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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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I suppose that by 'blood' you mean ethnic heritage, not service in the foreign legion or occult rituals.

I think ethnostates are overrated. Italy is not genetically uniform, and there is certainly no neat genetic cut-off between German-speaking South Tyrolese and the people living north of the Austrian border. The Sards form their distinct ethnic cluster. None of this matters very much, and few would think that Italy would benefit by granting South Tyrole to Austria and give independence to Sardinia so that Italy can get closer to being an ideal ethnostate.

Being an ethnostate is compatible with being a static agrarian society. Defend your borders, don't let the filthy foreigners in, raise a lot of pure-blooded kids to carry your ethnicity forward. (Take care not to get conquered, though.)

Being an ethnostate does not seem feasible for empires (Rome, Britain, US were/are all notably multi-ethnic), nor does it seem very beneficial for modern globally competitive information societies. Even societies in East Asia which we might perceive as ethnically homogeneous, such as Japan, South Korea or Singapore (not a bastion of wokeness) have naturalization laws requiring residency of 5-10 years. Technically, you don't have to let in foreigners to become technologically advanced, you can also just grant professorships to your own citizens who studied abroad, but this will reduce your applicant pool by ~90%. And societies which are seriously xenophobic might place little value in young people living among foreigners for a few years.

The adjective to describe the gulf states is not 'successful', but 'rich'. The smallish populations inhabiting them simply won the geological lottery, and used their undeserved wealth to import serf while denying them the wealth tied to citizenship. (Political participation is reserved strictly for the elites, of course.) This makes some cruel sense from the point of view of the native population. But unless you are suggesting that being an ethnostate affects the odds of fossil fuels being found in your land, their example can hardly be adapted to other states who have to compete for their GDP. Also, money can prop up a lot of things which would not be stable otherwise, it bribes their own citizens to stay quiet and also buys a lot of fancy tanks which can keep the serfs in check. I am not convinced that Saudi Arabia will be a good place to be twenty years after the oil is gone.