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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3851 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

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Extremely ignorant of both countries but;

Why doesn't India or Brazil just Balkanize?

Brazil:

  • Heavily stratified across the North and South. In just about all aspects. Let that be race, wealth, or crime. Is there some kind of system where the south is exploiting the north?

India:

  • Massive language, racial and religious divide. Not sure about wealth.

What's the virtue in balkanization, and how do you balance that against becoming a smaller power compared to your neighboring countries?

Question is whether economies of scale beat out diseconomies of scale.

Some systems (eg EU, US) try to solve this but there is a natural tendency for central governments to accrue more power even if it isn’t clear whether that’s a good thing or a natural outcome of federations.

Local elites can become ruling elites in their own state, thus gaining more power and possibilities to earn money.

India has already been balkanized into India and Pakistan (which has also split into Pakistan proper and Bangladesh). Any further balkanization was prevented with literal tanks.

It’s my understanding that these societies are generally improving for the average person and thus not the kind of society you would expect to be undergoing fission-level tension.

Balkanizing anything is hard, and there are a lot of reasons why it tends to be incredibly damaging.

Imagine if my local politicians somehow went through with Texit. All of a sudden we have 3 times as much border. We have to negotiate for use of the interstate highway system. We have to negotiate trade with every country that recognizes us as a new entity. Our superpower neighbor starts running covert ops whenever its alphabet agencies get bored.

I think that gets at a key difference between the USA(and Austria-Hungary) on the one hand, and to my knowledge India and Brazil on the other- multiple imperial cores. Texas, California, New York City have massive distorting effects on their neighbors to the point of being, basically, imperial core regions that happen to be politically subordinated to a larger structure. I’m not saying that the USA is about to break up, I’m saying that the apparent lack of that structure in India and Brazil makes it very unlikely that they would break up, because you’ll notice Texit is popular(and it’s exactly the kind of popular outside Overton window idea that the motte sometimes likes to use as examples of elite dissonance, even if there’s good reasons the elite like it less than the commons) in, well, Texas- one of those subordinated imperial core regions.

I dunno, could be wrong about the internal structures of India and Brazil, but I don’t think I’m wrong in pointing to the structures involved in the breakup of Yugoslavia and Austria-Hungary.

How would India achieve this? Why would the federal government allow states to secede? India is also diverse along multiple different axes. Even within states formed along language boundaries, Kerala for example, you have different religions and tribal vs rural vs urban populations. Would be a nightmare to partition, especially considering how chaotic the initial India-Pakistan partition was.

I agree, but to be fair the Balkans themselves were "a nightmare to partition".

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