Engels justified subsuming small peoples into larger viable nations

Evidence

All changes (in the map of Europe), if they are to last, must in general start from the effort to give the large and viable European nations more and more their true national boundaries, which are determined by language and sympathies, while at the same time the ruins of peoples, which are still found here and there and which are no longer capable of a national existence, are absorbed by the larger nations and either become a part of them or maintain themselves as ethnographic monuments without political significance. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 334

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely chilling Hegelian-historicist passage: Engels’s logic that non-viable peoples should be absorbed or become ‘ethnographic monuments’ prefigures exactly the kind of erasure Robinson argues the Black radical tradition suffers. Dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: This directly prefigures Robinson’s later argument that European socialism inherits a racialized historicism that writes Black peoples out of historical agency — the heart of the book’s thesis.
• QUESTION: To what extent does this same ‘viable nation’ logic carry over into Marxist treatments of African and colonial peoples, which Robinson addresses later?