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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33497 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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At one time, the Baltic countries joined the EU and became part of the "GAE". And they have deprived a third of their population of the right to vote on the basis of ethnicity. So I don't think that Ukraine will have problems with neo-Nazis.

Migrants go to Germany, France, Sweden - rich socialist states. Even Poland has a negative emigration balance in the EU. Probably Ukraine will never have to deal with mass migration from Africa.

From a demographic point of view, it is much more interesting how a country with one of the lowest fertility in the world and a population of less than 40 million people will exist after at least 10 million people left it. (Most of which are women and most of them will not return). This will probably be the biggest gender imbalance in history. Will Ukraine declare itself the first incel state? Will it provoke insanely high levels of crime and suicide? It will be interesting to watch.

And they have deprived a third of their population of the right to vote on the basis of ethnicity.

None of the Baltic countries has "deprived a third of their population of the right to vote on the basis of ethnicity", this assuredly referring to stateless post-Soviet citizens in Estonia and Latvia (not Lithuania, incidentally). Currently ca 9-10 % of Latvian and 7-8 % of Estonian population has the non-citizen status; this was not based on ethnicity but on the basis of becoming resident in these countries during Soviet occupation times (in other words, people descending from Estonian or Latvian Russian minorities that had existed there before the Soviet occupation gained citizenship among the others). Of course the noncitizen numbers were larger in the past decades, but many of them have been naturalized since.

That still definitely sounds to me like something the EU would never tolerate against any other ethnic group. You would likely get jail time in Germany for even championing stripping new comers of their citizenship.

Again, it wasn't done against one ethnic group. The group of stateless citizens included Ukrainians, Azeris etc. in addition to Russians.

Estonia and Latvia did this under rather special circumstances. In the Baltic countries, the historical view - with justification - is that the countries were illegally occupied in 1940-1991, with the legal state continuity instead being carried by the exile governments abroad. The fall of Soviet Union then meant the end of occupation; in this view, nobody was stripped of the Estonian/Latvian citizenship, since legally the newcomers had never even held it, as no citizenship application had been processed by a legitimate government in those countries.

Of course, this did lead to a fair mess regarding the status of the noncitizens and the fact that Lithuania solved this issue differently despite a similar history to other Baltic countries complicates things, but it's still important to remember what the legal justification for all of this is, insofar as Estonia and Latvia view the issue.

with the legal state continuity instead being carried by the exile

For multiple generations? That's just a ridiculous legal fiction. "Actually this group people born and raised in foreign countries who have never held any political power within you or your parent's lifetime was your true government all along. Oh, and they're now deciding who in the past few generations was a real citizen and who was not."

That's just a ridiculous legal fiction.

All discussion of legality is a discussion of fiction, what's your point?

My point was clearly stated. Let's not do the thing where we pretend not to understand common and clear phrases.

What phrase?

"Legal fiction".

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