> Imperialist Communist dictatorships try to destroy the identities of conquered countries and 'foreign' internal regions, including the USSR and China (Tibet,

> 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 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).