Comment by eesmith

> 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.