AHC: country-states

xsampa

Banned
Defining a nation as a group of people w. common ethnic/linguistic etc. heritage, a state as a government, and a country as a geographic territory/area, get !alt-Nationalism to center around building country-states instead of nation-states.
 
Defining a nation as a group of people w. common ethnic/linguistic etc. heritage, a state as a government, and a country as a geographic territory/area, get !alt-Nationalism to center around building country-states instead of nation-states.

Multi national states are already the norm. From the UK to China and nearly all of sub-saharan africa. Use Wikipedia on the terms.
 
nation:
state:
country:

As the other poster said, it already exist: Belgian nationalists, Canadian nationalist, British nationalists, etc.... people who define their nationalism more in term of a country (which they perceive rightly or wrongly as multicultural) then of a single shared ancestry.
 
Well, the thing about Europe is that it's nationalities are already divided by geographical landmarks. The pyrenees between Spain and France, the Rhine between France and Germany, the Alps between Germans and Italians, etc.
 
As the other poster said, it already exist: Belgian nationalists, Canadian nationalist, British nationalists, etc.... people who define their nationalism more in term of a country (which they perceive rightly or wrongly as multicultural) then of a single shared ancestry.

Nationalism is about more than shared ancestry, though - almost all New World states are nation-states and they're all a hodge-podge. And inasmuch as people are British or Belgian nationalists, they are so by emphasizing common British or Belgian cultural and historical touchstones, that they feel transcend bounds of language or ancestry.

What OP is suggesting, I guess, would involve a more intense connection to the land itself rather than people. You'd need, say, Italians and French on either side of their border deciding that their common bond to the Alps or the Mediterranean coast there is more important than bonds of language, food, or custom to Paris and Rome.

The problem, of course, is as stated earlier: a lot of nation-states already occupy "natural borders", because nations tend to spread, and because aside from things like mountains and major rivers that act as good borders while supporting similar lifestyles on either side, geography shapes culture within "bounded regions".
 
Nationalism is about more than shared ancestry, though - almost all New World states are nation-states and they're all a hodge-podge. And inasmuch as people are British or Belgian nationalists, they are so by emphasizing common British or Belgian cultural and historical touchstones, that they feel transcend bounds of language or ancestry.

What OP is suggesting, I guess, would involve a more intense connection to the land itself rather than people. You'd need, say, Italians and French on either side of their border deciding that their common bond to the Alps or the Mediterranean coast there is more important than bonds of language, food, or custom to Paris and Rome.

The problem, of course, is as stated earlier: a lot of nation-states already occupy "natural borders", because nations tend to spread, and because aside from things like mountains and major rivers that act as good borders while supporting similar lifestyles on either side, geography shapes culture within "bounded regions".

A Wikipedia search of nation state and the lists of nation states as opposed to multi national states disproves the notion that much of America is nation states. Belgium and the UK are not nation states as well.
 
Well, the thing about Europe is that it's nationalities are already divided by geographical landmarks. The pyrenees between Spain and France, the Rhine between France and Germany, the Alps between Germans and Italians, etc.

None of your three borders actually checks out. First, the easiest: the Rhine. The traditional language boundary between Germanic and Romance languages is well to the west of the Rhine; within France, it more or less corresponds to the 1871 boundary. The Alsatians did not really feel French until after WW1, and were treated as a minority group until well after WW2.

The other two are more complicated. There are intermediate language communities between Standard French and Standard Italian or Castilian Spanish. From Paris to the southeast, there's Arpitan, Occitan, and Gallo-Italian, and only past the La Spezia-Rimini line do we get to Standard Italian. The Gallo-Italians felt Italian in the Renaissance already, but the Occitans did not feel French. After France annexed Savoy and Nice in 1860, Italian irredentists kept claiming those two regions, especially Nice, arguing that the local dialect was more like Ligurian than like Provençal, while France asserted it was more like Provençal; neither Ligurian nor Provençal had any official status, and both were extirpated by public education in the ensuing decades.

In Spain today, the Catalans don't feel particularly Spanish. There's a massive secession movement, which won a referendum that the state regards as illegal; they maintain their own language, and Catalan and Occitan are more similar to each other than either is to its respective national language.

Multi national states are already the norm. From the UK to China and nearly all of sub-saharan africa. Use Wikipedia on the terms.

The UK is an English nation-state, which extirpated the Welsh language by caning schoolchildren who dared speak it. China is a Han nation-state, with some pretense to multinationalism by giving the Tibetans, Uyghurs, etc. pretend-autonomy. The US is an English nation-state, with strong pretense to multiculturalism, which means that everyone celebrates Christmas but possibly by a different name (Jewish-American Hanukkah is unrecognizable to Israelis).

In the developed world, the only multinational states are Canada (English and French), Belgium (Flemish and Walloon), Switzerland (German, French, and Italian), Singapore (Chinese, Malay, and Indian), Spain (Castilian, Catalan, Valencian, and Basque), and maybe New Zealand (English and Maori). There are some others with multiple official languages or some measure of cultural autonomy for minorities, but there the minorities are excluded from politics (Arabs in Israel, North American Indians, and Australian Aborigines), or only really have rights in small autonomous sections that aren't fully integrated into the state (Swedes in the Åland Islands, and Faroese and Greenland Inuits). There are some with multiple languages meant to be used by the same national community in different circumstances: Ireland with English and Irish, and Luxembourg with French, German, and Luxembourgish. Singapore qualifies as well with English and its respective ethnic languages, but the three ethnic groups are all included in politics, even if there's systemic discrimination.
 
In the developed world, the only multinational states are Canada (English and French), Belgium (Flemish and Walloon), Switzerland (German, French, and Italian), Singapore (Chinese, Malay, and Indian), Spain (Castilian, Catalan, Valencian, and Basque), and maybe New Zealand (English and Maori). There are some others with multiple official languages or some measure of cultural autonomy for minorities, but there the minorities are excluded from politics (Arabs in Israel, North American Indians, and Australian Aborigines), or only really have rights in small autonomous sections that aren't fully integrated into the state (Swedes in the Åland Islands, and Faroese and Greenland Inuits). There are some with multiple languages meant to be used by the same national community in different circumstances: Ireland with English and Irish, and Luxembourg with French, German, and Luxembourgish. Singapore qualifies as well with English and its respective ethnic languages, but the three ethnic groups are all included in politics, even if there's systemic discrimination.

It seems that you are basing this strictly on linguistic criteria. I would posit that language is one criterion for defining a "nation" but not the only. Religion, ancestry (real or mythologized) and a sense of common history are others.

I find it difficult to argue that the United States, for example, is a nation-state when one-eighth of the population has a distinct history of being enslaved and going through segregation; that's a hugely different historical memory than that held by most white Americans (and people of other races), whose ancestors came to the "land of opportunity." And the legacy of these differing histories survives today; racial reconciliation is far from having been achieved.
 
This "multinational" state is 91% Han, it's one of the most homogeneous countries in the world.

And 1/3rd of the world is "Asian" that doesn't mean Earth is homogenously Asian. You're erroneously using a percentage about a large geographic area. Tibet and Uighur majority areas along with other minority-majority areas make the PRC a decidedly NON- nation-state. Again, I recommend all of you please read the definition on Wikipedia, while not a great overall source of knowledge the related articles on this topic are well enough written and are from the point of view of political science and NOT popular culture understanding of nation-state.
 
And 1/3rd of the world is "Asian" that doesn't mean Earth is homogenously Asian. You're erroneously using a percentage about a large geographic area. Tibet and Uighur majority areas along with other minority-majority areas make the PRC a decidedly NON- nation-state. Again, I recommend all of you please read the definition on Wikipedia, while not a great overall source of knowledge the related articles on this topic are well enough written and are from the point of view of political science and NOT popular culture understanding of nation-state.

Half of the world actually, but 91.5 (thanks wikipedia) is still much larger and dominant than 50-55 in term of percentages.

If the PRC isn't a nation state, I can't find one single entity in the world that would count. Even the Japanese have the Ainus and Okinawans.

EDIT: Oh, you meant the stereotypical "Asian" (in the sense of East-Southeast Asian) so, yeah 30% still much lower than 90%.
 
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UKFA

Banned
How about the gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands of Scotland? The region is sometimes referred to as the gaidhealtachd, the gaelic-speaking land. Keep it independent of the rest of Scotland, have them keep their language, their clan systems, and other traditions (instead of them being revived in somewhat of a bastardised form by lowlanders as per OTL).
 
It seems that you are basing this strictly on linguistic criteria. I would posit that language is one criterion for defining a "nation" but not the only. Religion, ancestry (real or mythologized) and a sense of common history are others.

Indeed, and I'd class the Netherlands between the late 19c and about 1970 as a multinational state, because of its practice of consociational democracy. But with secularization, people no longer care very much about the Protestant vs. Catholic vs. social democratic distinction; the Protestant and Catholic parties merged in 1977. Lebanon remains multinational, despite being linguistically uniform, because the sectarian divisions there still matter.

However, in the Western European and North American countries, those religious divisions don't really matter anymore. For example, in the US, in the 1960 election Kennedy was criticized for being too Catholic, but by 2004, Evangelical Protestants criticized Kerry for not being Catholic enough.

I find it difficult to argue that the United States, for example, is a nation-state when one-eighth of the population has a distinct history of being enslaved and going through segregation; that's a hugely different historical memory than that held by most white Americans (and people of other races), whose ancestors came to the "land of opportunity." And the legacy of these differing histories survives today; racial reconciliation is far from having been achieved.

There's plenty of conflict, but how much difference is there?

For example, imagine a holiday calendar developed by black Americans, based entirely on their own history. It would keep Christmas and Easter, as they're religious holidays for nearly all US blacks, but then add various days commemorating slave rebellions, emancipation, and civil rights, and days of mourning commemorating defeats of slave rebellions and notable lynchings and assassinations (e.g. of MLK). This is not what we see. What we actually see is that when black Americans developed their own holiday, they created a Christmas clone in Kwanzaa, essentially a way to be normative Americans without admitting as much.

In modern-day US politics, blacks are one voting bloc in a coalition. We can say things like "blacks vote Democratic in general elections and are currently supporting Clinton in the primary" on the same level that we say "white Evangelicals vote for Republicans and are currently supporting Cruz." Blacks are not contrasted with whites, but with subgroups of whites of similar size. In contrast, in Israel (which would be multinational if it didn't politically exclude the Arabs), Arabs are compared with Jews and only rarely with subgroups of Jews; in Canada, there are separate debates in English and French and for a while there was a strong separatist movement; and in Belgium, there are separate parties for Walloons and Flemings, which ally on the national level by ideology.

The situation for US Jews is similar to that for US blacks. American Jews complain noisily about anti-Semitism and feel different, and a few years ago there was an odious Slate article asking if it's even possible to be a French Jew, France demands so much assimilation. But at the same time, American Jews have turned Hanukkah into their own Christmas, complete with gift-giving; it was not originally an important holiday in Judaism. At the same time, holidays that could not be so Christianized have decreased in importance, for examples Rosh Hashana and Passover. Of note, the spellcheck in this forum recognizes the word Hanukkah but not Rosh or Hashana, or Pesach, or Yom, or Kippur.

For both blacks and Jews, assimilation was a rapid process during and immediately after WW2. On Twitter, fantasy author Saladin Ahmed, who is Arab-American and married to a black American, recently tweeted about Golden Age comics. He found that there was a WW2-era black superhero, published in black magazines, contemporary with early Superman and Batman. But by the Silver Age, the black magazines folded, and the superhero was racelifted to white. In essence, blacks switched to reading the same magazines as the rest of America, and those were written and edited by whites. With Jews, Joseph Heller writes that he initially intended Yossarian to be a Brooklyn Jew like himself, but by the time he was writing Catch-22, from 1953 to 1961, American Jews were so assimilated that this would not convey the character's foreignness, so instead he made him Assyrian.

For more recent ethnic groups in the US, i.e. Asians and Hispanics, we see more recent assimilation. It's not common for children of educated immigrants from either group to maintain their parents' language. While many second-generation Hispanic-Americans do maintain the Spanish language, a) I am told their Spanish is not great by the standards of any Spanish-speaking country, b) this is less common in the educated middle class (what Americans call upper middle class), and c) by the third generation, loss of Spanish fluency is widespread.

However, unlike the Netherlands, the US was never a multinational democracy. Back when blacks were truly different, the US was an apartheid state. It's not possible for a minority group in the US, or any other first-world nation-state today, to achieve political rights without assimilating; nor is it possible for any immigrant group in the various multinational European states to achieve political rights without assimilating to the language group in the city it's moved to (English in Toronto, French in Brussels, etc.). Of note, the Netherlands did try to adapt the consociational model to add Muslims in as another group, but it didn't go anywhere, and nowadays the important Muslim political leaders, e.g. Ahmed Aboutaleb, call for assimilation.

The political and social structures we're used to in the developed world don't really let any group maintain autonomy, unless it's geographically concentrated. In the 1930s, there was a call for autonomy for the Black Belt... but only among the communists and other radicals; even that could not conceivably happen this side of the Great Migration. A few countries, such as Israel and India, maintain a millet system in which religious groups have their own internal family laws, but at least in the case of Israel, it's more or less explicitly a statement, "this is unimportant, so we're devolving it to religious authorities." With modern public education, the result is that groups without autonomy end up assimilating very quickly. Singapore avoids that by imposing foreign language studies on students based on their ethnicity, but this only works because English exists there as a neutral language, whereas in every other developed country, there is no language that fills that role.
 

PhilippeO

Banned
The AHC was for the 19th century nationalist movements be replaced with that.

Different Vienna ?

Austria already multinational. If German and Italian nationalism fail, there might be more dynastic state survive.

Prussia: not getting Westphalia and Rhine province, instead more Polish speaking land not given to Russia but retained, turning it into German-Polish state.

Savoy: getting Provence, Burgundy, and Alsace. become three lingual state.

Dutch : Aachen and Cologne ? become bilingual Dutch-German state.

Two Sicily : need to be made stronger to resist Italian unification. Sardinia ?

West Germany : creation of strong state that can resist Austria, Prussia and Bavaria ? Westphalia ? Hannover ? or Hesse ? Or all three.
 
I think you need to create a stronger sense that the geography shapes the real characteristics of the person and the individual. There are already theories like this floating around in the early modern period, so just have them be amplified.

Then you could get a real sense that you and I may speak different tongues and have different folkways, but we are still essentially North European plainers, or Alpinists, or whatever.
 
I think about the only way you could have people developing a strictly geographical sense of belonging would be if they came to be seen as economical units. In that way, people's ethnicity would be irrelevant as long as one participate in the economical life and the defence of the country would be for its assets, natural or otherwise.
 
The problem with trying to come up with geography-based alt-nationalism is that it did in fact exist in OTL, in France. French nationalism was never ethnic. As long as you act exactly like the Parisian bourgeoisie and have no identity except French, you're considered French.

The imposition of the French language on the entire country comes from two sources. The first is that a modern industrial society requires standardized languages. It features high social and geographic mobility, high levels of internal trade, and economic specialization across regions. If people stick to their village dialects, it's harder for people in rural regions with a surplus of population (for example, East Elbia) to move to urban regions with factories that are looking for labor (for example, the Ruhr). It also requires standardized education, which exists both to give people basic skills and to create a sense of national loyalty.

The second source is that France was never a federal state. In federal states, it's possible to maintain several standard languages. Switzerland is the main example, and Belgium was forced to become one, creating federalism based around language regions. In the Revolution, the Girondists did favor more local autonomy, but they stopped short of federalism, which everyone agreed would just split the French nation apart. Had France become federal during the Revolution, it's possible that Alsace, Brittany, and Aquitaine/Languedoc could have maintained their languages; but the local langues d'oïl, like Picard and Gallo, would most likely have gone into terminal decline.

This what-if-France-were-more-federal question mirrors Spain, which isn't quite federal, but accords its regions a lot of autonomy, as if it were federal. It underwent the same process of language standardization as France, but Basque and Catalan avoided assimilation, and developed standards of their own. Catalonia and the Basque Country were quite rich in the 19c, which helped them maintain their cultures, but the Southwest of France was also rich around the Revolution, and did try to maintain autonomy, before being crushed.
 
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