Comment by luckylion
5 months ago
> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce
The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).
It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.
The USSR split up into 15 smaller states 35 years ago. But those 15 smaller states combined are exactly the same territory as the former USSR- none of her (many, many) neighbors took the opportunity to reach in and fiddle with borders, to redraw this or that boundary that they had wanted, to try and take back parts of their former country that Stalin had stolen back in 1945.
No one is saying that states will never collapse, will never split up, will never secede. But the fact that no existing state tried to take advantage of the confusion in the USSR and gain revenge for an ancient wrong? That was the result of this global norm, which held up even as the USSR (and Yugoslavia) fell apart. And that is a very good thing.