Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

What is better for a country, to be big or to be small? And should sovereign statehood be centralised or distributed among countries of common cultural and institutional lineage? Debates on this reach back to early modernity where Gibbon tries to draw lessons from the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire and Smith reflects on the political conditions of individual liberty in a society with mobile capital. The lecture explores in their light current developments in the European and international state system, in particular subnational separatism and nationalist revolts against a European superstate. It concludes that it is time to give small size and decentralised sovereignty a chance.