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Note that Elon Musk is not the one torturing the Prime Minister of Greece or Lithuania. The stakes won't be high enough for him. He also didn't post bad things on X about China's leaders. There is a lot to lose in this massive market. No, it is Britain, like Germany, that has the optimal size for intervention: large enough to arouse public interest, but not so large that it would make or break the fortunes of the wealthy. It is their mediocrity that exposes them to the curiosity of the Rocket Man (who appears to have been somewhat sidetracked by Washington's procurement reform).
In other words, the problem here is that Britain's size is completely wrong. This wouldn't be the first time. Perhaps one of the worst constraints any country can face in this century is medium-sized constraints.
Of the countries that tend to be classification The most efficient in the world, some are democratic, like Finland, and some are not, like the United Arab Emirates. Some are Western, like New Zealand, and some are not, like Singapore. The connecting theme is that most of them have small populations. This “should not” be true. In principle, serving fifty million people is no more difficult than serving five million, assuming that the civil service itself is proportionately larger. And yet here we are.
Regarding Noble Route and other honorable exceptions, the rule of dining out is that no restaurant can maintain its standards once it expands beyond a certain point (two outlets, I suggest), even if management evolves with it. Similar interruptions often govern government. How is that? The feedback loop between policies and outcomes may be faster when most citizens live within a narrow observable radius. Or maybe small countries aren't so proud of wandering around looking for ideas. (One of the basic elements of British thought remains the existence of two models of health care on Earth: our model and America’s model). population It seems to enable – although not guarantee, as the Libyans can confirm – a certain amount of ingenuity.
And not just in the public domain. The success of Scandinavian and Israeli companies abroad has no single reason. But it might be helpful for executives there to think about foreign markets from the start. With 70 million people at home, their French or British peers have less of this momentum. At the same time, they cannot rely on anything close to American or Chinese levels of domestic demand and capital. There is no anecdote that describes the exact opposite of Goldilocks: the situation only mistake. Perhaps establishing a British technology company would be sufficient.
The advantages of smallness are eternal. The uses of gigantism are more specific in this era. In the “rules-based international order,” as no one called it at the time, a state with a population of a billion people was theoretically no more powerful than a small state, any more than a businessman and a pauper stood on equal footing before a local court. There is no doubt that this principle was respected more in violation than in adherence to it. The topic of “international law” still comes up in conversations with a strange amount of seriousness, because it often does not include a third-party enforcement mechanism. (Thomas Hobbes knew the value of “covenants without a sword.”) However, the pretense of a rule-bound world is nice, and the reality is often quite functional.
now? If what is shaping up is a world where might is right, then brute scale becomes an advantage again. The old clever Anglo-French Middle Kingdom gambit of using institutions like the United Nations to look the great powers on the chin, if not in the eye, had fallen by the wayside.
Indeed, in a world with three giants – two of which, India and China, represent a third of humanity – it is not clear that having 70 million people is significantly more beneficial than having 10 million. Consider defense spending. In absolute numbers, Sweden's annual budget ($9 billion) is closer to Britain's budget ($75 billion) than Britain's budget and China's budget (estimated at $296 billion). This total raw cash does more to determine a country's hard power — the amount of power it can deploy in the actual world — than percentages of gross domestic product. Otherwise Algeria It will overtake France, and Oman will overtake Britain.
Likewise, the most ridiculous statistic in public discourse in Britain is that we are the “sixth largest economy in the world”, which is like being the third largest football club in Manchester. It fails to detect that the gap to number one is larger than that of it No. 20.
The midsize dilemma is not universal, of course. South Korea has made great progress over decades, whatever the recent uproar there. Countries may be small and dysfunctional (Honduras), and large and not powerful (Indonesia, at least for now). However, the broad pattern is worrying. Or at least that is the case when viewed from Europe, which is monopolized by a few countries – France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain and, increasingly, Poland – each of which is stuck in this awkward position between the manageably compact and the huge that constitutes the world.
There's only one way around this, and it's offensive to even complain about it while going through so much nationalism around. In the last century, the argument for European integration was peace. In this mission, the goal is to make the continent's numbers relevant to the outside world. As a goal, it is less lofty but no less existentially important, not in the presence of a selfish United States, an assertive China, a rising India, or a Russia that is numerically superior to almost any one or two European countries. If the idea's innate romanticism no longer drives voters toward an “ever closer union,” then the primal survival instinct will.
