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Note that it’s not the prime minister of Greece or Lithuania that Elon Musk is tormenting. The stakes will never be high enough for him. Nor did he post bad things on X about China’s leaders. There is a lot to lose in that huge market. No, it’s Britain, like Germany, it’s the perfect size for intervention: countries big enough to arouse general interest, but not big enough to make or break a plutocrat’s fortune. Their mediocrity exposes them to Rocket Man’s curiosity (which seems somewhat deviant from Washington’s collection reforms).
In other words, the problem here is that Britain is just the wrong size. And this would not be the first time. Perhaps one of the worst handicaps of a nation in this century is the middle scale.
The tendency of the state to rate The world’s most efficient, some democratic, such as Finland, and some not, such as the United Arab Emirates. Some are Western, such as New Zealand, and some are not, such as Singapore. The linking theme is that most have small populations. This “shouldn’t” be true. In principle, it is no harder to serve 50 million people than 5 million, assuming the civil service itself is relatively large. Yet here we are.
With Noble Rot and other honorable exceptions, a rule of dining out is that a restaurant can’t maintain its value if it expands beyond a certain point (two outlets, I suggest), even if management grows with it. A similar isolation often governs, well, government. How come? Perhaps the feedback loop between policies and outcomes is faster when most citizens live within a tight, observable radius. Or perhaps small countries aren’t too proud to run around for ideas. (It is a staple of British thinking that there are two health care models in the world: ours and America’s.) Either way, a sub-10 million population Seems capable – though far from assured, as the Libyans can attest – of a certain slickness.
And not just in public. There is no single reason for the success of Nordic and Israeli companies abroad. But it may help that executives there have to think about foreign markets. With 70 million people at home, their French or British peers lack that motivation. At the same time, they cannot rely on anything close to American or Chinese levels of domestic demand and capital. There is no fable that describes the exact opposite of Goldilocks: a situation which only The pressure on a wrong UK tech company can be considerable.
Small advantage is eternal. The use of demonism in this period is even more peculiar. In the “rules-based international order,” as no one called it then, a billion-strong nation was theoretically no more powerful than a microstate, just as a tycoon and a pauper stood equal before a domestic court. Undoubtedly, this principle was more honored in the breach than in the observance. “International law” is still thrown into conversation with strange seriousness, given that it often lacks third-party enforcement mechanisms. (Thomas Hobbes knew what a “treaty without a sword” was worth.) Still, the pretense of a rule-bound world was beautiful, and the reality often quite effective.
now? If what is taking shape is a world where power is right, then brute scale becomes an advantage again. The clever old Anglo-French middle-country gambit of getting institutions like the United Nations to look the superpower in the chin, if not in the eye, goes away.
Indeed, in a world of three giants – two of which, India and China, account for a third of humanity – it is not clear that having 70 million people is much more advantageous than 10 million. Consider defense spending. In absolute terms, Sweden’s annual budget ($9bn) is closer to Britain’s China’s (estimated at $296bn) than Britain’s ($75bn). And this amount of raw cash does more to determine a nation’s hard power—the power it can exert in the real world—than as a percentage of GDP. Otherwise Algeria will surpass France and Oman will overtake Britain.
On a similar note, the silliest statistic in Britain’s public discourse is that we are the “world’s sixth-largest economy”, which is the same as Manchester being the third-largest football club. It fails to reveal that the number one interval is larger than that The number is 20.
Medium-sized distress is certainly not universal. South Korea has made great strides over the decades, whatever the recent hubbub there. Countries can be small and ineffective (Honduras), not large and powerful (Indonesia, at least for now). All the same, the broad pattern is boring. Or at least as seen from Europe, whose oligopoly of nations – France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain and, increasingly, Poland – are each caught in that awkward position between the manageably compact and the world-shapingly vast.
There’s only one way around it, and muttering it in the midst of so much encompassing nationalism feels transgressive. In the last century, peace was made in terms of European integration. In this one, it is calculated outside the number of continents. As a goal, it is less high-minded but no less existential, not with a self-absorbed United States around, or an assertive China, or a rising India, or a Russia that has overtaken a European country, and almost any two. If the inherent romance of the idea doesn’t stir voters to “ever closer encounters,” then don’t deny the survival instinct.
