integrating a state is a difficult, always ongoing project. human beings have and generate wide ranges of identities that don’t color between territorial lines. often the putative rulers of the putative states are shit. under the best of circumstances it’s a project that often fails. 1/

it’s a project that demands diplomacy and creativity. these are (proto)states we are talking about coercion and violence are in the toolkit as well. 2/

there is no cookbook right or wrong way to manage the project. should an affiliative group be granted some formal autonomy and recognition, or will that sew division? should we celebrate, even tolerate, linguistic diversity or insist on a unifying official language? 3/

all of these choices have tradeoffs. is it right or wrong to insist minority communities be schooled in the majority’s language and in majority norms and customs? it depends. it can be a legitimate choice. 4/

insisting that some affiliative communities (who decides? who judges?) have rights against the state to prejudge these choices is a well intentioned form of sabotage, ultimately in no one’s interest. 5/

no moral code written in Geneva can foresee the circumstances, adjudicate the trade offs, understand the particularities of local, overlapping identities, the potentials for conflict and for accommodation. 6/

granting “rights” is actually imposing constraints, and though perhaps well intentioned often (in fact i would claim usually) undermines a state construction project in ways that harm all residents of the territory to be governed, often especially the minorities ostensibly protected. 7/

(empirically outside advocacy of minority rights often both emboldens the minority while rendering other groups less tolerant and willing to accommodate the minority identity as it becomes perceived as a foreign threat or site of influence against the domestic sovereign.) 8/

it’s well meaning, sounds moral and good, but is a hubristic, mischievous, deadly project in practice. 9/

are there instances if vicious treatment of “unprotected” minorities, of genocide without any external meddling, of integration projects that violently fail with no intercession by liberal-internationalist arrogations? 10/

absolutely. formation of a state legitimate to substantially a territory’s entire population is a very hard problem nearly always, and very few ultimately “successful” projects did not involve some measure of coercion, exclusion, even extermination. 11/

but those projects are less, not more, likely to resort more to ugly tactics when they do not have the full range of potential accommodations or insistences from which to choose. 12/

when they lack the confidence to be indulgent because they perceive accommodation as forced surrender to an unintegrated subgroup, especially if managers of the putative state perceive accommodation as imposed by foreign powers, violent suppression becomes very likely. 13/

a state is sovereign. rights claims are claims against the sovereign. 14/

a liberal state that maintains sovereignty despite granting and then respecting strong rights claims against it is the most desirable form of state, but also rare and difficult to sustain and emerges from confident sovereignty rather than before it. 15/

pretending outsiders can insist on such a state by fiat, and correctly identify the form of rights claims and for whom that should be respected, prior to a process of integration and negotiation is just absurd. 16/

it sabotages worthy projects and encourages ugly conflicts that might otherwise have been avoided. 17/

(i’m sorry to have gone on so long and somewhat repetitively!) /fin