- 11 Mar 2020 13:17
#15074433
The solution to 1984 is 1973!
Generally we think governments or peoples acquire sovereignty over territory only through conquest. Perhaps that is generally true but there have been many exceptions. Russia sold Alaska to the US, Hong Kong was leased from the Imperial Chinese, Israel was gifted to Jewry from the British Mandate, the US made an offer on Greenland etc.
Might it be possible to solve international rivalries through more territory swapping and trading rather than predominantly through conquest?
We are in an age of where literacy and technology makes the logistics of democracy and referendums possible to a very extensive degree, as we saw with Brexit. So even territory trading need not be just decided only by chief executives but also through popular referendums.
Let us say we had a situation in the near future where the voters in California had taken the Californian governance on a course of full socialism while the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong would rather preserve their freedoms under the protection of the US rather than the PRC. Rather than the PRC and the US have a massively destructive war to decide who gets to rule over which territory why not just trade them? It would be a very complicated negotiation for sure, potentially involving many millions of people and multiple referendums. But if it avoided a war and made for a new arrangement that was satisfactory for all concerned then would that not be worth the trouble?
Could the US and the PRC ever trade Taiwan and Hong Kong for California? Do the ethnocentric issues complicate this too much?
Might it be possible to solve international rivalries through more territory swapping and trading rather than predominantly through conquest?
We are in an age of where literacy and technology makes the logistics of democracy and referendums possible to a very extensive degree, as we saw with Brexit. So even territory trading need not be just decided only by chief executives but also through popular referendums.
Let us say we had a situation in the near future where the voters in California had taken the Californian governance on a course of full socialism while the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong would rather preserve their freedoms under the protection of the US rather than the PRC. Rather than the PRC and the US have a massively destructive war to decide who gets to rule over which territory why not just trade them? It would be a very complicated negotiation for sure, potentially involving many millions of people and multiple referendums. But if it avoided a war and made for a new arrangement that was satisfactory for all concerned then would that not be worth the trouble?
Could the US and the PRC ever trade Taiwan and Hong Kong for California? Do the ethnocentric issues complicate this too much?
The solution to 1984 is 1973!