European regions that just couldn't quite unify

France + Germany = Mortal enemies in 2 world wars, and cultural rivals for far longer. The French get along better with the Brits than they do with the Germans.

Germany + Italy = Despite the Axis Alliance in WWII, these two countries are just too culturally different to be really unifiable.

Russia + Sweden = You would think, based on popular belief, that these two nations would easily unify. They most certainly would not. Russia is Orthodox and Sweden Lutheran for starters. Both countries may have shared some commonalities in their first years, but have since grown apart.

...What ARE you talking about? :confused:
 
I wonder if an independent Venice would be analogous to Portugal. Seafarers that looked outwards rather than inwards.

Only if Venice had managed to preserve its seaborne empire and avoided the acquirement of the Italian Domini di Terraferma which turned Venice into a respectable territorial power in Italy.

We have today Russia, Belarus and Uraine, even though one can argue it had to do with how the USSR arranged it's territory into different Soviet Republics. Still they are East Slavic and three different countries.

The same is true of the failed union of Serbia and Montenegro.
 
We have today Russia, Belarus and Uraine, even though one can argue it had to do with how the USSR arranged it's territory into different Soviet Republics. Still they are East Slavic and three different countries.

Also, the Czechs and Slovaks had a union that was broken. And of course Yugoslavia was a union that fell apart. However these examples are all post 1900.

Then we have the fact that the Dutch are split in the Flemish in Belgium and the other Dutch in the Netherlands. Of course Belgium and Netherlands were united into one nation in the early 1900s.

Luxemburg is interesting, since it could have culturally been a part of both France and Germany, but if the Belgians hadn't broke apart from the Netherlands it would probably still be Dutch. Also there was talk after WW1 about unifying Luxemburg with Belgium. (unified Benelux is underrated, need more TLs).

I could see the Sicilies as an ATL outsider of an Italian Union. I could also see Burgundy (the duchy and the free county) as well as Brittany ending up outside France if things had gone slightly different. An interesting alternate union would be one with Bohemia and Poland, kind of creating a West Slavic Monarchy. Navarra could possibly with luck and strong allies (preferably France) stay outside Spain.

Czechoslovakia was born in OTL because of the fact that Czechs and Slovaks were both Western Slavic identities, but were ruled separately until WWI, what with the Czechs in Bohemia and Slovaks in pre-Trianon Hungary.

Navarre ended up being split between France and Spain because Ferdinand II of Aragon took the parts south of the Pyrenees, while the King of Navarre was lucky enough to inherit France.
 
We're confused because the OP was asking about recognised geographic regions that failed to unify, you chose examples of completely separate geographical regions that had barely any linguistic or cultural links to one another.

In fact, what you posted were neighbouring countries that could never unify. That wasn't what was being asked.

This is the equivalent of asking "Why hasn't Arabia unified?" or "Why is Scandinavia not unified?", not "Why couldn't China and Russia unify?" or "India and Afghanistan never unified, discuss."
 
Poland and Denmark for some reason the personal union was possible because of the intermarriage of the Piasts and later the Jagellonians and Vasas with the Royal family of Denmark.
 
lol maybe France and Germany could have unified back when they weren't enemies but branches of the Carolingian Empire.

But yeah seriously man I'm talking about regions that actually had something in common with each other.
 
Scandinavia could count: the Nordic states shared a lot of common history and very similar cultures. However, save for the Kalmar Union, Scandinavia never unified.

Actually, I don't even know if the Kalmar Union can actually count. The three countries did on many occasions have different kings or regents who would war with each other over supremacy, regional uprisings against distant nobility, and then we have German merchants entering into the thing just to make it somewhat more complicated.

In fact, I'd dare say that the Kalmar Union only existed on the paper, and even there things are fuzzy...
 
In fact, I'd dare say that the Kalmar Union only existed on the paper, and even there things are fuzzy...

Well, Norway stuck to Denmark afterwards so at least two countries merged.

Maybe a TL where black death devastates Swedish nobility leaves us with a more succesful union.
 
So can anyone think of any other close-run examples of a region that might not join a nation that formed?

Belgium? But wait, for some strange reason, Walloonia and Flanders did form a single nation, at least for now.

A real example might be Norway, Sweden and Demark. Despite periods of unity among some of them and similar cultures and languages (are Swedish and Danish really seperate languages?, What about Swedish and Norweigan?), all three nations are independent today.
 
My apologies, but when I think about regions within the vaguely same cultural group unifying, I think of Europe, with the formation of Italy, Germany, and the stomping out of local linguistic groups in France and Spain in the 19th century. I'm sure other parts of the Old World (I don't really think this happens in the Americas) did the same, but I can't think of anything similar.

Small Nitpick: You mean 20th century, between 1936 and 1975, and in a totally different historical contest to what you have in mind. The language situation in 19th century Spain was far closer to that of Austria than France - this is a time of rebirth of local languages, not "stomping them out".

Now to the main question: You sort of answered yourself.

The thing is, language is a great factor of consolidation within an existing state, as is religion, after the regions in question have been put within that same state, but the mere existence of a common or similar language, or religion, or even shared history between two neighbouring regions doesn't constitute an actual driving force towards unification despite what that brief spark of 19th century romanticism could lead us to think.

And yes, it's no different in Europe or in America. If language was everything needed for political unification, Germany would include Austria, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and a chunk of Switzerland, and there would be a single state from Tijuana to Cape Horn. So what prevents that from happening?

Long aswer: A conjunction of factors including random circunstances, internal and foreign politics, and yep, geography, since that will determine communications, climate, fertility of soil, mineral resources and in the end the ability of X region to raise a bigger army than Y region and send there successfully. Short answer: What, in essence, we call History.

Yeah, that was the source of my confusion in my thread asking "why didn't Portugal get absorbed alongside the other Iberian states?"

...Woah. The way that thread unfolded was completely ridiculous.

Well, geography maybe the reason why the Occitan-Catalan sphere didn't unite.

More specifically, it was Peter II of Aragon being handed his ass on a plate at Muret, and his son James deciding to never fuck with France again after spending his childhood in French captivity and deciding to deploy his forces southwards instead.

Uff Da the optimist said:
Why exactly didn't Portugal get absorbed with the rest of the Iberian kingdoms though? They weren't much different in terms of having a slightly different language than Castille, Aragon and Catalonia?

Dynastic union came too late, at a time Portugal had already a colonial empire of its own, and even things could have turned very different if the Spanish had not have to deal with the French invading Catalonia in the 1640s when the Portuguese revolted.
 
Kaliningrad looks like it should be part of Poland or Lithuania.

Outside Europe: Brunei; in fact all of Borneo.

Arabia -- could have encompassed Yemen, Oman and the Emirates.
 
Kaliningrad looks like it should be part of Poland or Lithuania.

Outside Europe: Brunei; in fact all of Borneo.

Arabia -- could have encompassed Yemen, Oman and the Emirates.

Well, it was held as a Polish fief - it's just that it became one of the cores of the nascent German Empire, which proceeded to lose it to Russia as payback for Operation Barbarossa.
 
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