The United States of America cannot Balkanize. This is a contention I made last month in an article that I recommend reading before this piece. The gist is that despite the increasing heterogeneity and polarizing politics of the United States, the warring poles in America are not sufficiently geographically concentrated to divide the national state into a handful of smaller states.

There is no Southern Confederation, no Cascadia, no Republic of the Great Lakes, no New Afrika, except in the minds of online ideologues. The largest state on the North American continent is the United States federal government, and the second-largest most plausible functioning state within USG is a hypothetical city-state of New York. Whatever regional differences existed in America have been effectively subdued by the leveling power of the federal government since 1861.

This is not unwarranted pessimism but the sober reality that has to be accepted before any real goals can be achieved. Even an activist for the Cascadian Empire should begin by recognizing the uphill climb ahead of him.

Just because the United States cannot Balkanize does not mean it cannot collapse into chaos, however. The example of the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s is worth recalling: Yugoslavia Balkanized into several mutually hostile homogeneous states such as Croatia and Serbia, but the most heterogeneous state within Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, did not Balkanize. It collapsed into years of sectarian violence, low-level warfare, and village-sized genocides without ever splitting into smaller functional states.

After several years of bloodshed, the United States intervened just before Croat and Serb forces managed to divvy up Muslim areas between themselves, and subsequently froze Bosnia and Herzegovina into a dysfunctional peace. Bosnia today is a semi-failed state and additionally one of the exemplars of the total failure of government by protocol or algorithm. It has a bizarre, byzantine system of government wherein the country is divided into an autonomous Serb Republic, a mixed Croat-Muslim Federation, and a third little neutral self-governing city district.

Each of Bosnia’s three sub-entities has its own president (or mayor), prime minister and legislature, and on top of that the country has a national elected legislature as well as a national presidency occupied by three people at all times—one Croat, one Muslim and one Serb. A national total of four legislatures and seven presidents. Bosnia-Herzegovina probably has more politicians per capita than any country on the planet and it has the dysfunction to prove it.

Why is Bosnia so instructive? Of the successor states to Yugoslavia’s socialist republics, Bosnia was the most diverse, the most heterogeneous, the most geographically mixed, and the most similar to the United States’ demographic composition of today. At the outbreak of war in 1991, the Yugoslav census of the that year showed that Slovenia was 90% Slovenian. Croatia was 80% Croatian. Serbia was 80% Serbian. Bosnia was 40% Muslim, 30% Serbian, and 20% Croatian.

When Slovenia seceded, the ensuing war lasted all of ten days. When Croatia declared independence, the Yugoslav army used the majority-Serb interior of Croatia as a base to take back the whole country, but failed after a year and switched to supporting Serb separatists. After a few years of sporadic warfare, the Croatian army moved in and pretty much ethnically cleansed Croatia of Serbs in an event called Operation Storm. Serbia proper never experienced any warfare—the second-largest ethnic minority in Serbia were Hungarians, not Croats or Muslims.

The wars in Slovenia and Croatia wrapped up quickly compared to the war in Bosnia, and resulted in even more homogeneous states rather than multiethnic gridlock. Croatia was 90% Croatian 10 years after the outbreak of war. The war in Bosnia, on the contrary, was a complete mess, and to this day the conflict isn’t resolved by any meaningful definition of the word. This map shows you the level of mixture of ethnic groups in 1991, which did not change much geographically since then despite many attempts at ethnic cleansing. How do you split up a country like that into ethnic states? The short answer is that you can’t. The long answer is that you can only do it with biblical amounts of bloodshed.

Now back to America. Here is a link to an excellent interactive map called the ‘Racial Dot Map.’ All fifty states are broken down by racial demographics for you to see. Notice how, despite wide swathes of the lily-white rural interior, most urban areas are more mixed than Bosnia, as are the Southern Black Belt, Texas, the Southwest and California. If an ethnic free-for-all came to America as it did to Yugoslavia, vast swathes of the United States, as well as almost every single urban area, would have the potential to turn into bloodbaths on the order of Bosnia.

Separation would occur, but not on the order of U.S. states, state confederations, regions or mini-countries. The homogeneity and independence necessary for that simply doesn’t exist. Slovenia was a 90% Slovenian state. Croatia was 80% Croatian and still had a year of official war and three years of insurgency. The most ethnically homogeneous state in America with a significant population is Utah, and Utah is only around 50% Mormon. Utah is without question the most ethnically, culturally and religiously homogeneous state in America, but Utah is barely more homogeneous than Bosnia was in 1991. Bosnia is the best-case scenario for an American collapse scenario.

It’s true that there are very homogeneous white states like New Hampshire and Vermont that are close to 90% white, but the white political split in those states is going to be something to watch out for, and the homogeneous states are so tiny that they simply don’t matter compared to the rest of the country. New Hampshire and Vermont combined have a population that is less than 2 million, which is less than 1% of the total U.S. population. Most people in the United States live in diverse areas like California (population close to 40 million), the New York metropolitan area (population 20 million) or the American South (population upwards of 40-50 million, depending on where you draw the borders).

Civil war in America would entail separation on the order of towns, villages, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Cities like Chicago and New York, which already have de facto segregation, would remain demographically identical with some minor population sorting, but the toll for entering the wrong neighborhood would not just be glares, harassment or a mugging, but gunshots. This situation could go on for years or even decades without anyone attempting a multi-state solution that would allow for a Northwest American Republic or New Afrika.

Does that sound too awful to be possible? That is the exact situation Syria has been in since 2011, that Lebanon was in during the 1970s and 1980s, and that Bosnia was in during the 1990s.

A formerly peaceful multicultural city hit by political instability erupts into bloodshed and splits up into multiple ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods and suburbs. The inhabitants continue to live life much as before, but pay careful attention not to walk into the wrong neighborhood. Nobody stays out past midnight anymore. Sporadic mortar fire arcs from one neighborhood to the next. An occasional suicide bombing or sniper attack occurs. 14th street is safe, but 15th street is deadly. Inhabitants learn the meanings of Green Lines, Green Zones, and No Man’s Land. Street travel becomes a Sisyphean task as barricades and checkpoints become ubiquitous. But life still, somehow, goes on.

That’s life in Damascus and Aleppo; it was life in Sarajevo and Beirut. Some of the same patterns are already noticeable in Baltimore, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and other heterogeneous American cities.

Here’s a short video from the BBC depicting some scenes from wartime Damascus. If they didn’t tell you, you never would have guessed that a war was going on. People walk around calmly, merchants sell their wares on the street, things seem quiet. The two Syrians they interview complain about the lack of parties and bar patrons’ new preference for going home early. Yet other neighborhoods of the city are under siege, experiencing something close to Hell on Earth.

Peter Oborne spent two weeks in Damascus late last year, and his report describes the violently Kafkaesque situation of diversity plus urban warfare:

It could have been a society wedding in London, Milan or Paris. Instead, the packed event took place in the heart of Damascus’ Christian quarter. The men wore formal suits, the women elegant dresses. As the solemn ceremony led into a cheerful after party at a hotel in the centre of town, it seemed that the brutal civil war ravaging the country did not exist. Yet everybody I talked to had suffered misfortune or disaster. Some had been kidnapped. Many had lost their businesses. Others had received death threats. They were all resigned to the possibility, in some cases the likelihood, of sudden death.

You end up with war and peace being not an obvious dichotomy, but parallel realities that change with the very street:

Walk down one street where all the appearance of life seem to be going on (shops, cars, cafes), then turn off and it becomes a parallel world of sandbags, look-out posts, armed men and bunkers.

Oborne’s report continues with a fascinating metaphor for Damascus as London that tries to convey the situation intuitively to a Westerner. The whole thing is worth reading. In another example, Marwan Hisham reports from Aleppo:

Since the war, most of the old city’s neighborhoods had become inaccessible. Charred vehicles blockaded central streets. Trips that before the war took minutes had become seven-hour marathons, traversing hundreds of kilometers and dozens of checkpoints, each controlled by different warring groups. Regime snipers positioned atop the Citadel’s towers could survey huge areas of the city. Bodies caught in their cross fire might remain unburied for weeks, or months.

A lot more stories like these are available from people who survived Beirut in the ‘80s, Sarajevo in the ‘90s, or a multitude of other multiethnic cities in wartime.

If the federal government of the United States were to dissolve or collapse for some reason, there would not be an easy vacuum for aspiring state-builders to fill. The immediate consequences would probably be as described above: violent warfare and separation on the order of villages, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Following that, sporadic violence and dysfunction for a long time to come. Bosnia is still a mess. Lebanon is still a mess. Syria is still a mess, and will probably remain a mess for decades despite Russian support for Assad.

National newspapers still lament the fact that major American cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C. are racially segregated. Recent efforts by the Obama administration’s Department of Housing & Urban Development to “diversify” homogeneous neighborhoods are only ensuring that the ethnic powder keg is fully topped up.

In America, the old maxim is ‘United we stand, divided we fall.’ Under the stewardship of USG, America is unlikely to stand much longer, but if it falls, it’s not going to get back up in pieces.