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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The problem of the White Russians wasn't that the emerging Bolshevik state was strong -- actually it was significantly weaker at the time than any of the countries to which the émigrés went -- it's that it was Bolshevik. The US government was much stronger than the Soviet government, despite being less overbearing.

that fleeing conscription and taxes isn't a common reason for migration throughout history.

The US does not have conscription, while countries with significantly weaker governments like Syria or Ukraine do.

If you look a few comments up the chain, conscription and taxes are what we're talking about, not some abstract notion of strength you can argue to mean anything.

I started this comment chain and the comment I was replying to said nothing about conscription or taxes. I think "is there conscription and high taxes" is a bad measure of government strength compared to "does this government face any serious threats to its monopoly on force."

Then I think the entire disagreement is down to the definition of strength.

Centralization and the prevalence of rebels are pretty orthogonal.

I don't see how this could be true. A decentralized state which leaves more power in the hands of regional/local authorities provides many more opportunities for rebel groups to emerge and organize.

Oh that's easy.

Federal and confederal states allow local customs and forms to change independently without requiring a power struggle.

Central governments can also breed rebellion because their distance both in hierarchy and geography affords them less legitimacy and they have to use force more often.

Hence the two common and proven ways of dealing with separatism: autonomy and repression.

Both unitarian and federal states can be stable or unstable, but both have longstanding examples of both.

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