>A cheap shot from the hip.
Of course it was a cheap shot. It was from the eXile, and it was satire. But really, Woj, you're not denying that Europe has an incredibly bloody history based on all kinds of national and ethnic conflicts. And Europe now is obsessed with its own internal purity - keeping out refugees and immigrants.
As Robert Hayden said in my interview with him <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Hayden.html>:
>What has triumphed in Europe in this century is the concept of
>nation-state, in which the nation, which is an ethnic group in
>American terms, gets the state, which is a territory and a
>government. The nation is sovereign. So the Germans are sovereign in
>Germany, and if you are not an ethnic German, you may be living in
>Germany but you are not part of the sovereign body. Most of Europe
>is set up in this way. What won in the free and fair elections in
>Yugoslavia at the end of Communism was the ethnic state, and that
>required moving populations. The areas that were mixed in the former
>Yugoslavia have become unmixed, and Kosovo is the last stage in this.
[...]
>There was a protracted economic crisis in the former Yugoslavia in
>the 1980s which turned into a political crisis. But what has
>happened is the triumph of a European ideology. I was living in
>Yugoslavia in the 1980s and we all thought that the social democrats
>were going to win and we were appalled that they didn't. The
>nationalists won. That's what wins in Europe in the 20th century.
>Americans find this hard to understand. There's no place in the
>United States with the possible exception of some of the larger
>Indian reservations where you can link territory and ethnic group.
>That's the way Europe is. There's one place in North America where
>you can link territory and ethnic group and that's Quebec. Quebec is
>a classic European nationalist movement. The history of the 20th
>century in Europe has been one of massive population transfers.
[...]
>Is there any way to get beyond this idea of ethnically pure national states?
>
>No, that's how Europe works. Show me the exceptions. There's
>Belgium, but that's actually two ethnically pure areas except for
>the capital, Brussels, loosely linked together. Switzerland is
>several ethnically pure areas more tightly linked together, but
>that's it.
>
>Sounds like Europeans are guilty of the tribalism they accuse
>"primitive" peoples of.
>
>Absolutely, except they call it nationalism. You call it tribalism
>in Africa, nationalism in Europe, communalism in South Asia --
>racism in America, but it doesn't take the territorial form in
>America that it does in Europe.