I'm not talking about territories invaded during WW1 like France or Belgium. I'm talking about new countries emerging from the collapsing empires. The people have lived there the whole time, they just didn't have a nation state of their own. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Armenia. The Kurds are still fighting to have their own country today. You get the picture. Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus and Ukraine emerged from the collapse of the Russian Empire.
All of these people didn't work towards independence by accident. There were good reasons to, depending on whose empire you lived in, the ruling group was given preferential treatment, or maybe the minorities would be penalized for using their own language. Higher education and government services would often be provided exclusively in the ruling nation's language.
>WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.
The Armenian genocide sounds bad enough to me.
And of course these things happened even in the Entente empires, it's just easier to declare independence from an empire that just lost and can't do anything about it.
All of these people didn't work towards independence by accident. There were good reasons to, depending on whose empire you lived in, the ruling group was given preferential treatment, or maybe the minorities would be penalized for using their own language. Higher education and government services would often be provided exclusively in the ruling nation's language.
>WWI was not WWII. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Central Powers.
The Armenian genocide sounds bad enough to me.
And of course these things happened even in the Entente empires, it's just easier to declare independence from an empire that just lost and can't do anything about it.