"Despite two years of effort fewer than a thousand of the million ethnic Rohingya Burmese pushed into neighboring Bangladesh have returned. This has caused a diplomatic problem but otherwise is ignored by most Burmese. No compromise seems possible and with a powerful ally like China (and its UN vet0 and economic clout) to block major UN action Burma can afford to just let the situation simmer and concentrate on the other ethnic problems it must cope with. All this is the result of how the modern state of Burma was created after World War II. That process was messy and it was in part become no one had done it before. This was all about the relentless spread of nationalism over the last few centuries. This eventually became a European effort to ensure that everyone belonged to some kind of nation. Before that large portions of the world were inhabited by humans but there was no local government or ownership. By the 20 th century that was no longer acceptable, at least to the European nations that had taken, or simply assumed control over the many remaining blank spaces where there was no government that owned or controlled an area. Bringing education, modern medicine and the industrial revolution to these areas proved to be more expensive than anticipated. Then there were a lot of locals who become more aware of nationhood and demanded it for themselves. So between the late 1940s and 1960s most of the colonial areas were turned into sovereign states..."