Barry Stentiford rails against the creation of ethnically-based nation-states in Small Wars Journal:

One problem with the idea of the ethnically-based nation-state is that it is a-historical—based on a false understanding of the creation and nature of the nation-states of Western Europe. France is usually held as a model of the natural nation. But France was hardly more natural than the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, a minority of subjects of Louis XVI could be described as ethnically French—an ethnicity created over many centuries through a combination of various Germanic, Gallic, and Roman peoples—who were settled over a large oval in northern France centered on Paris. Most subjects of Louis were, and if they thought about it at all, considered themselves to be, Provencial, Breton, Norman, Alsace-Deutch, Flemish, Italian, or a host of smaller identities. The borders of France in 1789 were the result of a millennium of wars and marriages, wars fought and marriages arranged to expand territory, not out of any consideration for the language or culture of the people who lived in those territories.

Stentiford might have gone on to add that it was regional resistance to a centralizing and nationalist revolutionary regime that accounts for a significant part of conflicts after 1789 inside France, and the political contours of modern France have been shaped in part by regional resistance to Parisian government dating back at least to the late sixteenth century during the wars of religion. There is nothing “natural” about nation-states, they are typically the product of suppressing regional political, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity for the sake of greater uniformity and centralized control. Effective nation-building is an extremely coercive and brutal business. As Robert Farley observes, Stentiford’s argument is a familiar one, but Stentiford presents it very well. However, he adds a few words of caution:

Focus should indeed be on developing the capability of states to accept and govern ethnically heterogeneous populations, and we shouldn’t buy the argument that changing borders will solve all problems. However, it is possible that some ethnic identities have become so salient, and some relationships between identity communities so poisoned, that reconciliation is effectively impossible on any reasonable timeframe. But this probably constitutes a distinct minority of the cases under discussion.

All of this reminds me of an exchange at The National Interest a few weeks back between Ted Galen Carpenter on one side and Morton Abramowitz and James Hooper over the question of partitions in the Balkans. The short version of their disagreement is that Abramowitz and Hooper are absolutely against any additional partitions in the region (e.g., detaching Republika Srpska from Bosnia), but they are firmly in support of the states created by the rounds of separatism and partition that have already occurred, and Carpenter sees merit in continuing the partition process to separate unreconciled populations in Bosnia and Kosovo. Carpenter noted the others’ fairly new hostility to revising borders:

But those gentlemen, and most others in the foreign-policy community who share their views, are marvelously selective about their outrage regarding the acceptance of secession and partition as a policy tool. Relatively few among the European or U.S. political and policy elite had any problem when the NATO powers helped break up Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Even fewer expressed qualms about forcibly detaching Kosovo from Serbia.

This is certainly true, but then supporters of ethnic self-determination have usually been selective in where they want the principle to apply. That has been the case since the time of Wilson, when self-determination applied only to certain nations and came at the expense of others whose rights of national self-determination were simply ignored or denied. The redrawing of the map of Hungary to satisfy post-war Allied territorial claims and to punish Hungary is one of the more outstanding examples of how this worked in practice. Had the Allies had their way, the Treaty of Sevres would have imposed an even more egregious settlement on the Turks partly in the name of providing self-determination for the non-Turkish nations of Anatolia. Unless a partition is negotiated and accepted by all parties, it will always remain a potential source of future conflict, because one of the parties will always feel with some justification that it was forcibly robbed of territory that it considered its own. Partitions are usually imposed rather than negotiated.

When Abramowitz and Hooper argue that they fear opening a “Pandora’s box” of future separatism, they deliberately ignore that the box was opened (or rather re-opened) twenty years ago. One of the strongest arguments against continued partition in the Balkans (or elsewhere) is that past “solutions” based on the selective application of the principle self-determination have created deeply dysfunctional and/or failed states. Trying to apply a bad principle more universally is unlikely to yield desirable results, and it will simply create new grievances that can be used to stoke conflict down the road. For that matter, there is no chance that the U.S. and EU will ever impose additional partitions on the unwilling states whose territory would be affected, which makes the question of continued partition moot.