Captios said
Even in your more reasonable case does there exist a chance to expose 'subfactionalism', as we may call it, within the Middle East. Obviously the grand Sunni-Shia split and their various branches, but also the case of the Bahá'í Faith, Mandaeism, the Yazidis that we hear so much of nowadays, Ibadi Muslims in Oman, the whole Wahhabi bunch of shenanigans, the status of Israel and the Jewish state.Not to mention the dual-denominations of Christianity in the Balkan peninsula and the Greek peninsula and insular territories.And I'll conclude this by noting that nigh all historical 'superstates' if they can be called such exploited superfactionalism above nationalism or religious factionalism to maintain their power and control. Take, for example, the case of the Habsburg supremacy in Austria, the policies of the Sublime Porte in the Ottoman Empire, the whole states' rights vs federal power in the USA, cult-development and hyperstatism as well as oppressive policies in the USSR and to some extent the latter Yugoslavia, ethnic classism in various Chinese dynasties, indeed, even in my own Crimean state here does there exist a cohesive federal ideology centred about sometimes forceful national disregard and oft-violent 'enforcement' of socioeconomic equality. All of these examples highlight the importance of controlling factionalism in a superstate.
Oh, I know. Even united by religion(And even that's not fully united as you said), there's still ethnicity and the blood thats been lost between those various groups, not even counting the trouble with maintaining the Balkans, which is still the powderkeg its been since WW1, albeit, not as much for the world. I chose it as a lesser evil sort of thing; it's not nearly fully realistic, but I'm trying to get at least somewhere there. As this RP isn't focused on realism persay, I didn't mind as much in regards to making it as realistic as I could for this RP, as that's clearly not its focus. It would certainly be fun to do something like this while fully accounting for the various ethnic conflicts, religious splits, and diversity, however. I thought I'd set back and relax a bit and not go full realism, as I haven't RP'd here for a long time, and I don't want to go all out. However you do raise a lot of good points in what you say. There's also the ethnic manipulation the USSR(And PRC to a lesser degree now) that happened, such as forcibly removing all Germans from eastern europe and moving the various peoples of eastern europe around. For example, today Poland is around 99% Polish because of the USSRs meddling, which is unprecedented for almost all countries(Naturally, anyway).
94% Polish, apparently. That's probably from post cold war immigration. Probably.