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JulianTheApostate: Anyway, the 20th century saw the end of imperialism around the world, as various groups sought and achieved independence.

This is a topic that interests me, actually, and I'd be glad to have a few references points to reading that could shed some light on the question of why imperialism, in its overt state, had a fairly definite span of popularity, and why it has, as a modus operandi, largely gone the way of the dinosaur. It does seem like the idea of Empire went through a phase in which it seemed to make a lot of sense to a lot of people, and that, at a certain point, it lost all its cultural cache. And I'm not sure I've seen a really convincing explanation for why.

J Seabolt: Since I apparently hit some sort of exposed nerve here, I'd like to know a bit more about this "Progressive view of history" that you object to.

It's a perspective that I've run into in essentially two different contexts. One is, in works of popular philosophy, particularly those with a moral and/or scientific slant. Scientific professionals who take it upon themselves to write books of cultural commentary or moral elucidation tend to have, in my experience, an overt or covert tendency towards the assumption that history is Progressive. They also tend to view their own work as part of that Progressive tendency. The other context is that of the people that I run into on a regular basis, who may not necessarily articulate a Progressive view of the world (though some do, and some on this board have), but who talk and often behave as though progress were an inevitability.

I should say that I run into in three contexts, but the third is more historical than contemporary. There's an actual philosophical tradition of belief in the Progressive tendency of history, running through Hegel, Communism, Utopianism, etc. George Steiner traced it through the influence of Christianity and the concept of the eschatological kingdom of heaven.

This third possibility is, for want of a better term, an ontological type. A contemporary version of this might come from E.O. "Consilience" Wilson.

Haven't read "Consilience", and I'm not sure what you mean by the ontological type of Progress. Explain a little more and I'll let you know what I think.

Did it? Are Croatian Catholics, Serbian Orthodox, and Bosnian Muslims biologically distinct from one another?

At some far removed point in their history, yes. Or at least, racially distinct, since many scientists have claimed that there's no biological basis for race. Race, to some degree, is the basis of their "nationality", but in the modern context of their political and familial blending, it serves more as a historical myth than a contemporary reality. Yugoslavia as a political organism was arranged to preserve the dignity of individual nations -- it was a republic mediating between the unique needs of its seven constituent nations -- but the fact of the permeability between borders led to a fluidity of individual national identity that complicated that mediation process immensely.

There were cultural, religious, and historical influences on the conflict, and these often seem to merge together into the notion of ethnicity, but how much of the conflict was because of biological differences?

The conflict was essentially one of national identity, and the national identity of the populations was defined along racial lines. Religion had some place in that as well, but religious affiliation was typically mapped to national identity as well, such that Bosnians were uniformly perceived as Muslims (even where that wasn't true) and so on.

The idea that human races fit into a hierarchical structure (guess who was at the top) was, I believe, part of their mental baggage.

If you're interested in this subject in a broader context, you may want to check out E.M. Tillyard's "The Elizabethan World Picture" and, more expansively, A.O. Lovejoy's "The Great Chain of Being". My suspicion is that the hierarchical view of humanity is derived from the then-crumbling medieval view of the great chain of being, and that social Darwinism (or Spencerianism) served mostly as a crutch to a much older perspective whose foundation was in danger of washing away beneath it.

JulianTheApostate: Egypt and Iran are the only legitimate nations in the Middle East, since Egypt and Persian have centuries of history as well-defined powers.
...While you could quibble with that statement, its underlying truth seems plausible.

My only quibble is that so much depends on how you define the legitimacy of nationhood. What's the principle that makes Egypt and Persia more legitimate as nations? If the classical legitimacy of Egypt as a nation was based on its identity with monarch, then wouldn't that legitimacy be null in the contemporary context? Or is legitimacy premised on historical continuity, in which case, what period of time must elapse before a region is legitimized as a nation? If it's the feeling of the people towards the nation, then how can we exclude Israel as a nation? Surely the Israelis feel as strong a bond with their homeland as anyone.