Question #9

Yes I believe being a sovereign nation protects difference. For example take the Croatians in Yugoslavia in the late 1980's. They had a separate identity as did all the Yugoslav republics. For most of the country's history all the ethnic groups particularly the catholic Croatians, the orthodox Serbians, and the Bosniak Muslims lived in an equilibrium of culture and identity. However once Milosevic rose to power in Serbia he wanted to enforce Serbian dominance in the rest of the country. This was done mostly by way of having government, military, and other important official jobs in the republics and the country as a whole filled by Serbs. The average Croatian was frightened of the prospect of having their culture submissive to Serbia. So they declared themselves independent of Yugoslavia so as to protect their identity. Now even more interesting is that the Serbs living in Croatia, which was now a self-declared sovereign nation, decided they wanted their independence from Croatia. And like the Croats the Croatian Serbs were concerned that the Croatians would eliminate their culture, quite possibly by means of actually eliminating the Serbs themselves. Once Bosnia declared independence for many of the same reasons as Croatia, the exact same thing happened with Bosnian Serbs declaring themselves independent from Bosnia, and this time the Croats living in Bosnia did this as well.

This is also an example of how far people will go to protect their identity. Just the fear that the Serbs would end up being more powerful in Yugoslav politics than the Croats was enough to convince the Croats to break away. And the Croatian Serbs hated the idea of living in an independent Croatia so much that they broke away, but the tragedy of Yugoslavia is that this fear of cultural loss so enraged people that they started a war, but not a normal war, in many cases a total war, were your side could only win if everybody else was either dead or completely removed. Genocide, mass rape, destruction of whole towns, all sides did this just to protect their differences and they believed that the only way to be different was to be separate. But now look at the Balkans. Every single republic of Yugoslavia is now an independent country, even Kosovo which was only a semi-autonomous region of Serbia has semi-recognized independence, and things are relatively peaceful, and each republic has their own identity, their own culture, and their own differences. That they could not have had all being in one country where none of them were sovereign powers.