Dissolution of Czechoslovakia
Please post your comments and suggestions for this article.
Comment by Sherwin on January 11th, 2015 at 11:10 pm
You are absolutely wrong. Perhaps secession for artificial Czechoslovakia was OK but not for nation-states that have been in existent in a melting-pot for past several centuries, e.g. the United Kingdom.
Furthermore, many of the ethic “awakenings” in many Third World countries had been planned and put into action by the former Soviet Union’s KGB through the directives of the country’s Politburo, e.g. the Kurds, et al.
We cannot have a world where every province, or so-called ethnic tribe, wishes to secede from an organized modern nation-state. What will later become of our world and the international system? Soon, even cities and neighborhoods would want to secede on some differentiating factor.
The great humanist and unionist, Abraham Lincoln, had a very practical solution: send in the cavalry if and when any secessionists took matters into their hands!
Other less drastic methods are the Reza Shah/Canadian approach. The former encouraged non-Arab Iranians to move and settle in Khuzestan province where Arab Iranians had become the majority. Eventually, Persian and other Iranians came to outnumber the Arab Iranians, thereby effectively killing any secessionist aspiration.
In Canada, a similar movement took place prior to French Canadian secessionists’ attempt to put a pro-independence referendum in place; namely, many English-speaking Canadians moved into Quebec to the point they came to dominate the electorate and thereby managed to defeat the “independence” referendum.
The author(s) for this article need to be more realistic and less idealistic. “Organizing knowledge for happiness, prosperity, and world peace” does not mean living up to any “flunky” who aspires to fame and fortune through demagoguery and manipulation of peoples’ emotions.
Comment by Jennifer Tanabe on January 22nd, 2015 at 11:40 am
Thank you, Sherwin, for your feedback. Indeed, dissolution of every modern nation-state into its constituent tribal or ethnic groups would hardly be a viable way for the world to develop. This is not what the article intends to promote. I shall review the text and revise it to avoid that misunderstanding.
In the case of Czechoslovakia, however, the separation into its two previously independent states in a peaceful way has been successful. As the article points out, this success is partly due to the relatively amicable way in which the dissolution proceeded and the existence of the EU, which allows both states to maintain their own sovereignty while at the same time remaining in a close relationship.
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