Independence for Kosovo, Yes or No?

[Verily]

Yes. Referendum.

Let the areas contiguous with Serbia that vote more than 55% against stay in Serbia.

Yes.

[Verily]

Problem with letting the Serbian areas stay with Serbia:

Just like my plan for Northern Ireland, it pleases most but leaves a few angry. Most of the Serbs live in areas contiguous with Serbia, and they can stay in Serbia.

(My Northern Ireland plan would be for Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh, the mostly nationalist areas, to join Ireland while the rest of NI stays in the UK. That politically defuses the nationalists by putting most of their supporters in Ireland while leaving most of the unionists in Britain. Unfortunately, the nationalist areas of Belfast stay in NI, but that can't be helped.)

[Verily]

Do you people really believe there would be no discrimination of persecution of ethnic Serbs in an independent Kosovo? Especially with that butcher who currently serves as PM...

I don't think you're getting the point...there is discrimination going in a lot of countries in the world. THe solution to that isn't necessarily to revoke that country's independence.

Moreover, it is reasonable possible for the Serbs in Kosovo, most of whom were relocated there within the last twenty years, to move back to Serbia.

[Verily]

I don't want Serbia to have control of Kosovo, and I don't like the way Russia is interfering with this issue. Why do they care so much? Is it because the Serbs are Slavs like them?

That being said, I support Kosovo being annexed to Albania. Kosovars are Ethnic Albanians. I don't like all these fragmented states in Eastern Europe. It reminds me of Germany from 1815-1871, terribly divided and politically neutered. I like nation states better than every group of 200 people getting their own country, which seems to be the way Europe is heading sometimes.

Yeah, the unification of Germany sure did a lot of good for Europe.

You'd rather have dozens of independent fiefdoms? Thats ridiculous now and it was already outdated in the mid 19th Century. Whether or not German unification led directly to World Wars One and Two is entirely debatable, but can't be proven as a fact.

Actually, most historians would agree that this was one of the main reasons.
Of course, if the unification hadn't occured there might have been a French-British or a Russian British war - or both at the same time.

No, most historians agree that the initial fragmentation of Germany is what led to their militancy. Many small noble fiefdoms meant the sustaining of a large rural peasantry at the expensive of urbanization. They also encouraged militancy as each noble felt a need to be protected from the others. The unification of Germany merely turned these factors outward.

[Verily]

I don't want Serbia to have control of Kosovo, and I don't like the way Russia is interfering with this issue. Why do they care so much? Is it because the Serbs are Slavs like them?

That being said, I support Kosovo being annexed to Albania. Kosovars are Ethnic Albanians. I don't like all these fragmented states in Eastern Europe. It reminds me of Germany from 1815-1871, terribly divided and politically neutered. I like nation states better than every group of 200 people getting their own country, which seems to be the way Europe is heading sometimes.

Yeah, the unification of Germany sure did a lot of good for Europe.

You'd rather have dozens of independent fiefdoms? Thats ridiculous now and it was already outdated in the mid 19th Century. Whether or not German unification led directly to World Wars One and Two is entirely debatable, but can't be proven as a fact.

Actually, most historians would agree that this was one of the main reasons.
Of course, if the unification hadn't occured there might have been a French-British or a Russian British war - or both at the same time.

No, most historians agree that the initial fragmentation of Germany is what led to their militancy. Many small noble fiefdoms meant the sustaining of a large rural peasantry at the expensive of urbanization. They also encouraged militancy as each noble felt a need to be protected from the others. The unification of Germany merely turned these factors outward.

No, most historians disagree.

Anyway, most German states outside of Prussia were not especially militant. And Prussia's militant ways really came out when they started to aspire to the status of a great power and began the moves toward German unification. I was of course partly tounge-in-cheek; I'm not opposed to German unification in principle, but the idea that big states lead to peace is kind of ridiculous.

Verily, I'm not sure where most of your historians are, but I'd like them to explain why, if smaller states are more militant, Luxembourg, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland were, perhaps a tad less agressive than say Germany or France during the late nineteenth century.

You're setting up a straw man; nowhere did I say explicitly that all small states are militant ones.

The small German states had large peasant classes resulting from the intentional weakening of the cities by the nobility, which wanted to control trade and distrusted (probably rightfully so in terms of their own power) rising middle class factions in major trading centers. This large peasant class enabled the nobility to field large armies, and moreover the importance of agriculture and control of land as opposed to specialized industries and centers of trade encouraged conflict between petty princedoms. The Prussians were the most successful of these princedoms, but they, like all the others, started out small and eventually conquered (or strong-armed) the whole thing.

In England, initial centralization gave way to a stronger nobility, but one that was coterminous with the middle class, driving the peasantry out of rural areas and into the cities, where they too developed some auxiliary middle class structure. The monarchy was not as strong as in some places in mainland Europe, but it was strong enough to prevent internal conflicts that might have otherwise arisen. The middle class was adverse to (land) warfare, and England didn't have to worry much about land warfare anyway except with Scotland.

In France, the existence of a single state allowed the nobility the same freedom to specialize as in England, though this was completed to a lesser extent, perhaps because France had to worry more about external threats than England did, leading to the French Revolution and subsequent conflicts between lower class and aristocracy over the course of the 19th century. In Russia, a very weak nobility was kept under the thumb of the czars, and, although agriculture flourished and therefore the peasant class was large and urbanization minimal, internal conflict was also minimal as power was extremely centralized from the beginning. (Until the peasantry overthrew both the aristocracy and the monarchy, of course, though even then power was centralized.)

[Verily]

To make things more clear, the primary cause of a militant Germany (and many militant states in the 18th-20th centuries generally) was a strong, landed nobility coupled with a weak (or in Germany's case, essentially nonexistent by this time) monarchy. This restricts urbanization, prevents the appearance of a middle class, encourages warfare between nobles, and allows for the appearance of a single charismatic figure to turn that militancy outward.

[Verily]

In England, initial centralization gave way to a stronger nobility, but one that was coterminous with the middle class, driving the peasantry out of rural areas and into the cities, where they too developed some auxiliary middle class structure.

I'm not really sure where to begin as I'm not sure how broad the period you're talking about is (are you starting in the 18th century? 17th? 14th?).

But the process of urbanisation certainly didn't happen like that; industrialisation was all (the enclosures were but part of the process of industrialisation). I'm also a little unsure what you mean by "peasantry", btw.

Starting in about the late 16th to 17th century. Enclosures were the first step in both urbanization and industrialization. They drove the peasantry off of farms and into cities, where they became an industrial workforce. Their influence was most pronounced in England (and to a lesser extent Scotland and Wales), though the decline of public land and tenant farming contributed somewhat to urbanization in France as well.

I'm using peasantry to refer to poor farmers, especially those who do not own their own land, as opposed to poor industrial workers.

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The monarchy was, in fact, so strong that a King was overthrown (and then had his head lopped off) by a group of religious Radicals.
[/quote]

Well, yes, and they'd already been forced to concede some powers to the aristocracy in the past. However, unlike Germany, two nobles were not about to start a war with each other; the monarchs, even after being overthrown in both the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, were still able to put a stop to most internecine warfare.