In this post, "Initiatives", I excerpt and link to a lot of views of the filling of the Syrian power vacuum now underway. Turkey wants it all, reconstituting the Ottoman Empire. Israel wants a little-more and a little-more and a little-more as long as it is free of IDF blood, and is encroaching quite well, despite being warned off by somewhat distant Turks. HTS holds Damascus and major cities along the north-south line, but with a fairly small and dispersed force.
Russia moved away from Kurdish areas, contested by Turkey, and Russian/Syrian-army bases are being taken by scanty US forces to deter Turks. Turks say Kurds in Syria are an existential threat and they will militarily evict them from the best farmland and oilfields.
In the case of Syria, it's borders were artificially drawn by foreigners in such way that several opposing ethnic groups were fused together. Such countries are notoriously difficult to keep together even in the most favorable circumstances. Italy, on the other hand, has common foundation that is Italian language (with several dialects). Therefore there was some logic in making Italy unified country. British just facilitated the unification for their strategic reasons but Italy later became British enemy much more powerful than Kingdom of Naples could ever be. No matter how good British are in their machinations it's always risky strategy. The centuries of machinations are not helping them now when they are falling fast.
Yes and no. Italy is defined in geographical terms, but culturally it is a patchwork of different regions even today. It was much more so at the time of the unification. The South had no economic advantages in joining the North to be exploited as a colony. That's why it tried to resist the invasion, but it failed.
Decapitation of a military force seems to have been effective in Lebanon, now we see an essentially defeated and isolated Hezbollah. Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador filming in Lebanon has a pretty good analysis of events that he frankly says he did not expect 6 weeks ago.
Going back to the emergence of modern nation states... the big back-drop was Europe and the failing dynastic empires. and one has to include the Ottoman, that could not compete with industrialisation, population increase and mass urbanisation, and the emergent nation states capable of acquiring global colonies for resource extraction and captive markets. We are so used these days to 'the nation' and the industrial technocratic model based on fossil fuel that we can't see the underlying diversity still latent in our histories while these resource wars play out with diminishing returns?
I agree on the analysis, but I feel like it is specific to some kinds of states and not universal.
We had also some quite resilient states that seem had no keystones or some internal dynamic that made them resilient, we can think about Afghanistan or Vietnam but also some "narco empires" and similar.
My feeling is that we have "hollow states" and "filled states", the first is a governing body that is established but really didn't provide much to the populace under it, the second is a governing body that is functional to grant and keep running a lot of the well-being of the populace. Quite a bit of long-lasting empires were of the second type, Romans conquered by war but usually being conquered was to get access to a lot of useful services and infrastructure, same for English empire and old Chinese one, their fall was usually perceived as a setback so they could have keystones but usually removing one was not so catastrophic because the structure is almost self-sustaining: Roman emperors and governors could be swapped without much trouble, Chinese dynasties changed quite often by war or politics and the UK had quite a lot of changes in ruling class. We could see it also in the Russian Empire, they fell to a completely different meme set becoming URSS and back to modern Russian Federation, different iterations of the same structure.... I didn't understand what is, but seems that the "state" there is providing something.
Keystones exist in artificial systems, living ones usually have quite a lot of workarounds to minimize the impact of single point of failure situations, but also living organisms have similar problems in their complexity, cancer, infections and similar are particular examples of modes of failure possible in complex holographic systems. Death is unavoidable as manifestation of entropy, we can discuss what killed something, still the result was unavoidable!
States and big orangizations are like individual, they too are complex enought to die, usually also more complex is somathing less it lives: animals live less than plants, plants live less than bacteria, bigger the individual in a class more it usually live (more inertia) but still it will die.
New life must be able to come from death else the world will stop, actual decay must be used as fertilizer for the new, but we are no more in contact with nature to really understand this. We don't have to keep the burden of killing our beef, enduring the feeling of a life failing under our fingers, we didn't plant the seeds that are also our flour and so on, death and sacrifice are far away and keep at distance or exorcized as saints or heroes: the saint exists also to make his work "other" from human so not really required to common people and heroes are "one of a kind" so too not something that anyone expect from common people.
In this post, "Initiatives", I excerpt and link to a lot of views of the filling of the Syrian power vacuum now underway. Turkey wants it all, reconstituting the Ottoman Empire. Israel wants a little-more and a little-more and a little-more as long as it is free of IDF blood, and is encroaching quite well, despite being warned off by somewhat distant Turks. HTS holds Damascus and major cities along the north-south line, but with a fairly small and dispersed force.
Russia moved away from Kurdish areas, contested by Turkey, and Russian/Syrian-army bases are being taken by scanty US forces to deter Turks. Turks say Kurds in Syria are an existential threat and they will militarily evict them from the best farmland and oilfields.
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/initiatives
In the case of Syria, it's borders were artificially drawn by foreigners in such way that several opposing ethnic groups were fused together. Such countries are notoriously difficult to keep together even in the most favorable circumstances. Italy, on the other hand, has common foundation that is Italian language (with several dialects). Therefore there was some logic in making Italy unified country. British just facilitated the unification for their strategic reasons but Italy later became British enemy much more powerful than Kingdom of Naples could ever be. No matter how good British are in their machinations it's always risky strategy. The centuries of machinations are not helping them now when they are falling fast.
Yes and no. Italy is defined in geographical terms, but culturally it is a patchwork of different regions even today. It was much more so at the time of the unification. The South had no economic advantages in joining the North to be exploited as a colony. That's why it tried to resist the invasion, but it failed.
Decapitation of a military force seems to have been effective in Lebanon, now we see an essentially defeated and isolated Hezbollah. Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador filming in Lebanon has a pretty good analysis of events that he frankly says he did not expect 6 weeks ago.
Going back to the emergence of modern nation states... the big back-drop was Europe and the failing dynastic empires. and one has to include the Ottoman, that could not compete with industrialisation, population increase and mass urbanisation, and the emergent nation states capable of acquiring global colonies for resource extraction and captive markets. We are so used these days to 'the nation' and the industrial technocratic model based on fossil fuel that we can't see the underlying diversity still latent in our histories while these resource wars play out with diminishing returns?
I agree on the analysis, but I feel like it is specific to some kinds of states and not universal.
We had also some quite resilient states that seem had no keystones or some internal dynamic that made them resilient, we can think about Afghanistan or Vietnam but also some "narco empires" and similar.
My feeling is that we have "hollow states" and "filled states", the first is a governing body that is established but really didn't provide much to the populace under it, the second is a governing body that is functional to grant and keep running a lot of the well-being of the populace. Quite a bit of long-lasting empires were of the second type, Romans conquered by war but usually being conquered was to get access to a lot of useful services and infrastructure, same for English empire and old Chinese one, their fall was usually perceived as a setback so they could have keystones but usually removing one was not so catastrophic because the structure is almost self-sustaining: Roman emperors and governors could be swapped without much trouble, Chinese dynasties changed quite often by war or politics and the UK had quite a lot of changes in ruling class. We could see it also in the Russian Empire, they fell to a completely different meme set becoming URSS and back to modern Russian Federation, different iterations of the same structure.... I didn't understand what is, but seems that the "state" there is providing something.
Keystones exist in artificial systems, living ones usually have quite a lot of workarounds to minimize the impact of single point of failure situations, but also living organisms have similar problems in their complexity, cancer, infections and similar are particular examples of modes of failure possible in complex holographic systems. Death is unavoidable as manifestation of entropy, we can discuss what killed something, still the result was unavoidable!
States and big orangizations are like individual, they too are complex enought to die, usually also more complex is somathing less it lives: animals live less than plants, plants live less than bacteria, bigger the individual in a class more it usually live (more inertia) but still it will die.
"https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-pull-living-microbes-100-million-years-beneath-sea" for comparison
New life must be able to come from death else the world will stop, actual decay must be used as fertilizer for the new, but we are no more in contact with nature to really understand this. We don't have to keep the burden of killing our beef, enduring the feeling of a life failing under our fingers, we didn't plant the seeds that are also our flour and so on, death and sacrifice are far away and keep at distance or exorcized as saints or heroes: the saint exists also to make his work "other" from human so not really required to common people and heroes are "one of a kind" so too not something that anyone expect from common people.