[morsecodist]

> HK always was bound to become a part of China

Why so? Do you think Monaco should be part of France? Do you think Singapore should be part of Malaysia? A lot of big countries respect the sovereignty of neighboring smaller countries, although that is unfortunately becoming less true now.

It isn't about colonialism. I have never seen anyone seriously argue it should go back to the British. It is about a framework to ensure they maintain their rights. It would be great if that looked like expanded rights for all of China but it can also look like some degree of sovereignty, which was in place for quite some time.

[Bayart]

> Do you think Monaco should be part of France?

Monaco is already 90% part of France. There was an agreement until recently that Monaco would become French if the Princeship went extinct. By law the Prime Minister and the Police has to be French. France also handles their defense etc. It's very conditional sovereignty, the deal being that they can be a tax heaven if they want to, but not to France and Italy.

> Do you think Singapore should be part of Malaysia?

AFAIK they've been expelled from Malaysia after independence.

I'm not trying to disprove your point, just that it's fluid and fragile. Sovereignty itself has only been conceptually defined with the Treaties of Westphalia, it's recent and quintessentially Western.

[morsecodist]

This is kind of the point I am trying to make that sovereignty is somewhat of a spectrum and there are a lot of options for preserving parts of it.

I think the Westphalia thing is somewhat overblown there were lots of sovereignty analogs throughout human history all over the world before that.

[Bayart]

> I think the Westphalia thing is somewhat overblown there were lots of sovereignty analogs throughout human history all over the world before that.

I'm sure you understand there's a deep qualitative difference between a thing existing and the same thing being described, formalized and conceptualized. The latter allows us to use it with intent.

For example rationalism, which is a favoured subject on HN (I'm picking this because I've had a similar discussion recently with a friend of mine who uses to teach Philosophy, especially Epistemology, at UCSB) : it's obvious reason and structured rational thought existed before Descartes and Leibniz. But it's also undeniable there's been an extreme change is Human society after they defined it.

Conceptualizing ends up bringing changes at the cognitive level to the entire species. It's not a very deeply researched subject because of the lag time between the written material and observable anthropological effects, but at this point it's common knowledge, even if intuitively.

I'll digress for a bit and say that in my opinion there's a superior quality of knowledge, above Cartesianism, that'll I call informed intuitional. And I credit Srinivasa Ramanujan for forcefully bringing it back into Western Thought. [1]

In any case regarding Sovereignty, once we're sophisticated enough we'll accept multiple sovereignty as the rule. I don't see why, for example, Monaco couldn't be all at the same time the Sovereign State of Monaco, part of French Department of Alpes Maritimes, part of the Italian Province of Imperia and part of the European Federation. The specific conditions can be decided ad hoc with contract law, we've got the tools, we invented them.

[1]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/srinivasa-ramanujan-was-a-gen...

[zelphirkalt]

> It isn't about colonialism. I have never seen anyone seriously argue it should go back to the British.

Then you should read more of the comments here, and you will have that completely new experience.