Migration has nothing to do with democracy and real democracy is only really possible in homogeneous nations. Diversity is the worst poison and the handmaiden of empires and oligarchies.
Mark, Dorothy, and cold pizza party are right, but misses the point. "Nation" is itself a mythic concept, as classically articulated by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. But it is the foundational myth, the sense of belonging and exclusion of the population. It's a faith, not a science. Only the former had the power to maintain the fight to independence. The xenophobic part of it is not going to go away by explaining the nuance of the historical records.
Comments from Mark and Dorothy are right, of course. Macedonia makes an emblematic case -- the concept of a "melting pot" of peoples isn't some uniquely American / Western European ideological fantasy or "trick" to sap weaker nations of their etho-cultural vitality -- it's the fundamental state of human life, over time.
Macedonian culture is impossible to define as something "pure" or "essentially" Macedonian -- what gives it its unique character is its history as a place and people where Slavic, Greek, Ottoman, Roma, Turkish and Albanian influences have met, traded, fought, co-existed, and interbred over time.
I think the case of Macedonia makes two things clear -- first, this fundamental indeterminacy of any cultural or national "essence;" and second, that Milanovic missed a (c) -- in all of these countries - Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, or the nationalist Macedonians who claim Alexander's Hellenistic empire - Nationalism always produces the idea of a "Greater X," Greater Serbia, Albania, etc, a store of people *outside* their borders who are "really, properly, one of *us*; there's no such thing as 'Macedonian'."
I think this post has a lot of interesting descriptive truth, but I think (c) shows that it's much more fundamentally false.
As far as I am aware, none of these countries fulfill condition a), or for that matter, ever have. The concept of an ethnically homogeneous "nation" is a myth -- it may be a highly effective ideological tool for the mobilization and/or justification of political control of geographical territory, ethnic homogeneity is rarely found in human populations, aside from small groups located in isolated, usually mountainous areas.
Migration has nothing to do with democracy and real democracy is only really possible in homogeneous nations. Diversity is the worst poison and the handmaiden of empires and oligarchies.
Mark, Dorothy, and cold pizza party are right, but misses the point. "Nation" is itself a mythic concept, as classically articulated by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. But it is the foundational myth, the sense of belonging and exclusion of the population. It's a faith, not a science. Only the former had the power to maintain the fight to independence. The xenophobic part of it is not going to go away by explaining the nuance of the historical records.
Comments from Mark and Dorothy are right, of course. Macedonia makes an emblematic case -- the concept of a "melting pot" of peoples isn't some uniquely American / Western European ideological fantasy or "trick" to sap weaker nations of their etho-cultural vitality -- it's the fundamental state of human life, over time.
Macedonian culture is impossible to define as something "pure" or "essentially" Macedonian -- what gives it its unique character is its history as a place and people where Slavic, Greek, Ottoman, Roma, Turkish and Albanian influences have met, traded, fought, co-existed, and interbred over time.
I think the case of Macedonia makes two things clear -- first, this fundamental indeterminacy of any cultural or national "essence;" and second, that Milanovic missed a (c) -- in all of these countries - Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, or the nationalist Macedonians who claim Alexander's Hellenistic empire - Nationalism always produces the idea of a "Greater X," Greater Serbia, Albania, etc, a store of people *outside* their borders who are "really, properly, one of *us*; there's no such thing as 'Macedonian'."
I think this post has a lot of interesting descriptive truth, but I think (c) shows that it's much more fundamentally false.
And as for Poland, the current ethnic homogeneity is a historical anomaly. There is so such thing as a "real/true/whatever" Pole :-)
As far as I am aware, none of these countries fulfill condition a), or for that matter, ever have. The concept of an ethnically homogeneous "nation" is a myth -- it may be a highly effective ideological tool for the mobilization and/or justification of political control of geographical territory, ethnic homogeneity is rarely found in human populations, aside from small groups located in isolated, usually mountainous areas.
Do democracies not born out of convenience even exist anywhere in the world?
Hmmm, clashes of cultures. Samuel Huntington humming along to this tune. Makes much sense.