I appreciate the response Lord Shonus, but is everything OK? That's an enormous number of typos in that post, which is uncharacteristic for you. You might just be a little tipsy, who knows 
The on-screen keyboard of my tablet does that to me, often enough. i/o shift and n/m shift is not difficult on any (Qwerty) keyboard, but "Thisnis" is a 'go for spacebar, hit somewhere on the lower-row' standard error (ironically, I typed "space ar" just now!), with 'n' also a common key for me to mishit to in such circumstances. (I'm trying to avoid hitting the OS's "v O ≡" device overlay, below, which is more troublesome than most typos I can make by erring upwards.)
In this message, so far, as well as b/space I made an o/k slip and and a/w one, and a probably at least one other that I haven't spotted yet. That apart from getting c instead of apostrophe, i.e. not a long enough press to bring up the punctuation alternative. But it could have been worse, it could have been ç instead, due to finger-slip before release! And though I may have avoided it this time, going for l (uncapitalised L) puts me very close to backspace, so I can 'unbalance' things by ending up typing "unbance" instead, for example. Or "exame". Some such typos don't even read wrong. (Until you parse them, without "(al)ready" knowing what they "sho(ul)d" have been saying!)
Back to the subject, WW1 cemented a new paradigm, both on inception and 'conclusion', at least for the core of Europe Dynastic (mostly - or aspiringly so) realms used to annex and grab territories from each other a lot in prior times. The (possibly exagerated) tales of someone who had lived in seven different empires, but never even left the village they were born in, for example. And without front lines visibly moving, just a different set of tax-collectors/etc turning up occasionally.
Post-Armistice, there seemed to be a 'progressive' view that lines of control would (mostly!) return to what they were before... Perhaps not immediately before, though, where an even older claim might have been attended to where it was usefully an additional part of the punitive recompense (mostly financial) tagged on as the primary replacement for "you lost" (arguable) "...thus we take your land!"
Pre-WW2, the Germans therefore took the 'no-invasion invasion' route of engineering the (re)merging of a Greater Germany, but largely by wholesale absorption without traditional mitary (("military"!!)) attack-and-take. It was the division of Poland, which had been a grand old empire of old in the more fluid days,
without sufficiently excused popular support on the ground, that moved things into an actual pronounced war (prounounced "Waaaaaaaaaar"</goonshow>).
Post WW2, the differences were slighter still on the borders (Denmark got a bit back from Germany, etc) compared to the Block-based co-nationalism that set up the Soviet states (pretty much Russia-plus) and Western Europe (eventually the far more restrained EU, but overlaps and non-congruity with the baseline NATO that didn't even claim it as a monolithic territory, just membership).
Maybe this explains the Russian attitude, as most 'true Russians' hanker back to the Soviet Republic(s) of their/their parents' past, where individual freedom was universal across a monolothic superstats. Universally depressed, but it had something go for it if you had lived through it successfully. Western attitudes have a different history. Allsace-Lorrainne, etc, isn't something we'd expect to change (I doubt the EU would do as ¿Stalin? do with the Crimea, etc).
(I can only personally speak from a UK perspective, though, where borders have generally not been flexible or contestable for quite a while (Ireland/Irish Free State/Eire, and the bit that is now Northern Ireland, aside). We don't have the same Scottish border as back when Hadrian or Anthony were putting down their walls, and Berwick-upon-Tweed has had an interesting time of it, but that was 'set in stone' a long time ago. And apart from some desire to regionalise further the old Cornish territory, etc, there's little recent experience of invasion in the traditional sense (Channel Islands, obviously) and boundary changes are sub-national, annoying the proud Yorkshirefolk finding themselves now in Lancashire, or vice-versa.)
Obviously what Europe (and European-successors) did elsewhere is different, whether Chagos Islands, US Oversees claims, Indian/Pakistan post-partition borderland disputes and various messes in the continent of Africa (largely caused by historic European line-drawing/flag-planting, though without that who knows which different disputes and changes would have evolved). Is the set of South American borders fairly static these days? I know there are closures and political historicism, but since Bolivia lost its coastal access I'm not sure how much more has actually shifted.
And with China. Well, Taiwan aside (which itself has claim to the greater China, as well, just less likely to do anything about it) it seems to have been trying the creeping-tentacle game of gaining client-states via infrasructure (and loan-defaults, possibly engineered that way from the start), which is what some accuse the EU and/or NATO of, but clearly more insideously so.
Sorry, been writing and editing this for an hour now, and I think I've far exceeded my initial brief I set myself to quickly prattle away about. Leaving a few gross defects in my generalisations that I meant to double-check - but realised I'd end up writing more just in clarifications than I was starting with.
Author
Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4455100 times)