[BRIEF NOTE] The Merits of Unity
Apr. 22nd, 2005 01:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldRecent discussions about annexationism and the creation of larger states that look interesting on the map caused ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pauldrye to observe that had the United Provinces of Central America survived, the Central American isthmus would be form a single fairly large and populous state. On a similar theme, rydel23 has posted a brief study showing that had the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth survived to the present it would rank as the tenth economy of the planet.
The effects of unity, for Central Americans as for central and eastern Europeans, aren't merely additive, but are in fact cumulative. If the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had avoided the Partitions and their more malicious consequences--repressions by the occupying powers, Stalinist and Nazi genocides, repressive regimes discouraging social and economic modernization--I would argue that its territory would be home to rather more people, and that the Commonwealth's residents would be rather wealthier than the residents of the Commonwealth's two-centuries-removed successor states. This argument ignores the other catastrophies that could have happened to the Commonwealth-survives Earth, like, say, the vicious policies of Polish ultranationalism adopted in the 1930s that ended with the expulsion of the Protestant Balts to satellitized Livonia, the seizure of trans-Dneiper Ukraine by Orthodox Russia, and a catastrophic failed war against the German Confederation over Silesia. Even so, a unified state with an effective and legitimate government would have done wonders.
pauldrye to observe that had the United Provinces of Central America survived, the Central American isthmus would be form a single fairly large and populous state. On a similar theme, rydel23 has posted a brief study showing that had the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth survived to the present it would rank as the tenth economy of the planet.The effects of unity, for Central Americans as for central and eastern Europeans, aren't merely additive, but are in fact cumulative. If the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had avoided the Partitions and their more malicious consequences--repressions by the occupying powers, Stalinist and Nazi genocides, repressive regimes discouraging social and economic modernization--I would argue that its territory would be home to rather more people, and that the Commonwealth's residents would be rather wealthier than the residents of the Commonwealth's two-centuries-removed successor states. This argument ignores the other catastrophies that could have happened to the Commonwealth-survives Earth, like, say, the vicious policies of Polish ultranationalism adopted in the 1930s that ended with the expulsion of the Protestant Balts to satellitized Livonia, the seizure of trans-Dneiper Ukraine by Orthodox Russia, and a catastrophic failed war against the German Confederation over Silesia. Even so, a unified state with an effective and legitimate government would have done wonders.
