The topic of Tibet and China is essentially a domestic issue in China. Many forget that the Tibetan (religious) leadership signed a treaty with the People’s Republic of China agreeing to be part of that country. Tibet gained autonomy from Beijing since the 1980s to preserve its cultural identity as well as its own path of development. The latest railway development into Tibet, a unique piece of engineering at elevations of more than 4500 meters from sea level (about half the cruising altitude of airplanes), has connected Lhasa to the rest of the country. Could an independent Tibet afford such investment?

The Tibet region has taken no visible steps to build on its autonomy, for the fact is that autonomy and independence is first about daily economic realities, not about cultural roots, religious practice or ideology. An independence movement ought to be examined with a cool head as Tibet is not even able to feed its population to a modern standard. At very high elevations and with a short summer season, Tibet has no prospects for meaningful agricultural production—an important consideration for any country. So tourism is and will be a source of subsistence, whether Tibet is an autonomous region or an independent country.

Macedonia, Slovakia, Moldova and East Timor all argued stark cultural factors to create tiny nation-states. Kosovo is the latest aspirant in that league and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus has been waiting for more than thirty years to be recognized by other countries (although it occupies one-third of a small island whilst the other two-thirds has experienced a four-fold jump in its per capita GDP.)

Are any of these dreamer nations better off in this post-modern world than they were a generation ago? Put differently, if yours is a harsh, landlocked country that has seen precious little foreign investment since China's opening to the world, is it more promising to be a part of China or to oppose it? And what have all those Hollywood personalities done to create jobs or build better infrastructure, either in an autonomous Tibet or for Tibetan exiles?

Declaring independence and running a country is a lot more serious than the writings of Joseph Rock or the fictional works on Shangri-La and Lost Horizons of the Oscar-winning James Hilton. Nor is it simply about new flags, printing new passports and money and airlines in an interconnected and interdependent world where associations and conferring blocks are busy making covenants and treaties. Blood and ideological enemies of the past (in EU, ASEAN) or those with vastly different backgrounds (NAFTA, Mercosur, the African Union or ECOWAS) are all converging upon mutual understanding, commonalities and dignified compromises.

The world has a large enough inventory of failed ideas and independent, tattered nation-states (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan, Jordan, Israel, or the partition of Korea......). Is that not enough to deal with and worry about? If the MTV generation of the world finds the time to objectively examine the real effect and the concept of nation-states since the Industrial Revolution, it will soon justify the true belief of whether or not an independent Tibet (after its breach of covenants and treaty with the People’s Republic of China) will be a sober idea or yet another short-sighted, raw tactic to poke a finger in China's eye.