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Note that Elon Musk is not the prime minister of Greece or Lithuania he is torturing. The reward will not be enough for him. He also didn’t post bad things about Chinese leaders on X. There is so much to lose in that huge market. No, like Germany, it is Britain that is ideal for intervention: countries large enough to stimulate general interest, but not so large as to crush or break the plutocrat’s fortunes. It’s their middle class that makes them eager for Rocket Man (which seems to have strayed somewhat from Washington’s procurement reforms).
In other words, the problem here is that Britain is exactly the wrong size. And this won’t be the first time. Perhaps one of the worst handicaps a nation can face in this century is middle class.
From states that tend to be It has been rated. Most efficient in the world, some are democratic, like Finland, and some are not, like the Emirates. Some are Western, like New Zealand, and some are not, like Singapore. The unifying theme is that most people are small. This doesn’t have to be true. In principle, 50mn people have no problem serving more than 5mn, the civil service itself is proportionally larger. We’re still here.
With respect to Noble Roth and other honorable exceptions, the rule of thumb is that no restaurant can maintain its standard once it expands beyond a certain point (two outlets, I suggest), even if the management grows with it. The same interruption often governs, well, the government. How does it come? Perhaps the feedback loop between policies and outcomes is faster when most citizens live within a narrow and observable radius. Or maybe the smaller nations aren’t too proud to wander for ideas. (It remains a staple of British thinking that there are two models of healthcare on earth: ours and America’s.) In any case, less than 10 million Population It seems to have enabled – although not with certainty, as the Libyans attest – a certain laxity.
And not only in public. The success of Nordic and Israeli companies abroad is not without reason. But it can help executives there to think about foreign markets. While 70mn people are at home, their French or British peers are less motivated. At the same time, you can’t count on anything close to the domestic interest and capital of the US or China. There is no myth that describes the exact opposite of Goldilocks: the state of affairs. Only Error. The arc of a UK tech company might be enough.
The benefits of smallness are eternal. The uses of Giganism are more specific to this era. In a “rules-based international order,” as no one called it at the time, where a rich man and a poor man stood equal before a domestic court, a nation of billions was theoretically no more than a microstate. There is no doubt that this principle is more respected in the offense than in the observance. Often lacking a third-party enforcement mechanism, “international law” is still thrown into discussion with surprising solemnity. (Thomas Hobbes knew the value of “covenants without the sword.”) Still, the pretense of a rule-bound world was good, and reality often worked.
right now? If the world that is taking shape is right, brute force will be useful again. The clever Anglo-French middle-country gambit of using institutions like the UN to poke the superpowers in the chin will fail if not in sight.
In fact, in a world with three giants – two of which, India and China, account for a third of humanity – it is not clear that having 70mn people is more useful than 10mn. Consider defense costs. In absolute terms, Sweden’s annual budget ($9bn) is closer to Britain’s ($75bn), than to China (approximately $296bn) and to Britain ($75bn). And this cash does more to determine a country’s total energy output — the amount of energy it puts out in the real world — as a percentage of GDP. Otherwise Algeria France would be outmuscled, and Oman would eclipse Britain.
Similarly, the silliest statistic in British public discourse is that we are the “sixth-largest economy in the world”, which is the third largest football club in Manchester. He could not say that the gap to number one is more than that Number 20.
The medium size problem is not universal. South Korea has made significant progress over the past decades, regardless of the recent hubbub there. Countries can be small and dysfunctional (Honduras), large and powerful (Indonesia, at least for the time being). All the same, the wide design is immovable. Or at least it appears from Europe when their oligopolies – France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain and Poland – are wedged so awkwardly between the compact and world-like giants that each governs.
There’s only one way around this, and the mumbling feels contagious as you walk through the midst of so much ambient nationalism. In the last century, European integration was all about peace. In this, the number of the continent is to be counted by the outside world. As a goal, this is a little loftier but no less existential, higher than the self-sufficient US or China around, or higher than India, or Russia bigger than any European country, and almost both. If the inner love of the idea no longer drives voters to “ever closer,” don’t assume that raw survival instincts exist.
