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David Roberts's avatar

Excellent essay, clearly written and argued. I'm a lifelong resident of New York City and if there's a place in the United States that's like a city-state, it's here.

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colin Hélie-Harvey's avatar

In a way, the end of empires brought more diversity to the map—but less diversity within each state. Most nation-states were built around ethnic or national identities, which often led to a narrowing of internal pluralism. Take the Ottoman Empire, for example: it’s hard not to feel a certain nostalgia for its remarkably rich mosaic of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities spread across Anatolia, its cities, and beyond. That diversity has now all but disappeared.

There was a kind of pragmatic tolerance toward minorities—so long as they remained within their designated social and political boundaries. Many minority groups thrived economically and culturally under Ottoman rule, yet their success rarely provoked widespread resentment, largely because political power remained firmly in the hands of the Turks.

Empires also allowed individuals to hold complex, layered identities—religious, linguistic, regional, and cultural—in ways that are often difficult within the rigid frameworks of modern nation-states. That, too, is a loss of diversity. And when these layered identities are suppressed or forced into singular national molds, it can become yet another source of tribalism and conflict. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, proved catastrophic for many of Turkey’s minorities—marked by the Armenian genocide, the forced exodus of Greeks, and large-scale population exchanges.

I’m not saying we should bring empires back—or that small, diverse nation-states can’t succeed. Of course they can—and many do. But it’s worth recognizing that, for all their flaws, empires sometimes offered frameworks for managing complexity and diversity that modern nation-states still struggle to replicate.

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