[LINK] Crooked Timber on secessionism

[rfmcdonald]

Crooked Timber has two posts on nationalism inspired by Kosovo's recent declaration of independence, one by Chris Bertram arguing that the specifics of the Kosovo situation limit its applicability to other secessionist regions like Scotland or Québec, the other arguing after Mann that in the course of the past 150 years most European nation-states have become ethnically homogeneous. (I'm unsure about this second argument, partly because the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Soviet empires and the post-Second World War population movements were exceptional events which may have upped the quotient of ethnic homogeneity, and partly because non-coerced migration has significantly altered the ethnic composition of many European countries even after these breakups and expulsions.)