Interesting.

Not sure I’m going to phrase this right. I imagine these percentages are affected one way or the other based partly (mostly?) on geography. How much and what kind of physical boundary each country has with another? And how many direct neighbors you have?

And my first thought went back to our first house, one of my neighbors had a fence and I was cleaning up the junk on our side of it, and stacked some old bricks, and she got mad because I’d moved them, that 12 or so wide feet of what looked like our yard (all the neighbors had fences) going through the big overgrown trees down the long side of our yard was actually an old abandoned right of way, and she wanted to make sure I knew she technically owned half of it. She actually became a friend later on, but what a first impression.

Much of this is pretty obvious. Many countries have seen lots of border shifts over the past 150 years, and many have seen significant portions of their ethnic kin wind up on the other side of the border. There is a clear correlation in just that little bit of data.

No surprise that Hungarians are irredentist. Hungary was a much bigger kingdom once upon a time, and millions of ethnic Hungarians live in neighboring nations. Given half a chance, Hungary would go to war with Romania over Transylvania. Ditto Turkey and Russia shorn of their glorious empires. On the other end, very few people in the Netherlands or Sweden harbor a desire to claim neighboring lands. One wonders just what the 24% of Dutch respondents actually want to claim.

quote:

Originally posted by jodi:
Not sure I’m going to phrase this right. I imagine these percentages are affected one way or the other based partly (mostly?) on geography. How much and what kind of physical boundary each country has with another? And how many direct neighbors you have?

More about history, which geography influences. The lands controlled by these people have shifted over time, and there’s a tendency of each to think of their own high-water mark as naturally theirs, especially if they held it for some time.

And more especially if there are millions of their ethnic kin left in those lost lands.