I suppose you could argue that different cultures can be tolerated and persist in a larger state, but I’m not sure that history is on your side on this one, and in any case, I’m not sure you can separate a government’s writ from its cultural authority.

It’s hard to say on that one. Theoretically, you can get a kind of “civic identity” arising from common history and a state that people identify with (usually meaning some shared set of principles on how society ought to be governed), but that clearly wasn’t the case with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The wild card on this, I suppose, would be the role states play in creating “national” cultures out of smaller, more local identities. States often promoted a sense of shared history and national identity (usually along with a common culture and language) through systems like education, and it then became a kind of feedback-loop if the resulting “national” culture took and helped anchor allegiance to the state.

Self-determination along ethnolinguistic lines has been one fo the great curses of the modern era, and it is responsible for a large part of the bloodshed of the last two centuries in Europe and around the world.

Without knowing the specific cases you’re thinking of, I’d only point out that the conflicts with the highest amplitude of bloodshed in the last 200 years, such as the Nazi conquest of Europe, did not find their rationale in the belief that ethno-linguistic groups were natural units of government, as much as the belief that one ethno-linguistc group was a natural leader. I’m not sure you could claim that Stalin marching into Finland was motivated or enabled by national self-determination, or Britain’s seige of Sevastopol for that matter. The nation-state paradigm is completely distinct from imperialism, or doctrines of racial supremacy, which seem to be the things that you’re actually complaining about.

I’m not going to defend the Nation-State as a perfect form of government, but from the perspective of a Serbian or Czech in 1913, the ideal of national self-determination must have seemed far superior to being ruled by a feudal monarchy that had won your homeland in a card game 500 years previous, and systematically discrimintates against your countrymen and works by-the-by to eradicate your language and convert your children. Of course, you live in peace, as you say, but on the other side of the balance you’re destroying heritage and common history and a lot of things that, despite the bad reputation, people consider a crucial part of their endowment, to themselves and their children.

I suppose you could argue that different cultures can be tolerated and persist in a larger state, but I’m not sure that history is on your side on this one, and in any case, I’m not sure you can separate a government’s writ from its cultural authority.

I generally feel that most nationalist movements are shortsighted, and ignore fundamental problems that they would face either on their own or internal dynamics that they have yet to fully appreciate. Internal acrimony seems to occur in the immediate aftermath of independence, as various internal faction jockey for power within the new order, and more explicitly, throw out the idea of “unity” as soon as it stops being convenient. Ireland’s own internal civil war highlights how deep a supposedly “homogenous” country can be riven in time’s of trouble. The Confederacy’s crippling at the hands of intra-state rivalries is another example; its amusing that there is a stronger sense of “Southern identity” (a concept not unlike the various pan-X ideologies floating around) today than there ever was at any time during the Confederacy’s actual existence (where most states were fractured along ethnic, class, and geographical lines).