[rayiner]

I don’t want to diminish the impact of European colonialism, but that’s not really actionable in 2020. Bangladesh, where I’m from, was stripped of capital by the British Empire. Okay, now what? How does that fix the weak rule of law, the political patronage, etc? And it’s not like European countries don’t have a long history of sectarian and ethnic warfare.

[filleduchaos]

It is actionable, the powers that be are simply averse to acting on it. I will never understand the drive to preserve nation constructs that are barely a century old in many cases at all costs.

[JoeAltmaier]

Because in many cases, that independence was won at a terrible cost. To dissolve the result for convenience seems a tragedy in some cases.

[filleduchaos]

Sunk cost fallacy writ large.

[vsskanth]

Easy for you to say. It's the people at the margins that suffer from the chaos changing these borders wouls cause.

[filleduchaos]

Why do people like to argue that changing the status quo would cause suffering as though the status quo is not itself causing plenty of suffering? Especially when the chaos "caused" by change is most often actually caused by violent opposition from those desperate to preserve the current state of things?

[vsskanth]

The disruption is usually not worth it once generations have built their lives and have built their homes based on an existing border regime.

Read about the India Pakistan partition. How would you feel if you have to leave behind everything you have and move to another country because someone decided it is so.

[AnimalMuppet]

Perhaps. But what is your actual proposal that will actually make things better? Move the borders? Dissolve countries and go back to being tribes or something? What would that actually fix?

And if that won't fix much, then your talk about sunk cost is pointless.

[filleduchaos]

It's fascinating to me that people talk about a peoples' desire to exercise their right to self-determination (whether autonomist or secessionist) as absurd, especially people whose forebears have already exercised that right to set up the stable societies they benefit from today.

People understand/respect separatism when it's Kosovo, Scotland, Catalunya, Hong Kong, etc, but all of a sudden want to be led by the hand when it involves African nations.

[AnimalMuppet]

OK, but rayiner's comment was about fixing societies and economies. If you want independence for independence, fine, I've got no problem with that. I merely hope that you either succeed or fail as peacefully as possible.

But the context was about economics, so I presumed that you were saying that it would be economically helpful to change the boundaries.