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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28179 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Ukraine had UN membership from founding of UN...

The CSA was not recognized by as a country by others, even by UK. Post-1991 Ukraine has decades of peaceful life and got recognition by everyone.

Sure, that's a valid point, but in practice recognition is largely enforced through whatever borders a polity is capable of maintaining militarily (or having another nation maintain on their behalf). South Vietnam and South Korea are good examples of this playing out post WWII, their differing outcomes being a result of how their respective wars played out. Had Russia enough power to project their will, it's not clear to me that the rest of the world wouldn't just quietly drop recognition of Ukraine, since it wouldn't serve any benefit to them. (Thankfully for Eastern Europe, this doesn't seem to be the case.)

For the CSA's part, every other country remained neutral. CSA had powerful trading partners in Britain and France and they opted to wait to see how it played out, not wanting to upset trade deals with an emerging nation in the event of a CSA victory, or hurting relations with the Union by backing a rebellion in the event of a CSA loss. This is a similar diplomatic stance that the US held towards Europe as well, attempting to remain neutral as possible in 19th century European wars.

That's a very bad argument. If, for example, Kurds can carve out and keep a Kurdistan for themselves, it's theirs. If the UN doesn't recognize it, that's an argument against the UN, not Kurdistan.

...but it seems to me how it works in practice.

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