Least likely European nations states

Galba Otho Vitelius

This may be too complicated a topic and title, but taking the set of European countries where most people speak the same language, and which have their own government and sovereignty, which are the most likely to wind up as part of some other country or have a different language in a different timeline?

Note that Belgium and Switzerland and both excluded, as being federations of peoples with different languages. Making sure that Germany and Italy never unite doesn't meet the criteria either (and anyway people tend to exaggerate the weakness of pre-1870 national German institutions). I think the leading candidates to have at the most a regional, not a national, identity are Portugal and Ireland, with Norway some ways behind them.
 

GuildedAgeNostalgia

1) Norway. If it wasn't for the British and Swedish attacking Denmark, Norway would have been perfectly fine being in a political union with Denmark.

2) Albania. Genuinely surprised that the European great powers protected in from Greek, Montenegrin, and Serbian annexation.

3) Belarus and Ukraine. Could have been easily assimilated into Russia as Russians.
 

casaubon

North Macedonia is unlikely to arise absent a specific series of contingent historical circumstances.

Slovakia probably ends up as part of another state most of the time.
 
Archduke

Archduke

Maybe the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Austria could have ended up as part of Germany. The Netherlands would need a 1300/1400s PoD to avoid falling to the Burgundians.
 
Neoteros

Neoteros

Archduke said:
Maybe the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Austria could have ended up as part of Germany. The Netherlands would need a 1300/1400s PoD to avoid falling to the Burgundians.
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Bohemia and Moravia could've easily become Germanized enough, with a HRE-era POD, to end up becoming part of a pan-German state, too, with Czechs being reduced to the role of a minority akin to the Sorbs; Slovenia, too.

Belarus and Ukraine, if the Commonwealth had endured, would've probably become a single, Ruthenian nation.
 

Galba Otho Vitelius

One major nation I didn't think of would be Turkey. It doesn't happen, at least as a Turkish speaking, Sunni Muslim nation, in most Byzantine Empire survives scenarios. It also may not happen in scenarios where some other group, like the Bulgarians, Serbs, or Normans, take over the Byzantine Empire, or even in Ottoman Empire timelines where the empire survives and keeps its multinational and multiethnic character.

For that matter, it would not be difficult to alter history to get rid of modern Bulgaria.
 
Denliner

Denliner

Romania probably wouldn't be a thing if there was an existing Rhomania (the actual Romania) running around. It was only after the two existing vestiges of the Roman Empire became extinct (the HRE and the Eastern Roman Empire) that the Vlachs were comfortable in claiming the title and the Roman lineage.

Hungary could easily not have existed had the Avars survived or been replaced by some kind of Slavic, Hunnic, or even an Iranian settlement in the Pannonian Basin.
 
DrakonFin

DrakonFin

EternalCynic said:
Finland had been an integral part of Sweden for 600 years before it was lost to Russia.
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...But still the great majority of the people spoke Finnish (dialects) as opposed to Swedish all this time. Had Finland remained a part of Sweden past 1809, a form of *Finnish nationalism and national identity would have born by the 20th century. Unless Stockholm went for draconian, totalitarian levels of Swedification in the Eastern Provinces, which might in some extreme case be possible but would hardly be very likely.
 

EternalCynic

DrakonFin said:
...But still the great majority of the people spoke Finnish (dialects) as opposed to Swedish all this time. Had Finland remained a part of Sweden past 1809, a form of *Finnish nationalism and national identity would have born by the 20th century. Unless Stockholm went for draconian, totalitarian levels of Swedification in the Eastern Provinces, which might in some extreme case be possible but would hardly be very likely.
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Is it possible that Finland becomes like Ireland, where the native language gets increasingly marginalized, even as national identity intensifies?
 
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