Comment by milesrout
5 days ago
It was no more acceptable than any of the other things that happened in the 19th century.
How Germany became a nation-state, which was generally by the unification of German polities (like Italy, or as happened in France many many centuries earlier), is quite irrelevant to its status today as one. Poland basically expelled its German population after WW2 for example. There are presumably people still alive today that were expelled. That is much more recent history but it doesn't take away from the fact that Poland is a nation-state or make that somehow a bad or invalid status.
I didn't say it was a good thing to expel cultural minorities, and nation-states can and do obviously have cultural minorities without issue.
The problem is people denying that Germany is a nation, often denying the very notion that there is something validly called a nation. The problem is people saying that Germans don't have the right to control their borders and maintain their country as their country on this basis. There are people that think unironically that identifying ethnic groups is racist if you are doing it for any reason except to give "affirmative action" benefits to non-white ethnic minorities.
Your country is presumably the US so you likely have no actual conception of what a nation-state is. The US is not one.
> is quite irrelevant to its status today as one.
You are the one which talked about how Germany has always been a nation state, as if that were a good thing.
> Poland basically expelled its German population after WW2 for example. ...
> Poland is a nation-state
Umm, you should mention the additional role of the Allied powers and the Postsdam Agreement in the ethnic cleansing of Germans from post-war Poland, and how it was based on the belief that a homogeneous population would be be more stable. And you should mention how the nation-state could only exist because of the near extermination of the Jewish population.
Had that not happened, Poland would now be as much a nation-state as Belgium or Finland.
So far I am not liking the processes used to make nation states.
Let's see, you said Italy is a nation-state, right? I've visited the autonomous region of South Tyrol. I guess the native German speakers are a cultural minority that a nation-state can have, right?
> saying that Germans don't have the right to control their borders and maintain their country as their country
I think I've spotted the racism. Define German. Define "their borders." Is Austria German? Is South Tyrol German? Should they be in German borders?
Is the Danish minority of Southern Schleswig German?
Do Germans need to be Catholic? Or Protestant? Can Germans be Muslim? Can Germans be black? Can Somalian refugees be German? Can the grandchildren of Turkish guest workers be German?
As an American, I find it bizarre and bigoted to call native-born Germans "Ausländer" just because their parents didn't come from Germany. Is that the nation-state you're talking about?
To me that just seems like a continuation of 19th century racist nationalism.