In search for the optimal size
Analysing the absolute size – the available quantity of specific resources and the effect of such resources on the political community – can be regarded as the first endeavour in the study of smallness. Greek and Arab philosophers, among others, expressed the idea quite early that bigger is not necessarily better and that there are (or should be) some limits to the growth of a political entity. Searching for the “optimal size”, they set the scale differently: Plato argued that 5,040 heads of families is enough, whereas Aristotle was a little more permissive with accuracy, claiming that citizens in the ideal political community should be able to maintain face-to-face relationships with each other (Beer, 1993, pp. 88–89).
Naturally, their argumentation was more interesting than the actual number they proclaimed. In Plato’s The Republic, state size is connected with morality and self-sustainability. Socrates argues that the size of a state is healthy if it provides the “bare necessities” for its population and nothing more. If it remains as such, its smallness encourages “intimacy and friendship”, “sobriety and moderation” (Owen Arthur cited by Henrikson, 2007, p. 50). Nevertheless, if a state overstretches, it will turn into the immoral entity of the “luxurious state” that starts wars with others in its “pursute of unlimited wealth” (Plato, 2004, pp. 55–57).
Besides Plato, Arab philosophers also differentiated between the two categories. In al-Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldoun (1967) makes the distinction between the Bedouins (al-Badw) who “restrict themselves to what is necessary in their conditions (of life)” and sedentary people (al-hadar), who “concern themselves with conveniences and luxuries in their conditions”. 1 Al-Farabi also describes the “necessary city” (al-madina al-darariyya) as a type of city in which “the people’s aim is restricted to what is necessary for the subsistence of the body in (the way of) food, drink, habitation and sexual intercourse and to cooperation in obtaining these (things)” (Pines, 1971, p. 128), but he does not connect it with moral superiority (Pines, 1971, pp. 134–135).
Aristotle also favoured smaller entities; however, he did not build his argumentation on morality of self-sufficiency but, rather, on governability. In Politics, he argued that if a state is too large (both in terms of population and territory), it can only be governed badly. He echoes Plato’s argument about the importance of satisfying the needs of the population, but he goes further and proclaims the importance of defence (Aristotle, 1998, p. 44):
there should not be so much property on hand that more powerful neighbours will covet it, and the owners will be unable to repel the attackers, nor so little that they cannot sustain a war even against equal or similar people.
His argument translates into a premodern security dilemma, according to which growing is necessary to protect oneself but growing too large can actually provoke others to attack the community. While, generally, Aristotle accepted that wealth has beneficial effects, he set the “best limit” for the optimal size as the state in which “those who are stronger will not profit if they go to war because of the excess, but as they would if the property were not so great” (ibid.).
The aforementioned classic philosophers set the tone for modern understanding of smallness for millennia. Political theorists of the last centuries built upon their ideas, constructing five main research programmes related to absolute smallness.
First, the questions of self-sufficiency and morality were reborn in the literature on sustainability, degrowth and the criticism of over-consumption (DeWesse-Boyd and DeWesse-Boyd, 2007). Acclaimed authors such as Ezra Mishan (1967) and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1977) criticised the “growth mania” of mainstream economic thought –the belief in the possibility and the necessity of “continuous material growth”, embedded in what E.F. Schumacher (2011, p. 51) calls the “idolatry of giantism”, the implicit assumption that bigger is always better. From their perspective, being small is not a negative fact of life; a “non-problem” (Schumacher, 2011, p. 54).
Second, historians tried to undertake empirical investigation of the developments that shaped the size of modern states (Alesina, 2003, p. 303). They were somewhat critical of classic philosophers’ admiration of smallness, arguing that their ideas “were not realistic. History did not follow [their] advice” (Gottmann, 1980, p. 220). Accordingly, in history, small states have not been morally superior communities but, rather, “economic jokes” (Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 286). To understand states’ size, one has to follow historical developments such as nationalism or modernisation, and not moral dimensions. “Nation-statehood”, argues Thomas Nairn (1997, p. 144) “was configured by the pressures and constraints of development […], and these ensured that only entities above a certain threshold of scale had any chance of surviving, or of attaining independence – or indeed, the right to do so”.
This brings us back to the question of the necessary size for self-sufficiency, or “viability” as Nairn puts it. The bar for this was set by the emerging competitive capitalism as the “first-wave industrialisation had to emancipate itself both from the confines of the city-state (where capitalism had always been at home) and from the bureaucratic hierarchies of the ancient empire-state” (Nairn, 1997, p. 147). Thus, the model for the ideal size of a nation state was set by France, a “medium-to-large nation state, capable of constructing a distinguishable political economy of its own, the range of cultural and administrative institutions needed for managing this, and an army capable of defending it” (Nairn, 1997, p. 133).
Third, debate surfaced in political science regarding the connection between governability and size (Beer, 1993; Anckar, 1999; Alesina, 2003; Posner, 2012). While many writers, including Niccoló Macchiavelli, Montesquieu, James Madison, Robert Dahl and Edward Tufte, agreed with Aristotle that large size contribute to ineffective governance due to growing diversity, others defied this correlation. According to the critics, there is no empirical evidence that ethnic or religious diversity is larger in bigger states but, even if it is, that cannot be directly translated into hostility or conflict.
Fourth, some economists also tried to calculate the optimal size of states. In one of the most comprehensive attempts, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore (2005) argued that the size of states is “due to trade-offs between the benefits of size and the costs of heterogeneity of preferences over public goods and policies provided by government” (Alesina and Spolaore, 2005, p. 3). Growth produces advantages and disadvantages (e.g. growing costs of governability, the multitude of interests and preferences) simultaneously, which balance themselves out. Alesina and Spolaore (2005) presupposed the existence of an “equilibrium size”, in which the costs of largeness are minimal and the benefits arising from it are maximal.
The exact equilibrium size of a state is determined by international economic conditions, especially the country’s integration into the world economy and the prevailing trade regime. In a completely autarchic and protectionist environment, the size of the population is the same as the market for national companies, which enlarges the disadvantages of smallness. On the other hand, in a completely liberalised environment in which all states are equally and fully integrated, the size of the market is (at least, theoretically) the same for everyone. Therefore, the “benefits from country size are smaller the larger the degree of international openness, and, conversely, […] the benefits from openness are smaller the larger the size of the country” (Alesina and...