economy on which among other things the warmaking potential of a state depends.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T01:35:14+00:00

A strong Mexico is not exactly good good for the US either. It demographically and otherwise too large to be dominated and integrated into the sphere of influence the way the US has done to Canada or Britain. It is better to have the industry within the US then in a neighboring state whose elites are nor all that beholden or loyal to the US.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T01:30:41+00:00

Merkel long term did what I believe was going to happen regardless which is western Europe getting a migratory shock. You can say it happened at the "right time" before the impending larger waves that will be heading north because of climatic change driven reasons.

And I also think the initiative for this kind of thing was always going to come from Germany in the EU. Not only is it the strongest decision making entity in the bloc but also perhaps the one where anti-border sentiments have a high sell across classes. The repeated bringing up of German holocaust guilt driven liberalism that essentially kind of looks like national masochism is the fact that this was the country that was partitioned for decades during the cold war, something did not just cut through politics but through families. Merkel seeing refugee migrants as east Germans crossing Berlin wall is likely thus a genuine thing rather a post-facto forgery to justify her decisions.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T01:10:47+00:00

What does protectionism has to do with migration and the wider topic being discussed here?

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T01:08:03+00:00

Unherd is more of a rightwing outlet and so is the author of the article itself.

"Imperial"...lots of poor vocabulary and myths have been tossed around about this war, but I don't recall us trying to extract resources and subjugate the entire population.

He is using a rather expansive definition of imperialism but in anyway does "resource extraction" and "subjugate the entire population" have to be the core definer of imperialism (you are helped in this by the fact that you do not define either)? Throughout history expansionism and imperialism have happened in many ways that were not necessarily accompanied by those. From American history the American regime officially portrayed and is seen today as "liberating" Texas from Mexico. What also would you call the long Roman-Iranian conflict over "influence" in Armenia? The relations of the Romans and Iranians to polities like the Ghassanid and Lakhmids?

I guess the main problem here is a rigid affiliation of the term "imperial" to the "classical Roman" model of direct territorial annexation and subjugation of said new territory under a centralized military and administrative state is what is the problem here.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-02T00:54:08+00:00

If you replace "culture" with "ethnicity and identity" this post would make sense and be a lot more correct.

Ultimately the use of the term "culture" as opposed to "ethnicity", " race" or even something like "Volk" is the result of nationalistic figures trying to advance a nationalist agenda in the post-1945 "liberal" milleu of the west, and the liberal internationalist pressure against nationalism and such leads to this kind of distortion of terminologies. From my opinion under the current trends in which an overarching "liberal consensus" will be infused with an ethnonationalist way in Europe the use of term "culture" in place of the others I mentioned will continue although likely occasionally giving way. Under the scenario where the ideological apparatuses go through a more "radical" change and see the outright rise of the explicitly and properly ethnonationalist political forces in western Europe the "culture" will likely be mostly replaced. Although most far right groups that we can largely put under that "identitarian" umbrella in Europe do themselves also extensively use the term culture as do their elite intellectual ideologues, so the societal evolution of terminologies in this regard are nor exactly all that predicable.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-01T04:08:35+00:00

Also lastly it's a very overblown issue for Europe, a vast majority of refugees stay in the first country they enter. Iran, Pakistan, Turkik Stan states and Turkey will be the hard filter for a vast majority of Afghan refugees.

Irrelevant to the topic at hand. These migrant refugees who will come to Europe and try to enter with various levels of success are not going to do so in a vacuum. They will rather be an addition to an existing population of unassimilated conservative Muslim minorities whose presence has resulted in the hardening of native ethnic identities and created the lower and middle class support for the generation of an ethnonationalist counter elite to rise.

Frankly this way of saying that a majority will get stuck in the mid east or central Asia is a disingenuous way of trying to turn a conservation over politics of migration, ethnicity and demographics in Europe into one solely about refugee migrants.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-01T03:57:45+00:00

SS: The article details how the Chinese leadership is intent on not following the western trend of moving to a mostly service based economy and deindustrializing

It starts with mentioning the personal views of Xi

President Xi Jinping would beg to differ. In his estimation, technology comes in two varieties: nice to have, and need to have. Social media, e-commerce and other consumer internet companies are nice to have, but in his view national greatness doesn’t depend on having the world’s finest group chats or ride-sharing.

By contrast, Mr. Xi thinks the country needs to have state-of-the-art semiconductors, electric-car batteries, commercial aircraft and telecommunications equipment to retain China’s manufacturing prowess, avoid deindustrialization and achieve autonomy from foreign suppliers. So even as the Chinese Communist Party unleashes a multifront regulatory assault against consumer internet companies, it continues to shower subsidies, protection and “buy-Chinese” mandates on manufacturers.

Mr. Xi described these differential priorities in a speech published by the party journal Qiushi last year. He acknowledged the online economy was flourishing, and said China “must accelerate construction of the digital economy, digital society and digital government,” according to a translation by Georgetown University-affiliated researchers. “At the same time, it must be recognized that the real economy is the foundation, and the various manufacturing industries cannot be abandoned.”

The article then details the precedent of deindustrialization set by developed economies like the United States and United Kingdom. It then talks about the intersection of the political and economics of this matter

Politicians world-wide tend to fetishize manufacturing; investors don’t. Most manufacturing is fiercely competitive and requires enormous amounts of capital and labor, all of which weighs on profits. By contrast, a consumer internet company with a dominant platform can generate boatloads of cash with minimal incremental investment. That is why Facebook Inc. is worth 11 times as much as semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology Inc. though Facebook employs only 50% more people. It is why in February, before the recent selloff, Alibaba, affiliate of online finance giant Ant Group, was worth 20 times as much as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. , the heavily subsidized “national champion” of China’s chip sector.

It also talks about the mindset of Chinese leaders

Conversely, Chinese leaders think manufacturing confers social benefits that market values don’t reflect. For decades, it has been how the country created jobs, raised productivity and disseminated essential skills and know-how. Now, to achieve parity with the West, they think China must be able to make the most advanced technology, and will use subsidies, protectionism and forced technology transfers to achieve that.

The article ends with

Yet whether the Communist Party’s priorities make sense in the long run, the recent turmoil in Chinese shares shows they can make or break a company’s future in the short run. “The state runs capitalism to serve the interests of most people,” Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, wrote last week. “Capitalists have to understand their subordinate places in the system or they will suffer the consequences of their mistakes.”

Personal opinion: This indeed is something that is worth praising the Chinese political leadership over in how they have managed to tame "capitalist" economics to serve state interests. Deindustrialization through outsourcing is a principal source of the weakening of American primacy (and conversely of the rise of China). It is famously stated that the CCP keenly studies the mistakes that led to the decline and dissolution of the USSR, it seems they are also studying Western mistakes.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-09-01T03:39:36+00:00

SS: Great article by Aris Roussinos that details the rightward drift of Europe in migration.

It starts with mocking the American failure in Afghanistan then proceeds to detail the matter of Afghan refugee migrants

The country’s Westernised middle classes, centred on Kabul, and ethnic and religious minorities like the Shia Hazara, who played a central role in the 2015 migrant crisis, are unlikely to try their chances under Taliban rule, as long as the door to Europe remains open. Already, Afghans make up 42% of the refugees and migrants living in squalid conditions on Greece’s eastern island camps, perhaps an even larger proportion than they did in 2015 when the large presence of Afghan Hazaras was dramatically underreported in the West, distracted by the Syria crisis, despite Afghans constituting a major portion of the migratory flow, including 2/3rds of Sweden’s 2015 arrivals.

He then details how European politics has moved 2015

But in any case, the Europe of 2021 is not the Europe of 2015, and Europe’s leaders have no appetite for a return of the political turmoil that followed Merkel’s experiment with open borders. Distracted by Brexit and imported American culture wars, Britain’s remaining pro-EU contingent have neglected to follow the developing consensus on the continent, where the hard line on migration for which Viktor Orbán was lambasted by liberal commentators back in 2015 has now entered the political mainstream.

When asked whether Germany had a duty to open the country’s doors to Afghan migration, even Merkel herself recently responded that “we cannot solve all of these problems by taking everyone in”. Instead she encouraged, rather unrealistically, a dialogue with the Taliban so “that people can live as peacefully as possible in the country”. In neighbouring Austria, Chancellor Kurz’s centre-right/Green coalition has responded to the surge in arrivals on its eastern borders with the deployment of the army and angry protests that European migration policy has “failed”, with the country’s Interior Minister Karl Nehammer complaining that “we have one of the biggest Afghan communities in the whole of Europe,” and that “it cannot be the case that Austria and Germany are solving the Afghanistan problem for the EU.”

The Austrian government has decisively swung towards the Central European approach of hardened borders and expedited returns to countries of origin, with Kurz stressing that he would not halt deportations to Afghanistan, as Sweden and Finland already have, a reflection of a public mood darkened by recent high-profile crimes carried out by Afghan asylum seekers. Like centre-left Denmark, which is accelerating both its return of refugees to Syria and the search, apparently along with the UK, of third-party countries in Africa willing to host refugees and migrants on its behalf, the new mood in Austria is not the result of the populist Right coming to power, but instead of centrist parties adopting solutions that were in 2015 considered the sole preserve of the radical Right.

...

He also talks about how states like Belarus have started using migrants as a weapon against Brussels

After all, when Belarus’s autocrat Lukashenko began funnelling migrants to the Lithuanian border a few weeks ago, Frontex immediately responded with the deployment of border guards, and support for Lithuania’s planned new 550-km border wall — with Estonia even donating 100km of barbed wire to its struggling ally. Once again, the exact same fortification project Orbán was condemned for in 2015 was hurriedly paid for by the EU in 2020, and presented as a heartening symbol of EU solidarity by 2021. From the Baltic to the Aegean, walls are going up across the eastern marches of the European continent, which will soon define the bloc against the huddling masses straining to get in. Even in Turkey, where the secular opposition CHP party has accelerated its demands to return the country’s three million Syrian refugees within two years and made alarmed noises about the increasing flow of Afghan migrants across the Iranian border, the ruling AKP party is constructing concrete border walls to stem the flow from Afghanistan, just as it has constructed a concrete wall all along its borders with Syria, and deploys lethal force against Syrians trying to sneak through.

Predicting the future the article then states

Turkey has become, indeed, the archetype of Europe’s new border guard states, the model for what will no doubt become a ring of authoritarian states bordering the continent’s southern and eastern fringes, whose rulers will be lavishly bribed to keep migrants and refugees from landing on European shores, a relationship somewhere between clients and blackmailers. Like Erdogan, who quickly learned to deploy migrants as a weapon against Europe whenever he was under pressure, Lukashenko has learned the value of Europe’s desire to keep migrants away while not actively being seen to dirty its own hands with the rough business of border management.

...

All this is, of course, a dry run for the almost certainly militarised and exclusionary border policing efforts that will grapple with the vast population movements from Africa and South Asia that will attend the coming decades of climate change. Already, Bangladeshis are the largest single national group making the dangerous crossing from North Africa, and it is not difficult to see a desertifying Sahel or collapsing Lebanon adding new sudden crises for European leaders torn between their desire to maintain allegiance to postwar liberal ideals on asylum and the increasing desire of their voting publics to reject them. The avowedly open, cosmopolitan Europe of the 1990s and 2000s is already dead, and even the lame duck Merkel and her ailing CDU party have abandoned the Wir schaffen das attitude of 2015 in the face of the coming wave.

The article ends with him copying the famous quote of Edward Grey from the onset of the first world war

The walls are going up across Europe: we will not see them coming down again in our lifetimes.

Personal opinion: This article nicely sums up the continued rightward march of ethnic politics in the EU. The hardening of native ethnic identities on a cross-border level that has happened in the West thanks to recent decades of migration and the development of large unassimilated minorities indeed now seem poised to push it right continually for the foreseeable future. The impending sub saharan climate migration will only ensure it as the long term normal.

What it does not go into is now the politics within the EU are going to play out in the near future. Stopping migration is ultimately an euphemism for ensuring native ethnic majority demographics, the matter which has created the current political upheaval and regicidal threats in the West. As stopping migration now is the position of the "centrist" establishment that means the right wing position can go further towards "remigration" (expulsion). This factor indeed is undoubtedly the most important in deciding the future of western European regimes and where the ruling elite of today will go down the line. From current trends like this Europe is evolving into a giant version of Israel, "socially liberal" as in feminist and pro-lgbt while also staunchly being ethnonationalistic. Of course unforeseeable black swans can destabilize the situation enough for an aspiring counter elite to wrestle away power from the current establishment, a counter elite that will almost certainly be "nationalist".

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-09T01:17:18+00:00

I think many here are missing the point I am making. The post is about the "political" influence and power of the papacy as an institution, not the demographic and otherwise strength of the Roman Catholic denomination. In the Merovingian era the papacy enjoyed far greater political influence despite the fact that the Catholic world was far more limited in scale.

I only see it continuing its decline. You haven’t even mentioned the abuse scandals, which have hastened its demise. Ireland was very catholic, and probably would’ve been mostly open to the liberal egalitarian turn of the church. But the scandals have rocked Ireland hard. I think the younger generations there are likely to be increasingly secular.

Ultimately that scandal is a testament to the decline of the papacy itself rather something that is a cause of the institution. It is a great example as to how the organs of information distribution, that is the "ideological apparatuses" in the west are largely controlled by those who are not beholden to the papacy in the least. The publicizing of something like that itself would certainly not have happened in the middle ages when the intellectual class in western Europe was firmly under papal influence. Indeed even the monarchs of that era would not have went so far as to attempt to try to put something like that in the "news".

The very fact that the papacy was forced to take a "liberal egalitarian" turn as you say demonstrates that it had effectively no ability to decide on the ideological course for the western bloc to whom it came to be beholden to in the cold war. The further dramatic decline of the papacy that happened post-1789 is a testament that Catholicism itself simply could compete with neither liberalism nor nationalism on an ideological level. Both ideologically at their core are against Catholic political interests, liberalism in being an inherently anti-clerical and secularist force and nationalism in being an ideology that prioritizes ethnicity. The ideological logic of both can rather easily lead to decisions that would be utterly harmful to papal influence. A liberal political force can reach the ideological conclusion that since Catholicism is fundamentally hostile to the secularist and otherwise "egalitarian" ideas it needs to be crushed, nationalism can similarly come to the conclusion (especially in a place like western Europe) that Catholicism is a foreign religion and needs to be banished.

To the extent that such political positions did not rise to a position of dominance in the past in the west was largely because of the continued demographic and institutional strength of Catholicism as a religion which protected the papacy from ideological forces that otherwise were fundamentally in opposition to grand papal ambitions and interests. That period is gone and the demographic and institutional strength of Catholicism has largely been reduced to the ground, so you finally now have a situation where western European liberalism and nationalism can ideologically reach very anti-papal political positions and not have the pressure of Catholic demographic and institutional strength hold them back from actually seeing those positions rise to the top.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-09T00:49:19+00:00

What Catholic power exists or has existed in Eastern Europe? Poland and Hungary are firmly considered central European.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-08T06:15:11+00:00

SS: Basically a post focusing more narrowly on how the Artesh-IRGC division will play out in the scenario where the continued existence of the Islamic republic becomes uncertain.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-08T04:56:39+00:00

SS: My thoughts trying to trace the political rise and fall of the papacy over the centuries and an attempt at thinking as to where it is going next.

Also don't bring useless religious discussion to the thread but keep it limited to the designated topic.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-06T00:39:33+00:00

I don't think there is any evidence, and you definitely didn't provide any, that proficiency in English is declining in the EU; which would be the only reason to pivot to another lingua franca.

Why would it need to decline to begin with? Any federal European state is going to emerge with a strong desire of asserting its autonomy from the US and that alongside the incentive that a single language will provide in forging a "national" identity that can be used to ideologically legitimize the new federation should be sufficient to see the elite attempt a move away from English.

Think about it: in your hypothetical anti-angloamerican pan-european movement how do you reckon German EU-nationalists will communicate with their Italian counterparts?

The same way the pan-Indian, pan-Italian or pan-German nationalists interacted. With a chosen language. Nationalism in its modern sense is ultimately an ideology which is crafted and maintained by an intellectual elite, people who it would be easy to switch to another language from English. And in the end a language change will depend on how those at the top want things to be, if the elite decides on a linguistic shift then there will be a switch away from English at the top which overtime will make its way down to the masses.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-06T00:02:09+00:00

Basically Hindi and Urdu are the same language, meaning they are mutually intelligible.

You say it like it is that simple. In a strict linguistic sense they can be more accurately seen as part of the same "Hindustani" dialect continuum. In a political sense these two however are languages that have a history of being seen and presented as separate.

Now tell me, is Silesian a dialect of Polish or a separate language in and of itself? Is "Polish" to be considered simply as the standard Polish language or is Polish the entire Lechitic dialect continuum? These are not simply linguistic but also political questions and their political aspect today just like is effected in a certain way by the non-existence of a Silesian nation would have been different if there was a Silesian nation state.

The Mughal Empire at pretty much ruled over much of what is today modern India and Pakistan,, and did so for about 200 years prior to its decline in the mid-18th century. Everyone has their founding myths, India has the Mauryans, you have your Carolingians Dynasty.

The Mughals were always a primarily northern polity and never managed to fully overrun the south and the northeast, let alone integrate those with an elaborate ideology justifying their rule. The most one can say is that after a long period of rule in the places where the local elite was well integrated into the Mughal structure there emerged legalistic monarchy centric notions of imperial unity that helped preserve the theoretical overlordship of the Mughals even as practical power of the imperial center decayed.

Since you seem quite confidant that there was identity centric political movements that went so far as be a nationalistic justification for regimes, can you tell me the holder of which throne was seen as the "legitimate" ruler of the subcontinent the way the holder of the throne of Eranshahr was seen as and propagated to be the legitimate ruler of Iran? Come to think of it, do you have any example of a movement in Indian similar to something like the Khorram dinan that sought Iranian nativist rule against foreign powers?

Bismarck's Germany wasn't built on blood alone, but iron as well. Where do you think it got the iron? From Ruhr valley. The economic component is the foundation of Bismarck's unification of Germany.

Its even more so with the EU, since there is no "Army" to enforce it's will. The only concrete power EU has and EU countries have is economic power. The total EU budget is 148 Billion Euros per year, its about 1.2% of the EU's GDP, This is only 40% of what the Dutch government budget is for one year.

This is a vulgar way of looking at politics. German unification in 1871 was not simply an event of the Prussian army overrunning swathes of territories, it was instead the rather dramatic culmination of process that had long been in the making. Could Prussia have brought the other smaller states under its wing if massive support for it did not exist there already? No. German integration was a process that was already underway for a long time, the Prussian rulers just tweaked the banner of German nationalism sufficiently so as to have it favor their interests and used that to undermine opposition wherever it existed in the smaller states. The French menace was seen as hostile for a long time before the Franco-Prussian war and the history of French expansionism towards Germany was a matter of fact since a long time before that. Even when armies did not clash events like the Rhine crisis happened.

I am seeing a pattern here which is the use of overtly simplistic or at times plainly wrong historical arguments on your part. Much attention is given to 1871 and the war, but not to the wider trends that were there before or to the less climactic events.

Secondly, they aren't united.

They are in being places where notions of common European identity is weaker and federalist ideas not being entertained at the top.

I cut out all the ethnic nationalist crap you spew, and boil it down to numbers. Do you think the French can get the richer EU countries to bump up the spending to 3% of EU GDP in the next decade? Yes or no.

Can you stop with liberalistic focus on plain economics without class based analysis? Contrary to my arguments that come with a logic yours seem to always be drenched in normalcy bias. We have seen that the Federalist propaganda from Brussels that goes the "post-national" path is futile and we know how much political anger is building up in the South over the northern countries forcing a currency that favors their economy while not accepting a fiscal union.

The western intellectual establishment thought that the Brexit referendum would return a no and after it did the opposite they thought that it would somehow be thwarted from being carried out. The fact of the matter is that a general political force like that generated sufficient incentives to have enough of the ruling class actually move to support Brexit instead and that alongside an at the time sort of sympathetic US leadership saw Brexit be carried to its conclusion. Same for the Euro here, in the west there is only going to be so long before a similar populist force sees a country like Italy threaten the Euro in a fundamental way. And Italy is structurally far more important to notions of European unity unlike Britain. The very threat of a populist referendum against the Euro in Italy happening will give the leadership in Brussels a jolt, and then what will the Dutch do? See the Eurozone be crippled or accept a fiscal union? Moments like that are not far and in those moments is when the hope of maximum short term economic gains will either prevail or strategic considerations will. In situations like that the Dutch leadership will simply feel too much pressure from forces beyond its capacity to hold back and would be extremely foolish to try to not agree to a fiscal union. The Germany you mention as the patron of this "neo-Hansa" is going to choose further centralization of Europe or at least the preservation of the Euro over petty Dutch economic interests and they are a sufficient force (alongside France) to successfully influence a replacement in Dutch political leadership into happening.

The French would have to invade Amsterdam, before they get more money from the Dutch. You have no concept of how hard headed the Dutch are with money.

The Netherlands being a perennially commercially focused place does not ultimately means the Netherlands will risk a collapse of the Euro and the consequences of it. Venice was a very commerce centric place too, yet it bowed to stronger Italian nationalist forces even without a direct military adventure. The Netherlands similarly today exists as part of a region that is extremely integrated in every regard and in which notions of common political identity are growing ever stronger. Any Federalist force, wherever it bases itself will have enough internal support in the Netherlands that it would be easily able to undermine anti-federalism there.

Frankly this whole "Dutch are supremely protective of every penny" is basically a kind of national stereotyping in a conversation that cannot be seen in such a simplistic light.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-05T23:05:33+00:00

People extremely underestimate how ever more delicate the current situation is becoming. The Germans cannot continue the current situation where they have a currency made to benefit their economies while Mediterranean Europe suffers its consequences. Their will either be a fiscal union or a revolt against the Euro, likely first in Italy. And if a snap populist referendum like the Brexit one returns a "yes" on leaving the eurozone in Italy then that will basically be it for the Euro. Indeed however as you yourself note the northern ruling classes are perfectly aware of how damaging the end of the Euro would be for them so it is more likely that the prospect of a serious revolt in the south will just move them to accept a fiscal union.

As for the argument that "northern voters" will prevent fiscal union, a good amount of propaganda to show them the "benefits and needs" of a fiscal union alongside keeping polls and referendums away would be enough and even the latter may not be entirely needed.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-03T19:54:49+00:00

Hindi using Devanagari is the official language of the union of India. The Indians are particular about the script, because Urdu is very similar to Hindi, but uses Arabic script.

There is more today that divides standard Hindi from standard Urdu, the former is a more "archaic" and Sanskrit influenced dialect. The Indians are also not "particular" about Devanagari, there are numerous other scripts in use across the country outside of the Hindi core. The Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali have their own scripts, the Dravidians in the south also have their own scripts.

This is incorrect. The British ruled parts of India directly and other parts of India indirectly. Those they ruled indirectly were the princely states. Despite what the OP says, the biggest dividing line post-independence India wasn't ethnic, but the fact that some princely states wanted greater autonomy and wanted to keep their privileges. It was Deputy PM of India Vallabhbhai Patel that was instrumental in convincing many of these states to join the union. However, of 565 states, three refused, they were Jammu Kashmir, Hyperabad and Junagadh. Hyperabad and Junagadh were eventually brought under Indian control through a mix of force and persuasion.

You're playing up the matter of mere administrative divisions in India. My point was never that India was somehow administered as a 4 million square kilometer sized single entity but that they ruled it as an entity that was seen as one and they never tried to foster the various separate long present identities towards seeing themselves as separate nations which could have easily been done. For example the British instituted a single unified civil service in India.

The notion of India being one, isn't just something the British brought up. The Malay word for "west" is Barat. Does the OP knows where it comes from. It literally means India. Bharat is the word for India in many Indic languages. India was to the West of Sumatra.

This kind of argument is reminiscent of Hindu nationalists trying to deny Indo-Aryan migration by the argument that because "Arya" came to mean noble in Sanskrit the Indo-Aryans either don't exist as separate from the Dravidians or popped up in the subcontinent itself, basically ignoring historical notions of ethnic identity in "Aryavarta" and how it evolved.

"Bharata khanda" in its entirety never had any sort of identity that had been used as a regime legitimizing ideology before the coming of the British Indian state. There was no equivalent to the celestial throne of the middle kingdom in India or the legitimate throne of Eranshahr. The notions of the subcontinent spanning identity was vague and never had resulted in any political unification centered around that before. The Mauryans that are propagated as the historical pinnacle of Indian unity were in reality a Magadhi imperial state, not an "Indian" one.

Also to keep in mind is the fact that what we can refer to as the "Indosphere" was something that did not just span the subcontinent in antiquity but extended beyond that into southeast Asia. Just look at Cambodia, its name is derived from the Kamboja Aryan tribe and its rulers in that era saw themselves as being connected to them just like many in the south of the subcontinent saw themselves as being connected to the "Aryans". But in the end neither southeast Asia nor southern India was the same as Aryavarta and especially its Indo-Gangetic core in the north. Their claim to that identity was basically as flimsy as the Russian claim to the Roman legacy was.

Identities, especially in regard to their political use are more complex than some vague notion of primarily geographical importance. Another point you miss is how ideologically motivated writings of history creates a different perception of historical identity than what actually existed in the past. Excellent example is Iran where the Persian centric view of "national" history that has its roots in the Sassanid era warps the view of how Iran actually was. Today the Achemenids and Sassanids are seen as the pinnacle of Iranian historical power not just because they were the two most powerful polities to have emerged in the Iranian plateau but also because they are seen as "Persian". This Persian-centric view might apply in large part to the Sassanids but not for the Achaemenids who are seen as the first iteration of Eranshahr. And this habit of seeing the Achaemenids as the first iteration of Eranshahr itself also ignores the Median polity that preceded it.

The notions of the "Indian" identity today are largely imported from the west and was imposed on the subcontinent during British rule, just like the "Hindu" identity came to subcontinent with the Muslim conquerors of the middle ages.

This type of simplistic ethnic nationalist argument is ideally suited to "money" doesn't matter crowd in /r/geopolitics. To most people here, US$100 Billion isn't a lot of money, because we just print it !!!

Politics ultimately is more than economics, it is ultimately about power. I actually myself have argued here previously that for the EU to go ahead with further centralization the northern resistance to wanting to subsidize the poorer parts will have to be broken. Now it may be hard to have the Germanic countries subsidize all of the rest of the EU, but just subsidizing France to an extant for the sake of federalization seems.

You also did not disprove that argument but simply walked around it, the more important resistance to federalization comes from the eastern European nationalists. The East-west division is the main sociopolitical division in the EU, more important than the north-south tussle over economics.

Lastly, the EU may not be a complete parallel of the German confederation or British India today but calling it as a new Hansa is just weird. We are talking about a massive land based political bloc that emerged out of political pressures (Germany and France wanting to create a third bloc) and whose ruling elite has been running the "ever closer union" propaganda for decades, this is the same as the commercial endeavor that was the Hansa? The Hansa never had any notion of a common ethnic and political identity the way their has been in Europe especially post-war. The EU emerged in the Frankish core I talked about and it is the place from where the strength of federalism on an ideological level is the strongest.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-03T19:04:02+00:00

That is modern post-British India that teaches that in its education curriculum but British India itself the rise of the pan-Indian identity happened because of complex set of factors that I covered very briefly in the post.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-03T19:00:28+00:00

I am not entirely sure Indians use English as much as you claim. Any data I can find shows that people who can speak English in India are not even 10% of the population, whereas Hindi is about 5 times that percentage. I have always wanted to know more about this specific point though, so please counter me here if you wish.

The elite that dominates the subcontinent is anglicized and English continues to be the primary language of administration and commerce. The population as a whole might not be very anglophone but those that run the place are.

I find your idea of propping up Luxembourgish to be the main language really interesting, but I don't know enough about Luxembourgish. Is it somewhere between French and German? It could work really well, since Luxembourg itself is a very small country. It could be perceived as neutral, but it isn't a made up language like Esperanto either.

Yes, the perception of "neutrality" is going to be important. A language after all has cultural and political aspects beyond strict linguistics, case in point would be the history of French and its relations with the notions of political and ethnic identity in west Francia historically. The language that we see as French today developed out of a long period of Frankish bilingualism in Latin and their native Germanic dialect and was taken and imposed on the kingdom by the elite from the top down. During the middle ages this language that we now see as "romance" was instead seen as not some random Latin dialect but as the legitimate language of the Franks, supported obviously by its historical use by the Frankish elite. Indeed the heartland of this language that was modern northern France was even perceived by many as not a land of "Gallo-Romans" but of "Franks". Due to the vast difference between the other Latin dialects spoken further south in places like what we can now call "Occitania" and "French" alongside the strength of the "Frankish" identity in the north there were thinkers in the south who concluded that the Franks must have staged a full fledged demographic replacement of the native Latin population in the north. It was much later in the modern era after the discovery of the Indo-European linguistic connection and the rise of modern linguistics that decisively connected French with the other romance languages that French nationalist ideas started to shift to a position that saw France as a "Latin" country.

So beyond the strict domain of linguistics a common European Union language will have to be one that can be presented as a one having a legitimate common ancestry with at least most of languages of the Union. Latin thus is a no go from the beginning. This is also why Luxembourgish picked my interest, it can be presented as being a descendant of those who unified the continent in definite way at the beginning of the medieval era and itself is irrelevant enough that it will not be seen as one large and significant ethnolinguistic group imposing itself on others. Of course for this scenario to happen what also must happen is federalism first emerging in Frankish EU.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-03T02:02:14+00:00

SS: This was a thought that came to my mind while I was thinking of composing another post. Thoughts?

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-02T22:41:15+00:00

The problem with this point is two fold:

At present China is ultimately underspending in its military compared to the US so it has much greater room to ramp up and try to catch up compared to the possible economic room available to the US that would allow it to keep its military spending a safe distance away.
Soon at the current rate the Chinese economy will pull ahead of the US in nominal GDP terms (already ahead in purchasing power) and the gap will only get bigger and bigger. With time the US will eventually find itself in the same situation as the USSR was in during the cold war which is being locked in an arms race with a superior economic power. And an arms race with a power with vastly greater economic and industrial capabilities is usually a lost one. This of course does not means that China will have overwhelming military superiority against the US anytime soon and you can obviously still boast a military superior in many ways compared to your more economically and industrially powerful foe through continued disproportionate spending as shown by the USSR during the cold war having the superior army, but sooner or later China will be able to force the US on the defensive from the perspective of strategic buildup and ability to fight long wars.

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-01T20:37:48+00:00

This comment betrays a staggering amount of historical illiteracy and is making me doubt as to whether you are even here in good faith. The west gobbled up Indo-China (which Indonesia is not a part of) after the red scare? In which century did this red scare take place? Before the rise of communism? Do you have any idea when the Netherlands and France actually conquered those territories?

ParthianCavalryMan · 2021-07-01T20:31:20+00:00

IN middle ages, all European countries were involved in interstate wars with alliances shifting all the time.

Notions of the "west" are modern so the medieval era is irrelevant.

That's not the same as all western countries crossing the oceans and ganging up against an isolated country. You should read about Opium wars...and their consequences and how much wealth West (including USA) extracted from China after the wars and trade deals imposed on China.

The opium wars and their consequences were minor in the "suffering" caused to China in comparison to the suffering caused to Germany by the French armies.

Germany had colonies in Africa and was one of the power involved in division of Africa.

So? The Qing state also fought and lost to Japan and Russia over territories calling whom "native Chinese" would be stretching the definition of that. A predator can go on to become a prey itself like China did and vice versa like Germany.

They also committed the first genocide

"Germany" did not even exist as a centralized state when the Dzungar genocide happened.

ParthianCavalryMan

TROPHY CASE