For my research, I had to consult a couple of paragraphs in Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. And that was a mistake because this turned out to be one of those “You’ll have to tear this 900-page volume out of my cold, dead hands if you want me to let it go before I read every word of it, twice” books.
I don’t like books that tell me what I already know. I prefer the kind of research that surprises me. Europe after 1945 always seemed like too familiar a topic for me to consider reading anything else about it, so I would have never picked up Judt’s book on my own.
Judt espouses a very interesting approach to the history of the XXth century in Europe that seems to be gaining in popularity these days. Europe couldn’t deal with its enormous ethnic diversity packed into a small territory, Judt says (and Helen Graham says something similar.) So between 1914-45, Europe fought incessant wars trying to push every ethnic group into its own small parcel of land:
Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities—the Jews in France, for example—represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union—an empire, not a country and anyway only part-European, as already noted—stood aside from this new, serially homogenous Europe.
Maybe you heard this before, but for me this is a strikingly novel approach. And it makes sense, too.
Remember what happened when there wasn’t anybody left to keep Yugoslavia together with an iron fist? And have you noticed what is happening now when millions of representatives of different ethnic groups are pouring into Europe?
This is fascinating stuff, people.
Clarissa's Blog 
An acquaintance from Former Jugoslavia says that mostly the region is slowly but surely forming into Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia (no matter what the map says) with Slovenia left on its own. He didn’t say much about Macedonia but from what I can tell it seems that Albanians are slowly displacing the slav population there (just as they already have in Kosovo).
You could also partly add Spain (and maybe the British Isles) as holdouts against homogenity (with increased local autonomy heading off indpendence movements – for a while).
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“You could also partly add Spain (and maybe the British Isles) as holdouts against homogenity (with increased local autonomy heading off indpendence movements – for a while).”
– And both countries are about to fall apart.
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“And both countries are about to fall apart”
Possilbly (that’s what I meant by ‘for a while’) but I’m not entirely sure that’s going to happen. I especially wouldn’t be surprised if the scots finally vote to stay in the uk.
If Catalonia does break free I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a fairly large backlash against Catalan language and culture in Valencia and the Baleares where it seems maybe more tolerated than celebrated (and in some of catalonia for that matter).
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I SO hope that Catalonia settles down and abandons all this silly nationalist crap. Of course, I have a very personal and even financial stake in Spain’s territorial wholeness. 🙂
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As someone who is instinctively xenophilic, I always find this kind of thing sad and perplexing.
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I think ‘problematic’ might be a better word here than perplexing, but after the recent discussion here I hesitated to use it.
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This is very interesting to me in the context of the recent Swiss vote to curb immigration. This decision was made knowing that serious economic consequences are likely. So the desire to live among their own people is even stronger than the desire to be economically successful. We have not made much progress it seems.
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“So the desire to live among their own people is even stronger than the desire to be economically successful. ”
– Absolutely. This is yet another example of Marxism not working.
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// So the desire to live among their own people is even stronger than the desire to be economically successful.
RE economic success and immigrants: may be Clarissa and/or zinemin may write more. A few years ago in the summer there were problems in London, many immigrants don’t seem to succeed neither culturally nor economically. How is it benefitting Europe at all in the long run?
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In societies with a strong social safety net, immigrants are a lot more motivated to work, start businesses, acquire education, and progress economically and socially. When a non-immigrant has his or her basic needs covered by the state, there is often no further motivation to seek a job or start a business. An immigrant has powerful non-economic motivations that a local resident is often lacking.
To give just one example, in every university where I taught, the gap in motivation and dedication among immigrants (without any difference based in the country of origin) is light years ahead of that among the locals. An immigrant has no network of support, no connections, no parents with a warm, big house and lines of credit to fall back on. Success is the only option because there is literally nothing else.
And my sister is seeing the same trend in her job recruitment agency. Locals very easily reject jobs that are not highly paid and / or interesting/prestigious because staying on unemployment benefits for a while is not a big deal. Immigrants have no access to these benefits and even if they did, this doesn’t impact the enormous stigma of being an immigrant and out of work.
On a personal level, the only reason why I wrote my entire doctoral dissertation in 10 months was the absolute terror I had of finding myself in the street with no place to go. I had a very vivid knowledge that there was no other option but to graduate fast and find a well-paying job. And that is a powerful motivator.
N and I often discuss why this negative motivation ends up being so much stronger than the positive motivations but this is what things were like.
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Or another example (since you asked this question that is so relevant to my life): N work in what is call “at-will contract” job. This means he can be fired at absolutely any time with no reason needed to let him go. And if this happens, he will take absolutely any menial job at any salary to tide him over while he job hunts in his field. He will not be tortured by considerations that he is slipping downwards from a “middle-class existence” because his frame of reference and his priorities are located in a different plane of existence. Not a better one or a worse one, just different.
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What about the following, if immigrants are so successful:
Sweden shaken as riots continue in immigrant suburbs (From May 25, 2013)
The unrest in poor, immigrant suburbs is the latest to break out in Europe over the past decade following riots in Paris in 2005 and in London in 2011. Analysts say they have much in common.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/05/25/sweden-riots-violence/2360211/
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This is exactly the point I’m making in the most recent post. Every effort is being made to admit only immigrants who lack any skills or education to the extent where they will not be able to break out of a ghetto. It’s as if these countries had a powerful and specific need for big, desperately poor and completely unintegrated ghettos that will riot and burn everything in sight every once in a while.
The question why these situations are engineered in this way still remains. I know I’ll figure it out eventually, but it will take time.
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“The question why these situations are engineered in this way still remains. I know I’ll figure it out eventually, but it will take time”
A comment at another blog (link below) got me thinking. Maybe it’s part of the overall plan to dilute nationalism and cultivate political loyalty to the EU rather than national governments. The EU agenda calls for greater class cohesion across countries than ethnic cohesion within countries.
Visible, unassimilating and perpetually underachieving immigrant populations in France and Germany mean that middle class professionals in both countries feel less commonality with a significant part of the local population and greater commonality with each other across national boundaries. And the same goes for the immigrant populations which often have better contacts with each other than with the host population of whichever country they’re in at the time.
The Swiss vote shows that Italian speaking Swiss have more in common with their fellow citizens (regardless of language) than with their co-ethnics. The EU hates that kind of citizenship-based national loyalty and does everything it can to stunt it (at a very slow pace and often indirectly, but…)
Similarly, Erasmus, it’s a joke of a program at least 90% of the time (for anything but language learnng) but it’s money well spent for the EU if it creates supranational EU class loaylty.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/02/practical-gradualism-vs-moral-absolutism-for-immigration-and-revolution.html#comments
(comment by AlanH)
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“Remember what happened when there wasn’t anybody left to keep Yugoslavia together with an iron fist?”
Are you saying that the Yugoslav nations should have been forced to continue living in a communist country with limited liberties and no rights to show any kind of national identity? The things that happened in Yugoslavia didn’t happen because of the lack of the iron fist, but because of the fact that the West ignored all of the cries for help until it was too late.
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I believe the trouble in Yugoslavia started a lot earlier, when the country was created to keep all the smaller groups together by force and completely artificially. Of course, any country is an artificial construct (and that’s not a bad thing) but Yugoslavia was more so than most and was destined to blow up sooner rather than later. Look at the lengths Americans go to create a common sense of purpose. Without something like this, a country built from hugely disparate elements will just explode.
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