> All of the nations you mention ("Europe" is not a nation) have had to fight to maintain their identity (and both Europe and Japan have relied on US military protection for a couple generations now).
When have they fought to maintain their identity? They fought for conquest or freedom. Japan, Germany, and Italy lost WWII, but their identities didn't (substantially) change.
Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet, Xinjing). That fails spectacularly - when the USSR collapsed, all the ethnic identities reappeared.
Interestingly, in free democracies, such as the US, ethnic identities tend to vanish. I read one study (many years ago) that said for most immigrants, in the third generation, only ~5% speak the original native language and (IIRC) ~80% marry outside the ethnic group.
It's hard to be more wrong when postulating that USSR tried to destroy ethnic identities.
USSR took a centrally run Russian Empire and carved a dozen of ethnic states from it - ones such as Belarus and Azerbaijan. These were de-jure countries with right of secession and USSR rouble bill featured writings in all of these countries' official languages.
When talking about Eastern Europe, USSR did some rebordering but it never prevented any of countries from having a language, a government and they got to keep a national flag.
> It's hard to be more wrong when postulating that USSR tried to destroy ethnic identities.
Their propaganda insisted it didn't exist. They literally moved communities across Asia to eradicate it. They insisted they were harmonious, unlike the divided US (sound like a familiar story?). There's a book by Daniel Patrick Moynahan which predicted the breakdown when the USSR disappeared.
> with right of secession
:D
> USSR did some rebordering but it never prevented any of countries from having a language, a government
:D They never prevented them from having a government that submitted to Moscow. Ask Hungary and Czechoslovakia, not to mention Tito, about what happens otherwise.
Russians did not get to keep a national flag. Russians only got their land and their souls given away to newfound nationalistic republics here and there, with no say about it.
Your comment shows the total futility of catering to ethnic minorities - they would eat through any amount of privilege and then backstab at the first opportunity. This was unexpected to USSR and Yugoslavia alike.
The success of China as an authoritarian state relies on not doing that mistake.
> free democracies, such as the US, ethnic identities tend to vanish
The US had legally mandated ethnic identities until 1967. It does tend to flatten other identities into "black" and "white", but that doesn't mean they've disappeared entirely.
> When have they fought to maintain their identity?
In case of Czech and Slovak Republic, at the very least in the second half of the 19th century, during WW I, and during WW II.
> Japan, Germany, and Italy lost WW II, but their identities didn't (substantially) change.
Another red herring; it wasn't the intention of victors to change the identities of Japan, Germany, and Italy, but it was DEFINITELY an intention of Germany to remove the identities of their Slavic neighbors. Had Germany won WW II, the losers wouldn't have been anywhere as lucky.
"Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet, Xinjing). That fails spectacularly - when the USSR collapsed, all the ethnic identities reappeared."
I'm pretty sure this stuff happens in countries that aren't communist nor dictatorships, too. See the treatment of First Nations people in the US and Canada for examples.
That last line doesn't tell us much unless you can compare it to what happens in other countries: I'm guessing that in most places, the outcome is similar. And to be absolutely fair: My grandmother didn't learn Arabic because her mother insisted the children not speak anything but English. They had moved from Syria to the US long ago. Realistically, it was so they did not get treated badly. No wonder her children and grandchildren (me) do not speak Arabic.
> I'm pretty sure this stuff happens in countries that aren't communist nor dictatorships, too. See the treatment of First Nations people in the US and Canada for examples.
Are we going to bring up slavery too? It's 2021.
> My grandmother didn't learn Arabic because her mother insisted the children not speak anything but English. They had moved from Syria to the US long ago. Realistically, it was so they did not get treated badly. No wonder her children and grandchildren (me) do not speak Arabic.
That is a common story, actually. Again, the immigrants want to erase the ethnic distinctions (to a degree, of course).
> Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet, Xinjing). That fails spectacularly - when the USSR collapsed, all the ethnic identities reappeared.
To be fair the USSR had scarcely 3 generations to make this work and they were nominally committed to respecting the cultures of the nations they subsumed, they just wanted to eradicate all the ideologically 'incorrect' aspects of cultural expression. China is likely to be much more successful if it has another 40 or 50 years because they will have successfully conducted a complete ethnic cleansing of Tibet and Xinjiang, which the remaining ethnic population there reduced to a discriminated against curiosity.
Historically plenty of subnational identity groups DID get successfully wiped out or have it be near enough to not matter. Germany, France, and Italy, for example were all the products of a big nation-building project that involved standardizing linguistic differences (sometimes even forcing German speakers to switch to French and vice versa) through public education and other state interventions.
In Europe it's hard to disentangle the nation-building process (as a cultural thing) from the formation of the modern, industrial, bureaucratic state (as a technological and social thing) because they both happened at the same time. We see the same processes play out with state-formation and nation building in the developing (post-colonial) world and if you apply the same trends back to what was happening in Europe around the start of the 100 years war it's a little easier to see the commonalities.
But we can see examples in Spain, where the state didn't get quite as advanced as in France or Germany until after WWII, and there still are several sub-nationalities that never got fully absorbed, like Catalonia or the Basque region. But once upon a time many of these https://i.redd.it/qw2f5wir7mq31.jpg would have been considered different identity groups, with the distinctions between them considered as salient or more salient than national identity (though probably less salient than whether you were catholic or protestant).
When have they fought to maintain their identity? They fought for conquest or freedom. Japan, Germany, and Italy lost WWII, but their identities didn't (substantially) change.
Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet, Xinjing). That fails spectacularly - when the USSR collapsed, all the ethnic identities reappeared.
Interestingly, in free democracies, such as the US, ethnic identities tend to vanish. I read one study (many years ago) that said for most immigrants, in the third generation, only ~5% speak the original native language and (IIRC) ~80% marry outside the ethnic group.