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.)
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.