>>The original point was that nation states were invented,
so to speak, with the Treaty of Westphalia. In addition to
carving out Europe, it set the precedent for dividing up the
M.E. and Africa into new, artificial entities.
Nation state are certainly better than the Talibanality of
the Middle Ages or the Middle East. As for the rest of the
point, there are too many historical contradictions to set
an arbitrary precedent.
For example, even before the Thirty Years' War, it was a
European custom for two powerful forces to fight on land
belonging to a third party. That way the two powerful
entities didn't risk their own crops and forests being
damaged, their peasants ill treated or taken into bondage.
The third party was out of luck.
As for dividing up other people's land and creating new
entities out of them, it's hardly unique to 17th century
Europeans. For example, Ottoman Sultan Mohammed II captured
Constantinople in 1453 and transformed it into the new
Muslim Ottoman capital. To go with his new capital, Sultan
Mo II captured Greece, Albania, Bosnia, and Serbia. These
regions were transformed into entirely different, parceled,
interlocked facets of the Ottoman Empire. Mo II was planning
to do the same to Italy, but his body had other plans and he
died.
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