Should every ethnic group have its own country?

In the Ages of Kings and Imperialism, the only constraints on the geographical limits of the State were power and ambition. On what basis ought the borders of a country be drawn?

In one of his testimonies, Louis Drapeau says about the Bosnian Crisis:

Each ethnic group believed it had a right to its own nation; Balkanization, we call it. On one city block there were ethnic Albanians, on the next block were ethnic Serbs, on the next were Bosniaks, on the next Croatians. It became a reductio ad absurdum. Every block believed it had an inalienable right to be a nation-state, and demanded recognition by America, Germany or Russia. When Serbia invaded Bosnia and sought to ethnically cleanse it, however, those nations who had given so much lip-service to recognition of statehood did nothing while thousands of civilians were slaughtered and buried in mass graves.

Ethnic nationalism has caused the most misery in the world. I would argue that the American Revolution was anti-colonial rather than nationalist, because the Americans were not a separate ethnic group from the British. The French Revolution was a class war. Those who believe that the language one speaks gives one the right to a nation-state, might be interested to know that at the time of the French Revolution, about half the people in France spoke no French at all. The state preceded the national identity. The same could be said about Italy.

But almost every ethnic group since then has used the ideals of those American and French revolutions in their justification to fight for their own nation-state. When the Greeks rebelled against the Ottomans in 1821, the world championed her cause. I’m not saying the Greeks weren’t oppressed and didn’t have to stop that oppression, I’m just saying that the Greek War of Independence resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, including the Greek massacres of innocent Jews. The poor Jews are always blamed by every side, aren’t they? The Greek Revolution spurred nationalist/anti-imperialist revolts in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Armenia, and Poland.

Many of the wars of nationalism were indistinguishable from wars against imperialism that used ethnic nationalist spirit to motivate revolution. The great imperialist nations – The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the British Empire, the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and Germans lost their colonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America to anti-colonial uprisings.

The United States, believing in its manifest destiny to rule from sea to sea, massacred its native Indian population in the 19^th Century. But then, in the 20^th Century, the nationalistic idea of ethnic purity became pandemic. The Germans instituted ethnic cleansing and systematically murdered Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. Ethnic purity of the majority was the excuse used for genocides on the part of Turks, Bolsheviks, Serbs, Croatians, Hutus, the Khmer Rouge, and by Australia, Abkhazia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. Violence and mass deportations on the part of ethnic majorities have become a global phenomenon.

Today, ethnic minorities, who are not necessarily oppressed, lead separatist movements, sometimes with violence, in almost every country. In Europe: there are the Catalonians and Basques in Spain and France; the Bretons in France; the Flemish in Belgium; Northern Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish and Manx in the UK; Silesians in Poland and the Czech Republic; Sorbs and Bavarians in Germany; Frisians in Holland; Padanians in Italy; In the Middle East: there are the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq; the Palestinians in Jordan and Israel; In Asia: the Chechans, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz in Russia; the Uighurs and Kazakhs in China; the Bolochs, Balawari, Waziri, and Pashtun in Pakistan; the Moslems of Jammu and Kashmir and  the Siligurians in India; Tamils in Sri Lanka; the Karen and others in Burma; In the Americas: Mayan Zapatistas in Mexico; the Aymara in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia; in Africa, there are hundreds of separatist ethnic groups who often kill or lose their lives, depending on the balance of power.

Václav Havel resigned as President rather than preside over the breakup of Czechoslovakia into ethnic states.

Albert Einstein stated, “Nationalism is an infantile disease… It is the measles of mankind.”