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Note that it is not the prime minister of Greece or Lithuania that Elon Musk is torturing. The stakes would not be high enough for him. And he didn't post nasty things to X about Chinese leaders. You have a lot to lose in that huge market. No, it's Britain, like Germany, that's big enough to intervene: countries big enough to arouse general interest, but not big enough to make or break a plutocrat's fortune. Their mediocrity is what makes them vulnerable to rocket man's ambitions (which seem to have strayed somewhat from Washington's procurement reforms).
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 flaws a nation can have in this century is the middle scale.
Of nations that like to be measured the most effective in the world, some are democratic, like Finland, and some are not, like the UAE. Some are in the west, like New Zealand, and some are not, like Singapore. A common theme is that most have small populations. This “shouldn't” be true. In principle, 50mn people are not harder to serve than 5mn, assuming that the government service itself is equally large. Yet here we are.
As for Noble Rot and other noble things, the rule of thumb is that no restaurant can maintain its standards when it expands beyond a certain point (two, I suggest), even if the management grows with it. The same discontinuity always rules, then, the government. How come? Perhaps the feedback loop between policies and outcomes is more rapid when most of the population lives in a dense, physical environment. Or small tribes are too proud to wander around looking for ideas. (It has always been a fundamental British thought that two models of health care exist on Earth: ours and America's.) Either way, the sub-10mn citizens it seems to allow – though far from guaranteeing, as the Libyans can confirm – some slippage.
And not just in the public domain. The success of Nordic and Israeli companies abroad is not for one reason. But it can help if managers there think about foreign markets from afar. With 70 million people at home, their French or British peers have little influence. At the same time, they cannot count on anything close to American or Chinese levels of domestic demand and capital. No myth describes the exact opposite of Goldilocks: the state of affairs in general wrong. The arc of a UK technology firm may be enough.
At least the benefits are eternal. The use of gigantism is common at this time. In “laws based on international law”, as no one called it at the time, a billion-strong nation was theoretically less powerful than a microstate, just as a tycoon and a pauper were equal before a domestic court. Undoubtedly, this rule was more glorious in breaking the law than in commemoration. “International law” is still brought into conversation with a strange dignity, because it often lacks the means of third-party enforcement. (Thomas Hobbes knew what “treaties without swords” were supposed to mean.) Still, the pretense of a world governed by laws was good, and the truth often works well.
At present? If what emerges is a world where it can be good, then the irrational scale becomes an advantage again. The old Anglo-French ideology of the middle world, of using institutions like the UN to look the great powers in the chin, if not in the eye, is collapsing.
After all, 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 70mn people is more beneficial than having 10mn. Consider defense spending. In fact, Sweden's annual budget ($9bn) is closer to Britain's ($75bn) than to China's (estimated at $296bn). And this raw total does more to determine a nation's hard power — the amount of energy it can use in the real world — than percentages of GDP. Otherwise Algeria would overtake France, and Oman black Britain.
On a similar note, the most ridiculous number in British public discourse is that we are the “sixth largest economy in the world”, which is the same as being the third largest football club in Manchester. It fails to tell if the gap to one number is greater than that number 20.
The medium size problem is not universal, however. South Korea has made progress over the decades, regardless of the recent hubbub. Countries can be small and dysfunctional (Honduras), large and weak (Indonesia, at least for now). However, the broader pattern is alarming. Or at least it is when seen from Europe, where the oligopoly of nations – France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain and increasingly Poland – are caught in that awkward position between being controlled thoroughly and the greatness of the world.
There's only one way around this, and it feels excessive to sneer at it when it goes through the existing nationalities. A century ago, the case for European integration was to stabilize peace. In this, it is to make the continental numbers calculated in foreign countries. As a goal, this is not a lofty idea but nothing less than an existence, not with the US working around it, or a strong China, or an expanding India, or a Russia that surpasses any single European country, and almost any two. If the natural love of the idea doesn't motivate voters to “closer to the union”, don't rule out that survival instinct will.