Studies of Federalism for me really started this summer in a Virginia bookstore with a $2 copy of the Federalist Papers. Then through openlibrary.org I found a number of other works from the 1776-1789 period. I have since realized that I'm a Madisonite.
The 1916 Sykes-Picot-Ribbentrop agreement drew lines on a map to ease colonial struggles, on the assumption that Britain France and Russia would destroy the Ottoman Empire leaving large tracts of unlorded land. While the actual history is impossible to know, the Kurds also wanted the land (then populated by Armenians) and on behalf of the Ottomans, many Kurds partook in the genocide of at least a million souls. From thence, Kurds have claimed the land, calling it their native home. Despite them still being a collective minority, and having claim only by way of their ancestor's mass murder, they think they have a right.
Yesterday the Spanish government handed down sedition sentences to nine individuals who took an active part in the Catalonian separatist movement of 2017. Look at that group--these are criminals each worthy of 9-13 years in jail? Images of grandmothers being beaten by cops will forever be remembered, yet they are now virtually scrubbed from the web. Somehow in 2019 we get photos of Kurdish models dressed as fighters and spread literally everywhere.
(wiki-commons)
There is a huge double standard here.
In 1995 Quebec was granted the opportunity to vote for independence. The Federalists won, albeit by a very slim margin. At the time I wondered, had the "results" been switched, would the "result" have been the same? I'm sure not. There is nary a single modern example of a nation willingly allowing a group to separate peacefully.
February 1861 saw the Confederacy of the Southern States successfully declare their independence from the Federal US government, and that declaration was immediately met with Lincoln's "civil" war.
So why the various results? Quebec gets to vote for a foregone conclusion, Americans were able to vote but denied the results, Catalonians are denied the vote and their leaders jailed, yet the Kurds are painted as brave and beautiful souls stymied by Evil Doctor Assad. I suspect its because its not only the Kurds who want the hydrocarbon reserves.
(wikipedia)
Alexander Hamilton was very afraid of foreign nations. Looking at the above map of 1789, Spain was heavy to the south and west. With England controlling everything north, and given the recent history of colonial Europe, they had no reason to believe that peace was ever going to break out. To them, it was only in unity that they had any chance to survive at all. While independent free states remained even to them a laudable goal, they genuinely feared that a divided union would fall and so they signed on to the 1789 union then spent weeks trying to defend their actions through essays published in newspapers nation wide.
Not long after, President Madison declared war on England in 1812 because the British kept sinking American boats trying to sail across the Atlantic. England fully intended to command the entire maritime trade and Madison knew the fledgling nation would never experience any semblance of fair value while England was the only carrier. By way of the collective Navy, the American traders had a chance to survive. That mindset has seemingly not left the American psyche one bit.
Syria has very little chance to rebuild its nation without access to oil and gas. While its great that the Kurds want their own state, for the sake of the population in Homs, Raqqa and Aleppo, Syria needs access to oil and gas. Its some inconvenient that the land claimed by the Kurds happens to hold Syria's only significant resources. Turkey has stolen the reserves north of Crete, Israel the southern fields, and so Crete gets nothing, showing the clear disadvantage of being a small island lacking a sizeable military. Like Papau New Guinea, where the gas in its territorial waters is run exclusively by Australia, small islands get nothing. Syria divided would surely experience the same result.
So based on the Sykes-Picot agreement, Syria has the paper claim to the land. Turkey kinda got nothing in terms of oil deposits, and that is pretty unlucky for Turkey, but that is also true for Belarus, France, England and a bunch of other nations, while Russia and Canada each got way more than they need. So bounces the ball. If the colonial powers knew about fossil fuels then, the world map would surely be really different today.
I'm pretty sure Jesus never said "Its okay to bomb brown people and steal their resources." Yet here we are. Turkey got the ability to grow incredible groves of olives, oranges, grapes and hemp, but unfortunately, they're really hungry for oil. Given that they're a very large Federalist state, they do have the ability to steam roll their neighbors, but that clearly wasn't the message of Jesus. Islam, maybe, but even there, respect for your neighbor is a pretty standard tenant of any Abrahamic religion (despite Abraham doing the exact opposite.) Its still a pretty well accepted truth if only by way of the second commandment.
The foundation of Federalism is fear of a neighbor's collective; the desire to protect one's collective against onslaught from another's. Seems the Kurds learned pretty quickly that powerful nations can steamroll even soldiers of the highest morale. So to stop the invasion, they have finally called upon their designated collective for aid. Even the Kurdish leaders now regard their need for Federalism. Maybe if they were able to reign in the terrorist bombings of their small enclaves of warriors, they, like the Cherokee Indians, probably wouldn't be attacked quite the way they've been. Turkey has suffered 3x the number of civilian casualties at the hands of Kurdish terrorists as the Americans did in the World Trade Center attack, and for the small group of violent thugs, the majority of civilians are now on the run.
In my dreams I envision the largest collectives dividing into smaller groups which would then allow the nearby small groups some badly sought after breathing room. I would love to see the four largest nations in the world, every year, divide themselves in half, and break the world down into a series of smaller and smaller groups. Probably not in my lifetime, but its still a goal the UN could seek. Granted, the veto of the Security Council would be five strong on that, but the idea I think is still pretty good. China wouldn't go for it until after the Americans did, and Russia wouldn't probably ever. They've learned a couple times the dangers of internal divisions; had Stalin not united the forces by cleaning out the military's europhilic core, it would probably be German today. 20 million lives is a pretty big price to pay, and forget soon they surely will not.
Federalism allows for the collective protection of the group. Terrorism is certainly a way to confound the Federal machine, and while wealth extraction by the majority is almost impossible to stop, terrorism seems possibly able. Really, all it does is strengthen the collective against the offenders. General Seiver burned a bunch of Indian villages in revenge for terror attacks against innocent civilians, and that really is all that terrorism has ever accomplished. The Kurds want what they want, but now their villages are being burned because they didn't learn from the Cherokee of east Tennessee.
There is no prize for losing the war. The Catalonians got beat by the King of Spain, the Kurds got beat by the Ottomans, and the Indians got beat by the American colonists. Ughurs in China, Quebecois in Canada, Palestinians in Israel and groups in virtually every part of Africa have experienced genuine violations though past transgressions. There is no real way to redress those grievances, clearly Spain is not giving up control of anything, and despite all the MSM tears for poor Kurdish civilians, Assad isn't giving up the gas fields either. We can all want what we want, but while bigger sharks are in the water, every nation is going to do all they can to hang on to what little they've got.