The Dutch were already different, the belgiums were artificially created by the British and before then they were part of the hre until its dissolution and the Swiss are the predecessors of the Austrians since they are German but not German.
Belgium didn't have to forge a non-German identity - it didn't have one in the first place.
The Dutch were already different, the belgiums were artificially created by the British and before then they were part of the hre until its dissolution and the Swiss are the predecessors of the Austrians since they are German but not German.
No the Belgians are the Flemish and Wallonians, who were already established national identities, they were "artificially created".
Anyways Bavaria, Baden, and Wurtemmburg are easy to make a different identity as they were already pretty different.
The Westphalians could be one.
The Rhenish for sure.
Well is not like Belgium is the most nationally united country. American post-independence was really aware of their cultural independence from the homeland and Russian speaking Ukrainians are the most in favour of a East leaning Ukraine.There is this very strong and somewhat bizarre tendency on AH.com to hate the Belgians and want to divide their nation just because they aren't conforming to the Napoleon III-esque idea of nations defined by language (though oddly enough, by the same reasoning the USA ought not to have rebelled against the equally Anglophone United Kingdom and the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians shouldn't be united either, yet those views don't seem so popular…). Goodness knows why. Perhaps just a general function of AH.com's Germanophilia.
The Belgians were not an artificial nation created by the evil nefarious British to hurt the glorious French/Dutch/Germans/whoever. The Belgians rose up of their own accord in the French revolutionary era and created their own state. Then they did so again—yes, in Flanders as well as Wallonia—in which the British contribution was limited to supplying a monarch out of fear and hatred of republicanism, i.e. the same thing the reactionary European powers did all over the place in the 19th century (and even the early 20th, judging by CP plans for what to do with the states created from Brest-Litovsk) when a new state was created in Europe.
To suggest that Belgium is some Frankenstein's monster of a nation created by outside force or a state purely based on historical dynastic links rather than a national identity à la Austria-Hungary, rather than a nation whose people (at a time when they were not a state) rose up and created a nation-state for themselves, is simply contradictory to fact. Indeed, Belgium has a better claim to being a nation which built itself a state (rather than a state that built itself a nation) than, say, France; France wasn't created from a long history of partition and foreign rule purely by its people rising up to establish, without much precedent, a French state. (NB: I'm not saying that France isn't a nation-state. Only an idiot would interpret my words in that manner.)
Yes, there are separatists in Belgium, but there are Québécois separatists in Canada; there are Bavarian separatists in Germany (though not many); there are Scottish separatists in the United Kingdom; there are Confederate separatists in the United States; et cetera. The existence of separatists does not mean that a nation is not a nation.
In addition, Matteo's comments about the folly of transposing the modern concept of nationhood onto the much older concept of statehood (if you asked a peasant farmer somewhere in Europe from five-hundred years ago what or who he was, he'd probably say 'Christian', 'man' or mention the name of his village) are very true.
Prussia could easily have ended up independent in an environment where the revolutionaries of 1848 were more successful in the rest of Germany but resisted (as in OTL) in Austria and Prussia, but Austria and Prussia failed to subjugate the revolutionaries in the rest of Germany. It certainly has at least as much potential for a separate identity as Austria does, given the Teutonic and Baltic links and history of Prussia (prior to the unification of Brandenburg-Prussia). The same scenario could see Bavaria separated too; it too could have separate identity. Germany could even have not been unified at all; foolish determinism about "the nation will always find a way" aside, it isn't difficult to make it so that there is no state powerful enough to destroy the old German Confederation and a reactionary consensus continues to be maintained into the modern day.
Well is not like Belgium is the most nationally united country. American post-independence was really aware of their cultural independence from the homeland and Russian speaking Ukrainians are the most in favour of a East leaning Ukraine.
Republicanism? The Belgian state was formed out by French speaking aristocracy and pissed of Catholics not by Belgian nationalist.
Why do you think that Belgium was formed by nationalist from every part of the society? It wasn´t. It was supported by Walloons and other French speaking people without opposition but neither with the support of the Flemish peasants.
Separatist in Quebec have a different language, separatist in Scotland don´t but they do have both a widespread dialect and their own but less widespread language, the CSA was created by rich landowners and the Bavarians tend to use more their language-dialect than other regions of Germany.
The Teutonic part of Prussia is so wrong, the center of Prussia is Brandenburg the name Prussia has been taken because the land was outside the HRE but Brandenburg itself isn´t.
Yeah you could maintain the division but the confederation would still unite militarly and economically the nations
plus the whole German unification was enacted by Conservatives at the end.
There is this very strong and somewhat bizarre tendency on AH.com to hate the Belgians and want to divide their nation just because they aren't conforming to the Napoleon III-esque idea of nations defined by language (though oddly enough, by the same reasoning the USA ought not to have rebelled against the equally Anglophone United Kingdom and the Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians shouldn't be united either, yet those views don't seem so popular…). Goodness knows why. Perhaps just a general function of AH.com's Germanophilia.
The Belgians were not an artificial nation created by the evil nefarious British to hurt the glorious French/Dutch/Germans/whoever. The Belgians rose up of their own accord in the French revolutionary era and created their own state. Then they did so again—yes, in Flanders as well as Wallonia—in which the British contribution was limited to supplying a monarch out of fear and hatred of republicanism, i.e. the same thing the reactionary European powers did all over the place in the 19th century (and even the early 20th, judging by CP plans for what to do with the states created from Brest-Litovsk) when a new state was created in Europe.
To suggest that Belgium is some Frankenstein's monster of a nation created by outside force or a state purely based on historical dynastic links rather than a national identity à la Austria-Hungary, rather than a nation whose people (at a time when they were not a state) rose up and created a nation-state for themselves, is simply contradictory to fact. Indeed, Belgium has a better claim to being a nation which built itself a state (rather than a state that built itself a nation) than, say, France; France wasn't created from a long history of partition and foreign rule purely by its people rising up to establish, without much precedent, a French state. (NB: I'm not saying that France isn't a nation-state. Only an idiot would interpret my words in that manner.)
Yes, there are separatists in Belgium, but there are Québécois separatists in Canada; there are Bavarian separatists in Germany (though not many); there are Scottish separatists in the United Kingdom; there are Confederate separatists in the United States; et cetera. The existence of separatists does not mean that a nation is not a nation.
Republicanism? The Belgian state was formed out by French speaking aristocracy and pissed of Catholics not by Belgian nationalist.
Oh well then I agree. Personally for me it doesn´t matter if Belgium was or was not an English artificial state because then you could expand it and say things like this to many other countries.I don't think you realise what I was saying.
I even went to the trouble of explicitly stating that the existence of separatists doesn't make a nation not a nation. There was a contention that Belgium is "artificially created" by the British rather than a real nation, which is total nonsense—the Belgians created the Belgian state; the British just insisted that it have a monarchy, which, as I did say, was standard practice for the reactionary European powers, as seen most easily in the Balkans.
I'm not arguing that Belgium is the most stable and homogeneous of nations; I'm arguing simply that it is a nation, not some British construct as the Belgophobes here have been saying.
I don't doubt that the aristocracy played a role in the revolution, and that so did Catholics (those being such a large number of the Belgian people that it would be absurd if they weren't involved). None of that means that there wasn't any such thing as Belgian nationalism. To pick an example you might be more familiar with, the American Revolution prominently featured major land-owners, some of them even slave-holding ones; so did many revolutions in Latin America; so did several of the Polish rebellions against foreign rule; so have revolutionary efforts in many countries.
I would like to ask for what allows you to make this assertion.
And? Does this mean that Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany aren't nations? Of course not.
All of that's true, but since when has nationalism ever been based on firm historical fact? It's all about appeals to a glorious past, claims of a glorious future, dubious distinctions between different people (nationalism being a concept that started in an era before the homogenisation of language through education and mass media, so it would be really hard to draw a line on a map and say at what point the local villages' dialect officially became, e.g., a dialect of German or a dialect of French) and praise of in-groups while hatred of out-groups… there's not much rationality in there. Think of how the English can look back fondly on kings of England who would actually have spoken Norman French and regarded English as a peasant tongue. Nationalism is all about constructing a mythology; it has little to do with the real past.
I don't think the German Confederation as it existed in OTL could reasonably be called a country; its parts were too independent from each other, to the point that they could even wage war against each other (Prussia declaring war on Austria wasn't a case of a state defying a federal government; there was no federal government to speak of); it was more like an alliance bloc than a federation, more like the EU than the USA (and arguably less centralised than even the EU; can one imagine the sort of conflict between EU countries that took place between German states?). The North German Confederation is a completely different kettle of fish; it has as much claim to be called a single country as the German Empire does (the constitution was almost a total copy), which is to say, a very good one.
Yes, but not for ideological reasons; it was a series of opportunistic steps taken by men who thought of themselves as Prussian reactionaries first and foremost. Otto von Bismarck made his name fighting against pan-Germanists. His own self-serving memoirs suggesting that he orchestrated the whole series of events in the unification of Germany (a claim that doesn't stand up to scrutiny) aside, to claim that he was a pan-Germanist ideologue is not borne out by the evidence.
I don't doubt that conservatives did enact German unification but it's hardly inevitable that they would have done; in OTL reactionary leaders in a particular German state saw the opportunity to strengthen that state by absorbing the rest of Germany into it, but there's no guarantee that a state would have been in a position to do this in an ATL with a sufficiently early PoD.
Is this a joke? Every part of the American society was part of the revolution, for or against. It didn´t start with the intention of independence but at the end of it it was a Democracy even if not universal.Republicanism? The United States was formed out by the planter Aristocracy and pissed off farmers, not by American nationalists.
Is this a joke? Every part of the American society was part of the revolution, for or against. It didn´t start with the intention of independence but at the end of it it was a Democracy even if not universal.
There was some support for a Republic but the Aristocracy wasn´t in favour of course, could you say the same for the USA?