AHC/WI: Proposed State Mergers

kernals12

Banned
Wikipedia has a fascinating page listing all of the proposals for merging countries.
For the ones that didn't go through, did go through but left out some of the states invited, or broke apart after a short time, can you think of a way to get it to work and what the implications would be.
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I think that Weimar Republic proposal, had it been accepted, would have accelerated the course to World War II. I know Miedzymorze isn't very realistic, but I remember reading a question on Yahoo! Answers proposing a similar idea of an Anti-Russian State following the Cold War. The various ethnic groups would endlessly quarrel, leading to instant collapse. An Alliance between those states, rather than a merger, fits my idea I posted a few years back of a proto-NATO, backed by the United States, Great Britain, France, and more to contain the Russians and hold off the Germans.
 
I think Intermarium, or a more limited Zapadoslavia, could work out. It would just need to have a federal structure to prevent the larger ethnicities from dominating. Eastern Europe has been in need of a regional power to balance against Germany and Russia ever since the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Perhaps we will still live to see it if the EU doesn't survive.
 
Africa could also do with some consolidation, a strong central government and a large single market are hugely important for economic development.
 

kernals12

Banned
I think Intermarium, or a more limited Zapadoslavia, could work out. It would just need to have a federal structure to prevent the larger ethnicities from dominating. Eastern Europe has been in need of a regional power to balance against Germany and Russia ever since the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Perhaps we will still live to see it if the EU doesn't survive.
So you look at what happened with Yugoslavia and think that making it much bigger would work?
 
So you look at what happened with Yugoslavia and think that making it much bigger would work?
Well, Yugoslavia did survive for quite an impressive ammount of time for such a dubiously stable country (seven decades, with a short interruption in WW2) until collapsing, so, maybe Zapadoslavia could float onwards through time under a stable leadership.
 

kernals12

Banned
It was socialism and authoritarianism that caused Yugoslavia to fail, or do you think that they were the only multinational state in history?
I've never seen a country with more than 15 major distinct ethnic groups stay together without brutal repression.
 

kernals12

Banned
What is the dominant ethnic group in India and South Africa? Why couldn’t Poles then be one? Why couldn’t they create their own Lingua Franca like the Indonesians did?
For your first question, Hindis and Blacks, respectively. And I would guess Poles would make up less than 40% of Intermarium's population. The proponents of the idea admitted they simply wanted to unite Eastern Europe so that they wouldn't get squeezed by the Russians and Germans, not because the people living there formed a coherent nation. I think the best they could do is a defense union, like NATO, or EETO if you will.
 
For your first question, Hindis and Blacks, respectively. And I would guess Poles would make up less than 40% of Intermarium's population. The proponents of the idea admitted they simply wanted to unite Eastern Europe so that they wouldn't get squeezed by the Russians and Germans, not because the people living there formed a coherent nation. I think the best they could do is a defense union, like NATO, or EETO if you will.

‘Blacks’.... are your for real?
 
I've never seen a country with more than 15 major distinct ethnic groups stay together without brutal repression.

If this is a reference to the USSR, then the distinctions made between that and India/South Africa seems rather blurry since Russians were the outright majority of the population and given that in South Africa the dominant ethnic group you referred to ("blacks") is not actually unified linguistically (Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Swazi,...etc which at least are all South Bantu languages, never mind the KhoiKhoi and San languages which aren't Bantu languages at all)), culturally (see before, plus the Khoikhoi and San) or ethnically. The East Slavs (Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians) formed something like 65-70% of the USSR's population and they had more linguistic similarity between them than the San do with the Zulu.

India and South Africa both have dominant ethno-religious groups. Indonesia has one language.

Indonesia has one language? That's a massive oversimplification. Indonesia has 700 languages. Yes, 80% of the population speaks Indonesian, but then Indonesian itself is a standardized variant of Malay and in that respect there is somewhat more similarity to the situation that existed in Yugoslavia where Serbian and Croatian are very close such that during the time of Yugoslavia it was standardized (at least as a written language though with two alphabets) as "Serbo-Croatian" and spoken as the native language (in some dialect or another) by at least 70-75% of the population and was the second language for many in Slovenia and Macedonia.

In fact, Indonesia rather resembles Yugoslavia in some key respects except it didn't have nearly 50 years of communism to destroy it:

Dominant Ethnic Group in Indonesia - Javanese - 40% of the population

Dominant Ethnic Group in Yugoslavia - Serbs - 36% of the population


Main Language of Indonesia - Indonesian - spoken by 80% of the population (however it is not a first language for most Indonesians as even the 2010 census showed that approximately only 20% spoke Indonesian at home; it is mainly a second language and the lingua franca of the archipelago; most Indonesians speak both Indonesian and a local language such as Javanese, which was spoken in over 40% of households even in the 1980 census. Javanese by the way has some noticeable differences to Indonesian despite being in the same broad language family)

Main Language of Yugoslavia - Serbo-Croatian - spoken by 75% of the population (a lingua-franca consisting of what are now four mutually intelligible standardized forms (or dialects or languages, YMMV), but *arguably* only 2 standardized forms throughout most of Yugoslavia's existence, with the standardized forms being the native language for most persons, so Croatian being spoken by about 20% of the population and Serbian being spoken by about a third of the population or so).
 
India. Indonesia. South Africa. All democracies.

You could add Kenya to that too. It's largest group only forms about 1/5th of the population and the two dominant languages (English and Swahili) are not local languages but lingua franca spoken across the wider community.
 
Kenya is only ranked "Partly Free" by Freedom House.


Doesn't change the fact that Kenya's transitioned from one party state in the 1980s to multiethnic and multiparty democracy in the 1990s where the former governing party during the one-state era lost both the presidency and legislature in the 2002 elections and the 2017 election results (which saw the candidate from the former governing party of the one-state era win re-election for the presidency) saw the successful supreme court challenge against the presidential election but the legislative elections were upheld. A subsequent re-run of the presidential elections were held on the orders of the court (and accepted by the candidate who claimed victory) but the candidate who had initially challenged the original 2017 election withdrew from the re-run. If he didn't participate that isn't the fault of Kenya's political system, but only of himself.

Heck, even the link you cited says as much in the very first line:

Kenya is a multiparty democracy that holds regular elections,

HappyNihilist mentioned that India, Indonesia and South Africa were all democracies. Are they perfect? No. And neither is Kenya. In fact, both Kenya and Indonesia are ranked partly free in the same notorious company as countries known for such brutal repression of ethnic groups like....Mexico, Ecuador, North Macedonia (in fact, Kenya has a higher score than Mexico and North Macedonia).
 
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There is some level of cohesiveness amongst the various ethnic groups who make up that category, thanks to residual solidarity from the Apartheid era.

So that makes all the ethnic groups into a single ethnic group now? What happens when the Apartheid era fades from memory?

So basically, a bunch of similar but still quite distinct ethnic groups (Bantu and Non-Bantu Black Africans in South Africa) are unified because of their experience of brutal repression, but other ethnic groups elsewhere (Slavs, Albanians, Cacasus peoples, Turkic groups) could not have had the same outcome with different leaderships because.....?

Really, South Africa did not have to go the way it did (EDIT: Just look next door at Zimbabwe where a similar experience of harsh minority rule did not lead to early cohesion among Black Zimbabweans as very shortly after Zimbabwe's new ruler (from the majority Shona people) initiated a massacre against Ndebele civilians; thankfully that didn't develop into anything further although the potential was there. /EDIT). Mandela did the country a huge favour in how he handled the transition from apartheid to democracy. On the other hand Yeltsin, Tudjman and Milosevic did their respective countries no such favours.
 
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