Colonial nations are not mere offshoots of the European nations that gave birth to them. The geography, ecology, history of the continent forged them as original identities, like it did for the indigenous when they came millenia ago. To remove them from this context is to remove them from what made their identities in the first place. It’s to such a point you can see very similar behaviours and interests in some circumstances. For example, both indigenous and allogenous populations try to lobby to keep seal-hunting going, because it’s their way of life since centuries and a major source of revenues they depend on.
For example, the Afrikaner people of South Africa, who were originally Dutch, were acknowledged as a new African nation by other indigenous African peoples like the Xhoza and Zulu, and it’s not shallow words. For centuries, many generations made their life in Africa, without ever thinking of going back to Europe. They are not Europeans anymore now. The great events that made their identity, like the Great Trek, the war against the Zulu, the wars against the British are all tied to the African continent.
Besides, it’s dangerous to put conditions on the principle of autodetermination, because when you start doing that, you open the door for every imperialism and colonialism of the world.
What matters is to make things in a way that would not dispossess further the indigenous nations that managed to survive. The great challenge of our time is to think hard about how that can be done.
Another aspect of the issue is when you start considering the actual logistics of deporting close to one billion allogenous peoples. Where would you put them ? In the overcrowded Europe ? You saw how they panicked when they were asked to welcome just a few refugees from Syria, imagined they got “Second Amendment Americans” ? Would you put them in Antarctica ? The Protocol of Madrid forbids the colonization of Antarctica. 500 years of history cannot be undone just like that. So it’s quite, quite not so simple. We are cursed to coexist now. It cannot be simple anymore.
- BRAINLIEST answerer
