not because of the death toll that accompanied the partition but because what might have been a great state had been made into two lesser ones. Similarly we can recall how pejorative was the term “Balkanization,”
meaning the division of a region into small ethnically based states. In the end, the achievements of these large states were less impressive than had been hoped for—the Soviet Union, China, and Indonesia in particular experienced periods of terrible economic dislocation despite the supposed advantages of scale—but hindsight should not blind us to the optimism with which these endeavors began.