Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To divide (a region or territory) into small, often hostile units.
- transitive verb To divide (an organization or system) into small, incompatible units:
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To break up into small, mutually hostile political units.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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-- Afghanistan and Pakistan "to stabilize the security situation;" in fact, a major effort may be undertaken to destabilize it as part of a broader agenda to stoke violence, increase Washington's presence in the region, double US forces in Afghanistan to 60,000 or more according to recent reports, and "Balkanize" each country, Iraq and possibly Syria into separate autonomous states; and
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The proxy forces that they have created to "Balkanize" Pakistan just as they have done in Iraq must by stopped.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED 2008
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The proxy forces that they have created to "Balkanize" Pakistan just as they have done in Iraq must be stopped.
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Critics fear it would Balkanize the public into warring factions, but that is what happens under our current one-size-fits-all approach.
Andrew Coulson: A "Winn" for Education and Freedom of Conscience Andrew Coulson 2011
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Critics fear it would Balkanize the public into warring factions, but that is what happens under our current one-size-fits-all approach.
Andrew Coulson: A "Winn" for Education and Freedom of Conscience Andrew Coulson 2011
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Put more concretely, a voucher system would make the educationally well-off better off, would make the poorly-off worse off, would Balkanize society, and would create an educational under-class.
Teacher Pay, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009
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The innate love of country, and the cohesiveness and self-identification as Americans that used to be taught in our schools and churches and homes is largely gone too, and ethnic/national identity, race and class warfare and envy has been promoted to Balkanize us and to weaken us.
The Slaughter solution, constitutionality, and precedent 2010
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Now compare things with the movie industry, in which "progress" too often counts as finding some new way to Balkanize the market a little further -- in the process, disabling features in people's homes.
Notes on the digital-music business: Things could be worse 2010
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By arbitrarily using RST packets in a manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the open standards that are the foundation of the Internet.
Boing Boing 2007
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Key then (and now) was to balkanize the Middle East along tribal and religious lines - a simple divide and conquer strategy that worked in the 1990s Balkan wars.
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