Yeah, the “neighbors” thing here is load-bearing—I think about borders as Schelling points, and so selling off territorial possessions is very different from selling off parts of your homeland to a neighbor who might then want to expand more.
I don’t have any clear examples of the latter in mind—I was thinking about this as a claim about why that doesn’t happen very much (i.e. it’s a hypothesis for the game-theoretic logic underlying people’s instinctive resistance to selling parts of their homeland). I also don’t think it’s crucial for the post as a whole.
But it does seem to be phrased too confidently given that lack of examples. So I’ll change it to “concede some territory”, where I think Czechoslovakia before WW2 (the Sudetenland) and modern Ukraine (Crimea) are both examples. (Note that I’m less interesting in “official” concessions and more interested in e.g. how long they keep fighting for it.)
Ukraine speaking about retaking Crimea wasn’t discouraging Russia from invading, if anything it did the opposite. A world where they would have implemented Minsk II and accepted Crimea as lost, might be a world without the current war.
Yeah, the “neighbors” thing here is load-bearing—I think about borders as Schelling points, and so selling off territorial possessions is very different from selling off parts of your homeland to a neighbor who might then want to expand more.
I don’t have any clear examples of the latter in mind—I was thinking about this as a claim about why that doesn’t happen very much (i.e. it’s a hypothesis for the game-theoretic logic underlying people’s instinctive resistance to selling parts of their homeland). I also don’t think it’s crucial for the post as a whole.
But it does seem to be phrased too confidently given that lack of examples. So I’ll change it to “concede some territory”, where I think Czechoslovakia before WW2 (the Sudetenland) and modern Ukraine (Crimea) are both examples. (Note that I’m less interesting in “official” concessions and more interested in e.g. how long they keep fighting for it.)
Ukraine speaking about retaking Crimea wasn’t discouraging Russia from invading, if anything it did the opposite. A world where they would have implemented Minsk II and accepted Crimea as lost, might be a world without the current war.