ntacts with foreigners. One is most likely to be murdered by one’s close relatives and friends because close contacts and high levels of interaction provides opportunities for such actions. Returning to the problem of the border / war relationship, Richardson then makes the obvious linkages: if frontiers create opportunities for interaction, and the greater the opportunities the greater the level of actual interaction, then the greater the number of frontiers the greater the probability of war.
To demonstrate his theory of geographical influences on development, Midlarsky first gives the standard explanations or why Britain developed a democratic culture, including high average rainfall, geographic safety, industrialization, and land inequality:
England may be the archetypical example of a country that experienced very early democratization and that also embodies the four principal variables examined here. Average rainfall is consistently high. As an island nation, especially after the subjugation of surrounding peoples such as the Irish, Scots, and Welsh, she was relatively free from the threat of war. At the very least, she had leeway in choosing her time of entry into continental wars and with force sizes pretty much at her own discretion. The English economy, of course, industrialized earlier than any other, leading to a very high gross domestic product (GDP) / capita (CAP) and consequent impact on democracy. Also, land inequality, especially in terms of land holdings by the nobility, was substantial. … “No Continental landed elite in the nineteenth century owned so large a part of its nation’s territory as did the English” … His explicit comparisons are with the French, Spanish, Prussian, and Russian elites, all of whose societies, of course, democratized at much later dates than did the English.”
Midlarsky also cites another state that also had high rainfall, geographic safety, and industrialization yet veered towards authoritarianism. This demonstrates the role of another important factor that is central to 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