I think one of the lessons we'll take away from the 19th and 20th centuries is that just smashing some things together and calling it a "country" by fiat from people hundreds or thousands of miles away doesn't do anybody any good.
Self-determination breaks down just as easily. You get regions seceding from countries, but nothing stops cities from seceding from that region, or blocks seceding from that city, creating an ungovernable patchwork where everyone is a king trying to extort taxes from neighbors.
Permanently fixing borders based on a population's will at one moment assumes demographics are held constant for all time. (And how do you pick how large of a population gets to vote?) Re-voting every time anyone calls for a referendum destroys any certainty that the state will exist for more than ten years, and creates little wars of demography, where populations try to pack supporters into a territory for political control.
As you noted, borders drawn according to pure whimsy aren't much of a prize either.
All of these systems are basically terrible for different reasons.
Me neither, but this tends to lead into some very politically incorrect territory when you start analyzing why.
However, I'd be willing to try letting the artificially created countries break themselves back down into some smaller units, then letting themselves voluntarily reassemble at a later date if they see the advantages. While it's easy to forget, since it hasn't happened in my lifetime, and our Federal government keeps getting larger and getting more of the attention, but the United States really are the United States; there are procedures for voluntarily joining it. The EU is a larger organization that provides another model for voluntarily joining a larger union. I agree the initial states might break down quite small, but if there are sufficient advantages to reforming into larger units there are models for this. This has been a relatively peaceful process. (Though history suggests that some procedures for voluntarily and legally disassociating may be a good idea. That's certainly debatable at length, but I'm not sure the one-way door model is entirely the best idea, though I'd suggest it also ought to take a supermajority of some sort.)
The early unification movements were also liberal - they rebelled against tyrannical monarchs. There are of course some bad experience from nationalism, but it was also much better than the system it displaced - Absolutism. The new nation-states had constitutions that protected human rights, there was some representation and the new common languages were established by promoting literacy. Not all bad, I say.
No, this is different than conquest. Conquest is at least semi-stable, for various rather politically-incorrect reasons. I'm talking about a relatively recent phenomenon, where we arbitrarily jam countries together and expect them to work. Even the juice of democracy can't always hold these countries together.
(I think a democracy can only work when you've got shifting alliances that need to continually compete for the voters, as the stable democracies have. Most countries have lots of parties whose fortunes ebb and wane, the US does it slightly differently with its two major coalitions but the effect is the same as the coalitions positions have to shift over time to compete for the middle. When you've got ethnic blocks that vote in solid blocks for their ethnic candidate regardless of anything else, you don't have a functioning Democracy; you've got an Ethnocracy, disguised as a Democracy, and that's not the same thing.)
I agree, yet that's still the model for all the major developed nations around the world. Which is kind of depressing while there could be many more ways to make people participate in how things are run.
