Saturday 6 October 2007

After the European Union (1)

I am no great historian, but here's a quick summary of the empires, hybrid states and supra-national bodies that have collapsed over the past hundred years:
The Ottoman Empire
The Austro-Hungarian Empire
The League of Nations
The Axis empires
The British, French, Belgian and Dutch empires.
India/Pakistan/Bangladesh
Malaysia/Singapore
The USA/Phillipines
The USSR/Warsaw pact
Yugoslavia
Czechoslovakia

Even within smaller units, there will always be tensions:
Scottish & Welsh Nationalists
30 years of open civil war in Northern Ireland
Austrian minority in South Tyrol
Danish minority in Schleswig-Holstein
Catalan and Basque separatists
Flemish v Walloons
Sardinia (is it French or Italian?)
Sri Lanka
Francophone v Anglophone parts of Canada
Israel/Palestine
Iraq (a country wholly invented by the British as a giggle).

Who's next:
The United Nations
NATO
... The European Union?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like all artificial structures.. the EU will collapse.
Hopefully, Britain will have the sense to withdraw before it happens.
JO

Anonymous said...

I think you missed a couple (thousand), eg the Greece/Turkey business in Cyprus, the Balkans, etc.

Why are politicians apparently so ignorant of human nature, when their very profession is to exploit it?