The following article ‘Small Countries Should Not Exist’ by a Netherlands philosopher, Thomas R. Wells, offers an insight of how we are seen by the new, evolving oligarchic world order. Forewarned should be forearmed.
“The World Bank classifies 40 countries as ‘small states’ on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million. Some are as small as 11,000 (Tuvalu), and the total population of all of them put together is only 20 million. Nevertheless, each of these countries has ‘sovereignty’ – meaning that the organisations that rule over the populations within these territories has special and equal rights under international law – to exploit the resources that fall within their exclusive economic zone, for example, or to vote on matters of global importance at the United Nations, or to make up their own regulations about corporation tax and secrecy. This is absurd, but also far from harmless.
Small countries do not make economic sense in their own right because their populations are too small to sustain the large scale markets required for specialisation and economies of scale, and hence the economic productivity required for real prosperity. The lack of real economic opportunities leads many of their citizens to want to leave. Hence most of these countries are very poor, simply because the borders have been drawn around too small a population. It is true that some small states manage to prosper despite their singular disadvantage. But the ways in which they do so provide no general justification for the existence of small states.
Most of the small states who prosper do so by exploiting the only thing they have in abundance: the legal sovereignty gifted by the international order. Most obviously, they use their right to make their own laws to convert crimes into opportunities for money laundering and tax avoidance for international companies and wealthy individuals. This is economic parasitism because it contributes nothing of economic value to the world. It only creates problems for the rest of the world by allowing corrupt individuals (often in Global South governments) to hide the loot they have stolen, thus encouraging them to steal more; and forcing governments to raise taxes on people and activities that are harder to hide abroad, with all the economic distortions and unfairness that implies.
One can see why this strategy makes sense to the small states that pursue it – there is literally nothing else they have a competitive advantage in. Some small states have improved their situation by joining larger confederations and thereby reducing the burden that political borders pose to economic development. However, the fact that being too small to be economically viable can to some extent be made up for, does not justify creating states with such a structural handicap in the first place.
It is often claimed that small countries are a natural political development of a people demanding a country of their own. This argument is popular among the fantasists who believe in culturally coherent and persistent nations enduring and evolving over time. This is a fantasy because it has things exactly the wrong way round. The evidence seems very clear that political entities come first – governments and borders – and then identity follows. It is also sometimes claimed that small countries are more responsive to the needs of the population…but the smallness of the population makes it unlikely that such a government could be very effective.
What can the government of a small state do to protect its people against invasion for example? Or to cope with the aftermath of a natural disaster? They would have to call for help from some of the real countries around them that have developed such additional capacity (‘resilience’). Once again, smallness is a structural handicap, not an advantage. For that matter, even the economy itself is likely to be vulnerable in all sorts of ways since it is so tiny, but still too big (because over-concentrated in one sector, such as tourism or tax evasion), for the government to be much help in the case of a shock.”
