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I find this somewhat hard to believe. Perhaps not many of the foreign policy experts you know specialize in the Balkins or the former USSR?

I don't know I agree that national boundries must follow ethnic divisions, and even question whether they can with any real efficacy, but I'll agreee that it's certainly true in the absence of some other compelling reason for the groups to stick together (thus explaining the Swiss and the Belgians - its been in their economic sefl interest to stick together, and they aren't divided by and religious doctrines). Other ethnicities' compelling reason has usually been coercive force - which, if applied long and convincingly enough, makes the issue go away (see, e.g. the US, Australia and most of China)

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Right. Because the rise of nationalism in Europe was followed by 200 years of peace.

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Or Switzerland, which is going to bum the Swiss out, since they've been stable for so long.

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My requirement are national boundaries that represent ethnic boundaries, prosperity and growth. Prior to WWI there were not that many democracies and there were many national groups that did not have independence. Poland did not and many countries were tied into the Austrian Hungarian empire. Ireland and Scotland still attached to England etc. It was one of those countrys, Serbia that started the war. After the war the ethnic boundaries were better defined.

The one country that go screwed was Germany. The were ethnic Germans in the Sudentenland, Austria and in Poland that were not attached to the mother country. Then you get a nasty recession and poverty in Germany and you get war. When Hitler started his war it was mainly to pull all ethnic Germans into Germany. First Austria, then the Sudatenland Germans and then the Germans in Poland between Konigsberg and Pomerania and Silesia.

After the war, you still had some nations that were not independent. You had the Czechs and the Slovaks pushed together and all those countries in Yugolsavia and the Soviet Union. They have all broken up. There are really only two multiethnic countrys in Europe: Belgium and Swizerland. The Flemmish and the Waloons in Belgium are always on the verge. Swizerland is the one exception. But I do know that the linguistic groups in Swizerland don't like eachother.

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I guess I'm having a hard time understanding the argument you're making. Spain is another country in Western Europe that you missed. Central and Eastern Europe have many countries where national boundaries do not match where different ethnic groups live.

Moreover, my point was that the rise of European nationalism brought an awful lot of conflict, something you seem to have forgotten. World War I may have been set off in the Balkans, but England, Germany and France (e.g.) did not exactly abstain from fighting. The French Revolution was followed by two and a half decades of war. 1848. 1870. And so on.

So, thinking that nationalism in the rest of the war is going to have everyone singing Kumbayah is wildly wrong. Think about what happened in Yugoslavia. The transition from Communist dictatorship to nation states divided along ethnic lines was a messy one.

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In Eastern Europe there is some cross over but that is because the popluation are so mixed up you can't draw lines. But the Hungarians do have a tough time of it in Bulgaria. And the other way around.

My main point is that when national boundaries follow ethnic lines and countries are democratic and have developed free market economies they will not go to war.

Can you name an exception?

See Balt. Ty thinks I am crazy. He agrees with Dr. Rice. I told you that no one but acid droppers agree with me.

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Well, it depends how "developed" one thinks the free market must be (but then one might define oneself out of a rule if you make the standard too high - getting into the old McDonald's rule that held for so long*), but, off hand, how about the United Kingdom and Argentina?

*There used to be a rule that no two countries with a McDonalds had ever gone to war. Then there got to be too many McDonalds, I suppose.

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Argentina was a dictatorship at the time. Next try?

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Actually, I think this is exactly right, but doesn't lessen the point that the urge toward national states is powerful, and in the case of Iraq, likely one of the major historical themes of its next twenty years. The Kurds seem to have already developed as a nation state, complete with Army. The Shi'ites in the South seem a bit different, since they have much in common with the Iranian Shi'ites but also have distinct ethnic and historical heritage.

And the question for me is how to manage the conflict; we eliminated the last "solution", which was an autocratic central government that repressed the conflicts and dominated the ethnic minorities. My assumption is that the continuing us of the old Iraqi boundries is going to pressure any government toward autocracy to manage the conflicts, and if our goal is to encourage democracy, we are pursuing the wrong overall strategy.

Of course, I do not see much stability in the crystal ball. But that does not mean that I think we can prevent the emergence, in particular, of a Kurdish nation-state.

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That was my point.

Not off the top of my head. But my point was that the process of getting to that ethnically unmixed/democratic/free-market state is one that usually involves a lot of conflict. It's like you're pointing across an alligator-infested swamp and saying, once we get to that rocky point way, way over there, we'll be safe.

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If you limit yourselves to contemporary democracies, it will be hard, because there are so few true democracies. But if you give yourself a little leeway, you can start with the US and England in 1812.

Some of the conflicts between India and Pakistan can also count, though Pakistan seems forever on the cusp between Democracy and Autocracy. Of course, those are boundary wars to a great extent, so they may prove the point.

I don't think development + democracy + ethnic homogeneity = peacefulness toward like countries, but rather that once you limit yourself to reviewing the recent history of well developed European nation-states, you discover that they all learned in WWII to stop beating each other up and to focus on bigger things in the world, so when they have wars they have tended to be oversees in less developed and less Democratic countries (Korea, Vietnam, etc.).

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This gives new meaning to SS being the dumbest.

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Good catch. Argentina didn't become even nominally democratic until the next year.

In that case, all I've got is the ongoing perpetual almost war between Canada and Spain that could spill into overt hostilities any day.

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Yes. An alligator swamp with Piranhas and water based mines.

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I was going to say:

"What's new? We already knew Penske has huge balls."

S_A_M