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rfmcdonaldGeoCurrentEvents' Martin Lewis notes how Luxembourg is a success story in multiple ways. For instance, it has successfully forged a national identity distinct from that of its neighbours, including the Germany that was at one point a co-lingual polity.
After noting Luxembourg's status as a tax shelter, Lewis notes how Luxemourg and other microstates are at once vestiges of the feudal past and key components of the post-modern world-system.
Go, read.
Unlike Belgium, Luxembourg has been able to generate a fairly solid sense of national identity. This process was helped by the partitions of the formerly multi-lingual Grand Duchy, whose French-speaking areas were annexed by France and Belgium. The German-speaking rump-state sought to culturally differentiate itself from Germany by elevating its own local dialect to a national language after World War II. From a linguistic standpoint, Luxembourgish (Letzeburgesch, locally) is a French-influenced variant of a group of local Germanic dialects known as Moselle Franconian. The boundaries between Germanic dialects do not correspond with national boundaries anywhere in the greater Netherlands, as the 1890 German dialect map posted above shows. Local dialects, however, are in decline, gradually being replaced by national languages. Outside of Luxembourg, Moselle Franconian is yielding to standard German to the east and north and French to the south and west. Inside the country, it is thriving. Due both to its national status and to the fact that speakers of standard German cannot generally understand it, Luxembourgish is now classified as a language rather than a mere dialect.
After noting Luxembourg's status as a tax shelter, Lewis notes how Luxemourg and other microstates are at once vestiges of the feudal past and key components of the post-modern world-system.
Europe’s feudal remnants, incongruous bits of territory that escaped state-building aggregation, are often viewed as quaint anachronisms. But Luxembourg and Lichtenstein can also be viewed as highly important and utterly modern geo-political formations: small places that have leveraged their anomalous sovereignty into lucrative positions in the global financial system. Whether the roles that they have carved out for themselves serve the interests of the world at large is another question.
Go, read.
