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Note that it is not the prime minister of Greece or Lithuania that Elon Musk is tormenting. The sticks would not be enough for him. He also never posted negative things on X about Chinese leaders. There is a lot to lose in that huge market. No, it is Britain, like Germany, that is big enough for intervention: countries big enough to arouse general interest, but not big enough to make or break a plutocrat’s fortunes. Their central position is what exposes them to the curiosity of the rocket man (who seems to have deviated from the change in the price of goods in Washington).
In other words, the problem here is that Britain is the wrong size. And this wouldn’t be the first time. Perhaps one of the worst handicaps that society can have in this century is the average.
Of countries that tend to be rated of the world’s best-performing countries, some are democratic, such as Finland, and some are not, such as the UAE. Some are western, like New Zealand, and some are not, like Singapore. The unifying theme is that the majority has a minority population. This “shouldn’t” be true. In fact, 50mn people are not difficult to serve than 5mn, assuming that the public service itself is bigger. Yet here we are.
With respect to Noble Rot and other honorable exceptions, the dining rule is that no restaurant can maintain its standards once it expands beyond a certain point (two spaces, I suggest), and if the system is growing with it. The same discontinuity often dominates, well, government. How come? Perhaps the feedback between policies and outcomes is faster when more citizens live in a difficult, observable environment. Or maybe small nations aren’t too proud to roam around for ideas. (It remains a staple of British thinking that there are two types of healthcare in the world: ours and America’s.) Either way, the sub-10mn citizens it appears to be helping – though far from ensuring, as the Libyans can attest – some slippage.
And not just in the public domain. The success of Nordic and Israeli companies in other countries does not have one reason. But it can help for existing managers to consider foreign markets. With 70mn people at home, their French or British peers do not have that influence. At the same time, they cannot rely on anything close to American or Chinese levels of domestic demand and income. There is no myth that describes Goldilocks’ exact situation: the state of affairs is that only error. The structure of a UK technology firm would be adequate.
The benefits of youth are eternal. The use of gigantism is more specific today. In “rules-based international order”, as no one called it at the time, a powerful multibillion-dollar country was no more powerful than a small country, like a tycoon and a pauper. they stand equal before the local court. There is no doubt that this principle was more respected in the crime than in the ceremony. “International law” still enters the conversation strangely, as it often lacks a third-party enforcement mechanism. (Thomas Hobbes knew how good “alliances without the sword” were.) However, the illusion of a world under control was pleasant, and the reality often it works well.
Now? If what happens is a world where there are positive forces, then a bad situation becomes an opportunity again. The old Anglo-French tactic of the central state, of using institutions like the United Nations to look the great powers in the chin, if not in the eye, is falling apart.
In fact, in a world of three giants – two of which, India and China, account for a third of the population – it is not clear that having 70 million people is better than having 10mn. Consider the cost of security. In other words, Sweden’s annual budget ($9bn) is closer to Britain’s ($75bn) than Britain’s to China (estimated at $296bn). And this raw income total does more to determine a country’s hard power — the amount of energy it can use in the real world — than a percentage of GDP. Otherwise Algeria it would pass France, and Oman over Britain.
Similarly, a statistic that doesn’t make sense in British public discourse is that we are the “sixth largest economy in the world”, the same as being the third largest football club in Manchester. It fails to reveal that the gap in the first number is greater than that of the number 20.
The middle-sized problem is not prevalent, of course. South Korea has achieved great progress over the decades, despite recent turmoil. Countries can be small and inefficient (Honduras), large and weak (Indonesia, at least for now). However, the broader trend is alarming. Or at least that’s when seen from Europe, whose oligopoly countries – France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain and increasingly Poland – are each stuck in a position that doesn’t exist. the difference between strict behavior and the larger world.
There’s only one way around this, and it feels like a crime to mumble it while passing through a strange nationality. In the last century, the case for European integration was to secure peace. In this, it is to make the numbers of the continent readable to the outside world. Objectively, this is not a very high opinion but it is not a very weak issue, not with an independent US around, or a strong China, or a growing India, or Russia more than any other country of Europe, about two. If natural love does not motivate voters to “come together more”, do not rule out that the natural instinct to live will be there.
