They were cohesive enough to start WW, Balkan wars, and collapse empires under the stress of the failing multiculturalism. They were cohesive enough to have the 1850-ish nationalist revolutionary era. We have writings that survived from the 1700, 1600 even sometimes, from all 3 regions of modern Romania. The amount of suffering because of being split and under various empires, the pining to have one single land is a near constant. By the 1800s poets and writers were basically all ethnic nationalists, wanting to purge foreigners and single mindedly focused on unification.
Ethnicity does develop over centuries, but it does start from a common core.
I highly doubt a Transylvanian shepherd who spoke Vlach in 1600 felt any commonality with a Wallachian or Moldavian shepherd who spoke Vlach in 1600, other than their shared religion. It's clear they did not share the same thoughts as a Vlach shepherd living in Ottoman Albania, since those Vlachs "became" Aromanians (or more often just converted to Islam and became Albanians or ended up speaking Greek and becoming Greeks).
And Vlachs are a way more clear cut case than the Slavs who lived in modern day Belarus and Ukraine and parts of Eastern Poland. Most of them didn't even have a name for themselves, they spoke a language between Polish and Russian (and wasn't the so-called "Ukrainian" language spoken by people in Galicia that the Austrian government promoted), practiced Catholicism (either actual Catholicism or Uniate), and had no history beside getting oppressed by rich Polish and Russian landlords. What were they? Were they Poles? Ukrainians? Belarusians? Russians? Well, the answer seems to be they were whatever they were educated as.
There's probably a very long conversation we could have about ethnicity and ethnic drift, but I guess the point is that all Eastern European ethnostates only came to exist because of vast amounts of indoctrination and persecution (i.e. where all the Germans in Transylvania went) while in Western Europe such states formed naturally (beside Belgium which is an artificial Anglo-manufactured buffer state) and the worst they had to do was smack a kid's hands for speaking Welsh or Breton or whatever.
Anyway, as I said, we have two differing visions. Both are fantasies. Yours because the German Reich is dead, and so is the USSR, and the peoples that were under them are scared to have that repeated. Also Germans are now a timid shadow of their former warrior past, impotent. Nordic tribes like Swedes and Norwegians, largely the same, victims of a century of liberalism. Russia is the only country with a half-alive warrior caste, also Ukraine, due to being forced in a war, but even like that they are pacified and unexciting societies compared to the past, no grand vision, no nothing, their heroes easy to mock, their rulers paranoid and small-minded. There is no new art that's not kitsch. No soul to their war. Just geopolitics.
My own vision is fantastical because what I want cannot exist due to the geopolitical interests of larger countries. There is no way to convince Russia to not annex lands it wants other than WW. There is no wat to convince China to be happy without Taiwan. There is no way to reason with the US to stop being the ZOG golem and meddling into anything it can. It's just how the planet works, and my half-bakes ethnic state exists only because the mutts tolerate it for geopolitical reasons.
It's all just very, very tragic and sad, because of the immense evil of the ruling classes everywhere.
Any serious destabilization of the horrendous system we have now will likely lead to all out war, which would be catastrophic with the weapons we have and set us back centuries.
Personally, I have zero intentions to die for anything or anyone. There is nothing on this planet I like enough to sacrifice for, 100% certainty.
That's the thing, not all nations are equal because some nations have more land, more people, smarter people, more resources, etc. so can dominate others. Since that's going to inevitably happen, it falls on us to make a framework in which nations can dominate other nations without oppressing them. The US used to do this, where the worst they'd do is just make you shoot commies, buy Coca-Cola, and teach kids English once a week, but now obviously the US has more strings attached, and very disgusting strings at that.
The root of the Communist Revolution was the collapse of the Russian Empire's economy due to having an unindustrialized economy and entering WWI without bothering to updste their economic model, fucking with the livlihoods of the serfs. Essentially, what happened to France during the French Revolution: out of touch nobles doing things that benefit them to everyone else's demise. Everything is "le Joooos" or Nazi dick-sucking with you guys. Maybe the Nazis were actually evil people ruled by drug-addicted sexual degenerates, even compared to the other fascist governments at the time (which at least managed to not piss off their European neighbors and want to ethnically cleanse entire groups of people for typical at the time jingoistic German reasons).
That's not entirely true. The thing is the Russian educated middle class was very, very stupid. They celebrated violent anarchists and communists because they thought it was the right, forward-thinking thing to do, since opposing that sort of violence made them backwards reactionaries who opposed Progress. Only a few of them were socialists or communists and a lot simply wanted Western-style democracy (today they would be called
liberashka), but they did nothing but sit back and watch communism gain strength.
The communists themselves were disproportionately Jewish, because Jews had a great resentment toward the Russian Empire where the law was "abandon your faith or stay in the shtetl and enjoy no rights." They were also not popular, since Bolsheviks were simply a minority of socialists in Russia, but Lenin was a skilled politician and great schemer who helped this minority seize power. But later Stalin seized power and ended up purging most of the Jews from the high ranks of the communist party and after WWII couldn't figure out whether to deport them to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast or simply destroy them.
