Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
Western Europe took a long time, centuries after the Treaty of Westphalia, to evolve systems of governance where peoples and politics coexisted with minimal violent conflict. Not to overlook what happened in Bosnia, Kosovo, the wider FRY and many other places, close to me Northern Ireland.

One of the largely forgotten episodes after 1918, partly as the League of Nations was responsible, were the number of population transfers, e.g. between Greece and Turkey in Thrace.

There were and remain a few places where sovereignty was shared, usually small tropical islands involving France and the UK.

Today it is difficult to see how partition and population transfer could happen by agreement.
But that is not the question - I am not looking at partition. That is the solution we automatically default to. Nor am I looking to something like Northern Ireland where both parties agree to a common government. In certain respects I am looking at going back to a time before the Treaty.

What I am talking about it two peoples sharing the same territory living under different laws - one secular and one religious. Certain common services would be provided by the central government but the legal system that the people live by would be separate depending on which group you declare yourself a part of. For example, if I were secular I could make statements against Muhammad but if I were a member of the religious group that would be a crime punishable by law.