A question.....

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Is it always a good thing for a hegemonic power to break down? When the USSR broke up a lot of people were expecting good things to come from it. Instead Russia's more or less returned to dictatorship, most of the smaller former SSRs are dictatorships and/or mired in ethnic conflict, and there's the issue of what happens with the Russians the Soviet government had the desire to colonize non-Russian lands with it. Yet the USSR and its Romanov predecessor were hardly the most benevolent governments that have ever existed. Then there's Habsburg Austria and Austria-Hungary, which did a damn sight better ruling even the Austrians than its successor states have done. There's also the Ottoman Empire, which provided about 6 centuries of peace in the Middle East prior to its dismemberment. The USA, Canada, and Mexico establishing three imperial states has pretty much stifled feuding here on the Continent.

Yet what I don't understand is that some people at least appear to be enthusiastic about national self-determination, which is the root of the ills of places like Yugoslavia and the root of things like the Azeri Genocide and the Rwandan Genocide. So....which is better? A functional but somewhat-repressive multiethnic state or a nation-state democracy that gets that way after it ruthlessly exterminates all minorities it can and expels the ones it can't?

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was a part of the Warsaw Pact. That does not change that my original post was relating to the former USSR and the 15 or so states that replaced it, not the Warsaw Pact states. If I wanted to get into that mess my post would have been TL;DR.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

Okey dokey.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

As a Bulgarian, my imput might have some value, I suppose.

That said, Bulgaria was widely regarded as the '16th USSR republic' both by Russians and Bulgarians. Todor Jivkov even actually applied for USSR membership, but he was told to fuck off. Our history of servility is very long.