Bay 12 Games Forum

But then you get different atoms if you cut different ways - well-defined that ain't.
Maybe you should stop and think about what you are doing: You have a goal that you want to achieve, a position you want to promote, and now you're thinking up linguistic arguments to attain legitimacy, justification for your ideas.
I'd suggest you start with the arguments and see where they take you instead. It'll lead to fewer contradictions - and you'll like the results you'll get better than the nebulous notions you espouse right now.

This is good advice.

At the moment I'm just putting my thoughts out there, acknowledging difficulties I face when they come to me. I'm not going to go into government or become a policy maker so I'm not worried about getting things wrong, nor am I claiming that everything I say as gospel. I just know that out of these discussions my views will be tempered and strengthened or readjusted.

Now that is nonsense, really. There are many nations much bigger than 5 million.

When I've been looking at "nations" and things that I might potentially consider to be a nation, it's very rare that I would find one that's much bigger than the 5 million sweet spot. England would be one; numbering at around 50 million or something. Poland wouldn't be far behind; even sans Silesia and Kashuba you're looking at 30 million+. Occitania might be another, numbering at 15 million. Castile would be about 10 million +, so would France. Bavaria is also pretty huge when you add in the rest of Bavaria which may currently be a part of Austria, so that would be potentially 20 million. That said, it's far more common to find things like Brittany (4 million or so), Normandy (3.5 million or so), Scotland (5 million or so), Ireland (6 million), Wales (3 million), Wallonia (3.5 million), Catalonia (7 million), Valencia (5 million), Galicia (nearly 3 million), Andalusia (8 million), Basque Country (about 3 million), Arpitania (unclear, judging by Romandie + the rest probably 3 million), Frisia (potentially 3 million judging by what I've seen), Alemannia (about 7 million, counting the so-called Swiss Germans and Baden), Lower Saxony (about 7 million, even including parts of the Netherlands), Franconia (about 3 million +), Venice (4.5 million).

I'm somewhat concerned by the bloody enormous size of England in this model. England would end up being one of the biggest countries in all of Europe; this is where federations come in handy. Russia would be pretty enormous though.

From what I can tell, under this model the biggest countries in Europe would be England (50 million), Ukraine (45 million), Poland (35 million +)... I can't even tell how big Turkey and Russia would be. Turkey would certainly be very big, potentially a rival to Russia because even without the Kurds you're looking at 70 million +. Germany seems like it should have some kind of enormous nation lurking within it but I can't actually find it. It's as if everything is beautifully even and spread out across the states. Why is Germany so good at everything? Even population spread. Damn. Then again, looking at Italy, we've got something similar going on there too.

Just because there are sub-national identities doesn't mean they overrule the national identity.

I would argue that most overall "national identities", which could be described as meta-identities, like Spanish, British and German may actually be counter productive. I am on the verge of not considering them "real" or legitimate; that they just get in the way of the realisation of the potential of the nations within them. Obviously I'm not going to impose this on someone as I'm not some kind of military commander ploughing through their territories, everyone is welcome to have complex national identities of their own which can include these things; I'm just talking about how I see things.

Also I think you're underestimating linguistic differences, where I live there are even tiny differences between dialects in towns a few kilometers apart.

I know this, it was once the case in Scotland. That said, I do not consider dialectal differences to be sufficient to prevent nationhood. Most linguistic nations are just collections of dialects within one family.

Then you're underestimating other nation-building factors besides language, like common culture and common heritage/fate/history (the German word Schicksalsgemeinschaft sounds a bit martial, but fits), stuff like geographical/historical/religious divisions etc.

Originally I was deliberately getting rid of those in a bid to reassess how Europe might end up looking. As I said earlier however, that's how "Scotland" is united as one country. This is one of the problems I have. At the moment I'd prefer to keep religion/history out of things and focus on linguistic divisions and see where that takes me, as Helgoland recommended, rather than trying to build a strategy around what I want.

A country is not a nation or vice versa. There are plenty of nations that have no country of their own, and there are plenty of countries that aren't nations (like pretty much all former colonies).

This is where things get problematic. The definitions of "nations" and "countries" are incredibly problematic. I tend to define nations and countries as one and the same. Anything else is purely political i.e. states.

Owlbread, what you, and a lot of peoples alongside, are missing is that originally most peoples spoke a dialect that had a reach of a few villages tops. What they speak when they had to speak with peoples from farther away was a different language.  I know for a fact that walloon from Liege and from Charleroi didn't understand each other. There is no "natural linguistic boundaries".

This is a common problem. I think if we look at the dialects scientifically we can group them under the "Walloon" label. There is rarely a clear boundary, but you can usually see a kind of faded outline of one if you look hard enough at the dialect continuums. Nowadays, just like with Scots in Scotland,  the Walloon language will have softened its differences to the point that mutual intelligibility is possible.

Can I ask you a question the other way Owlbread? What countries do you think should not be split. I'm seriously wondering what's your criteria for a country that should stay in one piece.

I think when you have reduced it to the equivalent of an atom i.e. where one language was natively spoken across the territory at some point. An example would be Wales. If other languages were spoken but they are long dead and irretrievable and its speakers assimilated I would not recommend separation.

In what way? There's no bigger difference between them and Swedes than between Geats and Swedes, or Island-landers and Swedes. There's several regions in the northlands with a lot more distinguishable differences than that, not to mention several places where they speak a whole different language.

edit: I'm sorry if I come off as pressuring you on this, it just intrigued me what makes it appear so. For a moment before I had finished reading your post I even thought you had brought up Scania but not the Sami peoples though

Well, I am afraid I have only looked at Sweden superficially but I read about tbe disputes between Sweden and Denmark over Scania and its long history of separateness from the rest of Sweden due to its Danish heritage. I also heard about its separatist movement (which sounded terrible) and thought it all seemed ambiguous enough to mention it.

I hope I'm not being rude here, but how many of the countries that you consider to be "real" are real countries. It seems to me that you think if a  country didn't exist 100, 200, 300 years ago then it's not a real country and that if a country did exist back then and no longer does that we should break the country in it's place and recreate the real country. Again, not trying to be rude or start an argument, just an observation.

You're not being rude or starting an argument wobbly, don't worry. I enjoy debating this topic as challenges force me to address my arguments and come up with something better. I think that there are many "real" countries in the world. Perhaps even close to the majority, but I'd have to address that point with care. It just happens that within those "real countries" there are also other real countries, the example I gave earlier was the Netherlands which I think are one nation, but they contain one or two little nations or parts of nations within them, one of which would be Frisia. Ireland is an example of a real country without other countries within, though you could argue it is divided across two countries like Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia and so on. Iceland is a "real country", you could say. So is Belarus. Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway are all pretty much real countries, although one can debate Skaneland. They do of course all collectively control a nation which is split between all of them - the nation of the Sami people, whose easternmost reaches are currently under Russian control (Murmansk is rightful Sami clay).

So you see, there are many "real" countries out there. It's just that a lot of them have smaller nations inside them. Many small nations are divided across several countries. I think the minority of states (apart from the colonial ones which are a real headache) are leftovers from the olden days of realms rather than nation states. An example in Europe would be Belgium while an example in central Asia would be Afghanistan.

The problem with the colonial states (United States, Australia etc) as Reelya has illustrated is that, in some cases, they literally killed everyone that was there before or put them all in Oklahoma or something so that means the natural order of things has been eschewed. Colonialism causes problems with this "real country" idea in Europe just as much as in the New World. I tend to avoid dealing with the New World for this reason, and when I am forced to deal with colonialism on the home front i.e. in Ukraine or in Northern Ireland where colonists have settled tracts of Irish or Ukrainian land and are trying to keep them united with their respective nations (Russia and the UK), this causes lots of problems and I end up tying myself in knots.

I will need to think carefully about these places. Of course that doesn't mean that, where the boundaries are a bit more clear, we can't make pronouncements, such as calling for the independence of obvious "nations" within a colonial state like Russia such as Buryatia, Tuva, the North Caucasian countries and so on. The boundary is perhaps clearest in Hawaii in the USA, hence my occasional calls for its independence. I mean, I at least know that Hawaii should be independent. The rest I'm still trying to work out.

Sheb and Slowpoke have accurately identified the greatest points about Switzerland. I actually love Switzerland and as Sheb has stated it is genuinely my dream country. I think the canton model of Swiss governance should be explored. It's what I was getting at when I talked about a Federation of England; each "county" is like a Swiss canton. I also really like Belgium; I'd love to visit the country and I've wanted to do so for a long time. None of this prevents me from quietly wanting to chop them up though. Perhaps you should take it as a complement if I express an interest in trying to chop up your country; it means I'm interested in your country and I probably like it. But yes, I would feel worse about chopping up Switzerland because, as Sheb says, it is a state unified through the will of its people rather than war and coercion (a truly admirable thing), it's just that I think within the "ethnic" nation state lines (which for me are more linguistic than ethnic, as Reelya identifies) we can apply those principles. I don't think you need to have Breton ancestry and speak Breton to be Breton; you can be an Algerian immigrant and still be Breton through the power of your will. If you learn Breton in the process that's fantastic; you don't have to though.

Austria is problematic for me because I don't understand its ethno-linguistic composition very well. If I was to take a stab at it, I would be tempted to put most of it in a sort of greater Bavaria, with the rest of it becoming a part of Alemannia, Swabia and so on. But yeah, Austria is pretty much one of those "realm-type" countries for me.

And yet... for all my talk of these "organic, linguistic nations", Scotland is a union of once Gaelic speaking Picto-Gaels and now Scots/English speaking Britons. Arguably, both of those groups were united under Gaelic for a few hundred years, apart from the far south east of the country. It does cause problems, however. Scotland is far, far less clear cut than Wales and Ireland. Could it be that Scotland is not a real country? Maybe it is, if you deem it to be a continuation of the ancient Pictish nation, just absorbed into a wider one that now includes all sorts of people. But what does this mean? Does this mean that other "real countries" are not real at all? Does it mean that Edinburgh and the Scottish borders should be independent from Scotland? I have no idea. Scotland is actually an example of that Old World/New World colonialism that I talked about earlier, where Gaels colonised the Picts and the Norse colonised the Gaels and the Anglo-Saxons colonised the Britons and then the Picto-Gaels colonised them all then the Anglo-Normans colonised them all, but became something else in the process. Much of the damage was done peacefully of course.

But then again, you think that of every country, so no surprises there.

Not every country. I think the Netherlands are real, for instance. They just control Frisia which I disagree with. There is no "Belgium" however - no mother nation. It's just the name given to a union of two countries.

However I should add that this is my point of view. Sheb is more than entitled to his own - I hope I am not offending him too much by saying his country doesn't exist. I do concede however that the regions within such old school "realms" are usually tied together through shared historical experience - so just like Flanders and Wallonia are separate nations, due to history they are Belgian in character. Whether this means Belgium is a country is another matter.

Honestly, I think Belgium is dead already. The NVA won. Now it's just a matter of waiting until the corpse grow cold.

I still hope foolishly that the Walloons will rediscover their national identity and form a separate state.

GreatJustice, I'll try to put this as gently as I can, but are you joking? Please tell me you're having a laugh and it went right over my head.

It doesn't mean democrat but it means respecting traditions, keeping the status quo, like taking the constitution seriously rather than brute-forcing into it laws that got repealed by the constitutional court. Favoring a strong state isn't conservative either that's more of a leftish thing. But they are certainly not progressive I give you that.
They are part of the conservative and democratic EPP

What is considered "conservative" varies from country to country. Conservative just means keeping the status quo, respecting traditions and generally opposing radical reform. Exactly what the status quo that they should be preserving is varies from country to country. There are of course traits common to most conservatives.

In the USA a Conservative may support small government, freedom to bear arms and the ensuring that the USA is a Christian country. In the UK a Conservative may be quite authoritarian - pro government surveillance, keeping guns banned, tough on crime, all about the "big society" thing where everyone has a role, promoting Christian values, less regulation and more privatisation. They can support the NHS in principle,  however (unthinkable in America) - just a very stripped down, mostly privatised one.

As a contrast - the American Conservative might complain about kids not praying in schools enough. In the UK a Conservative would complain about kids swearing on the bus.