| Good? There is a scale in play here. Either the centralization of nations is good or bad, on a case by case basis. For union - Centralization means more bargaining power in international negotiations because your economy is just physically larger. More tax revenue means the central government can do more ambitious things. Centralization is good for business because trade barriers are lower between providences and states than between countries. By far, however, the greatest historic argument for large countries has been for militaristic purposes. Having a nation of a hundred million men spanning half a continent could historically walk all over smaller neighbors. This historic basis for centralization of power has fallen way by the wayside in the modern era of global communication and more importantly nuclear arms. It doesn't matter if France is smaller than Germany when France has hundreds of nukes and could remove humanity from the Earth a dozen times over. For division - Minority cultures, groups, and people who simply do not agree with the majority opinions in a country but have solidarity in their region / culture are oppressed by the central government. The arguments basically come down to an economic rationale for big centralization or a social desire for self determination and liberty. Now of course dissidents could want secession for good or ill - Indian independence from Britain was by almost any account a moral good, but the desire to secede from the US by confederates just to persist their industry of owning human beings was not. But fundamentally we should all be able to at least agree that righteous revolutions we agree with are justified and worth the economic cost to obtain liberty. The debate over Catalonia shouldn't be along the lines of economic consequences from seceding because if Catalan is justified in what they are doing the freedom of its citizens has to supersede economic arguments to stay without liberty. Freedom has to come first before profit, and the debate should be if the Spanish governments has been legitimately oppressive of Catalan, and if you agree they have been, and you believe in liberty and self determination, you have to support their secession no matter the economic cost.Hygiene works by attaching an invisible "syntax context" value to all identifiers. When two identifiers are compared, both the identifiers' textural names and syntax contexts must be identical for the two to be considered equal. It is probably very romantic an ideology, but democracy has always been rooted in romanticism. |