As Tina Turner might have sang…

SMALL COUNTRIES are

SIMPLY THE BEST..!!!

SO MUCH BETTER THAN ALL THE REST..! 

In a small nation there is more of a limit to how big state institutions can grow. Monitoring becomes more efficient, there is more transparency and accountability, thus less corruption and less waste. Change is also much easier to implement, making a nation flexible, dynamic and competitive. Small states encourage competition and – if people, ideas or innovation are suppressed in one state – it is easy to move to a similar one nearby.   The evidence of history is that countries with the widest dispersal of power have always been the most prosperous and innovative.

NW Europe in 1700.  Northern Italy, Germany, much of Eastern France and the Low Countries was a fascinating patchwork of tiny states and “free cities” many under the protective umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire (“neither holy, roman nor an empire”, Voltaire).  After the HRE was abolished by Napoleon, many of these small states disappeared and the rest were subsumed during the mid-1800’s unification of Germany and Italy. 

GERMANY – After several brief but crushing military successes against Denmark, Austria and France, Prussian-led unification created a German Empire with a huge army, a powerful modern navy and a quickly-obtained colonial empire.  But consolidation and imperialist expansion led to 2 catastrophic conflicts with 4 powerful rivals – Britain, France, Russia/USSR, and the USA.  

Nobody can ever know what the course of German history would have been without unification, but almost certainly it would not have suffered the catastrophic 1914-45 period had it remained the Ruritanian patchwork of small states that had endured for 1000 years previously.   Germany has recovered economically but has lost much of its former territory and an irreplaceable loss of its architectural, historical, and cultural heritage.   And the German language, once the lingua franca throughout eastern Europe, the Balkans, and even Russia, is now almost irrelevant on the world stage.   

This very intriguing map from Charles Murray’s “Human Accomplishment” (2003) encompasses the region of small states shown in the first map on this page.    Is that a mere co-incidence?

Since unification Italy has been blighted by bureaucracy, organized crime, corruption, inflation and division. Much of the endemic corruption and torpidity of the South has spread to the North

In an ideal world charmingly tiny mini-states such as San Marino would be commonplace. Hopefully Oasis Cities can restore some of that magic.