Two weeks ago, I wrote of "restive regions" in Europe; see my comments here. Today I came across a column by Walter Russell Mead in The American Interest concerning the extent to which most European countries are either organized around a single ethnic group, or are experiencing the restive regions problem.
He discusses the European "model" in the context of ability to deal with immigration. He arrives at roughly the same view I blogged two weeks ago from Barcelona.
Mead doesn't discuss the obvious multi-ethnic success story that is Switzerland. The Swiss solution is to have three separate nations-within-one; German, French, and Italian regions each having considerable autonomy in cultural matters.
