Is looking at the size of a country a meaningful method of comparison and analysis?
By Toby Vogel
September 22, 2010 9:22 pm CET
Europe is full of small states and its library shelves carry a vast amount of literature about individual small countries. Yet, according to the editors of "Small states in Europe", political scientists and scholars of international relations have neglected small states as a group and have made little comparative study of the challenges they face or of the interests and strategies they pursue. This is the gap that the book aims to fill.
It struggles, though, to establish that there are choices that small states commonly make because of their size. Instead, what emerges from the individual contributions to this volume are explanations of how smallness in its various guises has shaped the identities, interests and institutions of individual small countries in Europe. The preface recounts the recent clampdown on tax havens, such as Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland, and concludes that "small states have no real chance to escape concerted international pressure".
A chapter on Luxembourg's foreign policy tells the story of how the country's size prompted it, as well as smallish neighbours Belgium and the Netherlands, to check the threat of German hegemony by binding Germany into a common structure (today's European Union) and of how Luxembourg has used the EU to magnify its foreign policy.
Another chapter traces the different trajectories of the Czech Republic and Slovakia into and inside the EU, with Slovakia accepting its smallness and the Czech Republic seeking to act as an equal partner to the other EU member states. A spectacularly one-sided chapter on Cyprus defends the Greek Cypriots' use of their EU membership to fend off pressure for an accommodation with the Turkish Cypriots.
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No framework
Some of these chapters are interesting and insightful, for example the chapter on the collapse of Iceland's financial system and its impact on a country that is outside the shelter of the EU. But these individual insights fail to come together in a more coherent and comprehensive account. Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of edited volumes, as contributors pursue their particular interests with little or no reference to an overall conceptual framework. But it is a failing of a volume whose very purpose is to compensate for a lack of comparative study and to establish that size is a meaningful category of analysis.
It may also reflect a problem inherent in the notion of a 'small state'. The difficulty begins in defining a small state. It is a reasonable point of departure to posit, as the editors do, that "smallness is defined through the relation between the state and its external environment" rather than by an absolute measure, such as economic output or population size. Smallness comes in different shapes and sizes; each small state is small in its own way. But having made that point, the book tends to underplay the differences that surely follow from the actual size of countries such as the Netherlands (the biggest of the small states and the smallest of the big states, as the excellent chapter on the country puts it) or Malta and Luxembourg, with a population of less than half a million each. It notes that some countries – Norway and Switzerland, for example – jealously guard against any encroachment of their sovereignty and have chosen to remain outside the EU, while others – Finland, for example – advocate a further deepening of the EU. But it does not seek to explain why they make these different choices.
It is true that small states frequently face similar challenges: they are vulnerable to predatory neighbours and, since they typically have open economies that tend to be highly specialised, to the ups and downs of the world economy. But how they deal with these challenges is difficult to explain with reference to their size, however defined. This book would have gained much if the editors had devoted more effort to this difficulty.
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