o this paper: land borders
One of the closest counterparts to the English-landed elite in terms of residence patterns, political dominance of the local countryside and thence of the state, and inheritance laws that tended to maintain entire estates intact over time was the Prussian. And here, this basic similarity that might have led to a similar democratic evolution is vitiated strongly by the Prussian military tradition. Where as the English-landed elite opposed standing armies and evolved a strong libertarian tradition, it was said of the Prussian, “What they loved best next to their estates was an army and all that went with it — splendid uniforms, military pomp, and chivalric codes of honor”… What is obvious here is the critical role of the maximization of the threat of war by many land borders and its diminution of th positive impact of other variables on the evolution of democracy.”
This study seeks to go one steep beyond Midlarsky’s earlier work. Midlarsky was looking at land-borders from the perspective of being surrounded by the sea (either through being on an island or a peninsula). Other geographic-conditioning studies, such as Enterline (1998), also looked at neighboring states. This research, by contrast, will examine sea-borders from the perspective of being surrounded by land (that is, being landlocked). In order to make the examination more readily testable, the economic and democratic fate of the ex-Communist states will be compared with respect to their being landlocked or not