...until some mumbling old fool starts talking about Trotsky and the Mensheviks. God help us.

The only thing I can really say I've learned about the band of ethnic instability running from the Adriatic to the Aral is that someone can come up with a preferred set of facts to generate a historical narrative to "prove" anything--absolutely anything. Perhaps we could convince ourselves that the Golden Horde was never legally dissolved, and the whole mess should be handed back to the Mongolians.

So Hitch has some fine points of constitutional law that were not met to his satisfaction the better part of a hundred years ago--you might as easily prove that Vermont isn't legally part of the United States. Lovely for the debating society; of less application in the wider world.

There are ultimately no laws to govern the creation and dissolution of nations, no reliable police, no competent court--centuries of effort and good intentions to the contrary. My inclination is to support the rights of identifiable peoples to self-determination, and I try to fall back on that principle when it becomes hard to work out which lines on a map ought to be drawn in ink and which in pencil. Hitchens' evaluations of Yugoslav borders as inconseqential and Georgian borders as sacrosanct seem to be built on little more than his dislike for Russia. They're dislikable enough, I grant him, but this seems a flimsy basis for questions of war and peace.

(Sorry to repost--I don't know why, but this wonky discussion engine doesn't seem to show my original reliably.)