American states such as Vermont? http://www.vermontrepublic.org/ I find it funny too how the US supported Kosovo's independence, but heaven forbid if a state of our own were to do that!! It's real easy I guess to sit back in your elitist mansion, funding regimes here, supporting movements there, sanctioning countries here and there.. all while you collect a third of the income of every pesky worker in America!! How dare you speak out against the establishment!! You pesky little serfs!
My short answer, and grossly generalized, but nations on the way to modern development quite typically undergo a civil war - the flux engendered by mass mobilization - along ethnic, economic, geographic lines, many others - tends to be too much for the existing stasis to bear, and blood is the only solution between intractable alternatives. A sad reality. I think that what you are seeing in the Balkans is the last throes of that process, a bloody, costly process that we fought, in the U.S., 150 years ago.
A war that was ultimately unjust and led by the "heroic" failure we call Lincoln. A secession doesn't have to be followed by war. If I remember correctly, it was not the Confederates whose interest was war.
Well, we can argue about whether it was just or not, Nate. But as someone whose graduate work concentrated on nationalism, separatism, and political economic development, from my research into our country's history, and the history of manifold countries otherwise, civil war was inevitable - it might not have been 1861, but it would have been. This is my conclusion, anyway. The same obtains all over the globe.
Not saying it wasn't inevitable, but it shouldn't be that way. Unfortunately we've been brainwashed at an early age in skewl that Lincoln was an American hero and he was the "champion of slaves", without EVER letting them think for themselves.
Inevitability means that no matter what people may have "wanted," it was going to happen. Can't speak for everyone, but from a kid who lived on the side of freeways, I received a public education, and a great one at that, that gave me the gift of wonderful mentors, a deep love of history and the search for history's causes. From the community college where I first woke and flourished, through Berkeley and some of the finest minds in the field, I wouldn't have been given the gift without a beneficent society willing to place a priority on such an opportunity.
I'll pass on the whole public education system, if it works for you, that's excellent and I'm happy for you. But I can read a book for free at the library without paying a couple thousand dollars for it. And if I'm looking for a particularly good book and they don't have it, I might spend an upwards of $30 on amazon. Of all the great things I've learned in the past year or so, it has come from my OWN desire to learn about the things I am interested, not to get a "passing grade". My brother is finishing up college and finding that the jobs he wants to work don't even require his degree.
That library - how was it endowed? Fully on people paying user's fees? I went to college to learn, not to acquire good grades, not to acquire my entry card to a particular job. That I maintained a perfect G.P.A., acquired an honors degree, and achieved entry into the PhD program based on my work, and the nod of mentors who believed in me, is secondary to the primordial desire - to learn. I was exposed to things in a way it would not have been possible otherwise. A quick example, out of countless others: I have always been fascinated by history, and whether there is something to be learned from looking at it - whether there are causes to be assessed, or whether it's all just a bunch of contingent circumstances. I came across an entire body of work by virtue of something I took only incidentally - early English history. There, I discovered the reign of Alfred the Great and was given carte blanche to develop a fairly major work on his times, in terms of something I would later call proto-nationalism. What I discovered there led me to a broader synthesis of the relationship between industrialization, nationalism, and its relative, separatism. And I have been looking at all of this since, a lifetime of inquiry - and joy at the search. None of what I came to know would have originated in me being staying in my parent's house, searching for the books that fit my current vista. The nature and intensity of the experience - and the community intrinsic to such an experience - gave me a gift that has lasted a lifetime, unattainable any other way.
Then i'd say you took the right path. You were in it for the right reasons and is evident you learned a lot. I don't oppose what you did, I just believe that the things that I am interested in are no where to be found in college, that's something I'm sure of. And yes, the library is funded through tax, probably the ONLY thing I'll benefit from after they steal a third of my paycheck.
Well, that, and the plethora of daily things one doesn't think about until they are removed, I would say. Nate - and this is not meant as any kind of judgment, in any way, but out of a sincere spirit of kindness; if it's an unwarranted piece of advice, please disregard, also with my sincere desire you live long and well. I understood you to be 17 years of age? If so, may I drop in that life is long, but we only get one shot; whatever you do, exhaust yourself in all it has to offer, and take a cue from all the great traditions of wisdom: come to know yourself. Master what others teach, then discard it, and forge your own path. Along the way, I would humbly submit that what one is certain on may be, on a deeper search within, ephemeral, and unworthy of our time here.
Good point about secession Nate. I think you posted a Canadian article earlier today, and in that article, the Canadians were concerned about endorsing secession for Kosovo, when they have been fighting the French separatist movement for decades. It would be ironic for them to do so.
While it may not have been in the confederates best interest to wage war, they where the first to do so though by firing on Fort Sumter.