This feels like you started from a position that you wanted to believe and worked backwards, looking for reasons to believe it, rather than the other way around. The overwhelming majority of successful civilizations throughout history have been nation-states, at least to some degree, which should be addressed in some capacity by any argument claiming that it’s a suboptimal way to organize a society.
It is true that large empires are often not monoethnic, but this seems like a structural challenge of building a large empire[1] rather than a question of how each system scales. Indeed, large empires tend to be authoritarian rather than democratic, and few people use this as an argument for why authoritarianism is intrinsically better than democracy.
Which may not be intrinsically desirable—the U.S., for example, built its hegemonic status on a web of economic and military relationships rather than on conquest, and I don’t consider it self-evident that this is a worse strategy. China is frequently said to be working towards the same ends as a (relatively) monoethnic state.
The overwhelming majority of successful civilizations throughout history have been nation-states, at least to some degree,
The vast majority of unsuccessful ones have been ethnostates, as well, because the vast majority are ethnostates … on average, ethnostates are average.
Indeed, large empires tend to be authoritarian rather than democratic, and few people use this as an argument for why authoritarianism is intrinsically better than democracy.
This feels like you started from a position that you wanted to believe and worked backwards, looking for reasons to believe it, rather than the other way around. The overwhelming majority of successful civilizations throughout history have been nation-states, at least to some degree, which should be addressed in some capacity by any argument claiming that it’s a suboptimal way to organize a society.
It is true that large empires are often not monoethnic, but this seems like a structural challenge of building a large empire[1] rather than a question of how each system scales. Indeed, large empires tend to be authoritarian rather than democratic, and few people use this as an argument for why authoritarianism is intrinsically better than democracy.
Which may not be intrinsically desirable—the U.S., for example, built its hegemonic status on a web of economic and military relationships rather than on conquest, and I don’t consider it self-evident that this is a worse strategy. China is frequently said to be working towards the same ends as a (relatively) monoethnic state.
The vast majority of unsuccessful ones have been ethnostates, as well, because the vast majority are ethnostates … on average, ethnostates are average.
I spoke of greatness, not goodness.