Ask Lemmygrad

808 readers

5 users here now

A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

I Live in a western (sort of) microstate. No true Leftist party to vote or support. (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So here is my dilemma. We import all food and goods, too small for agriculture. Our main economy is built on financial services and tourism mostly. Our social safety net and most of our let's say, liberal left leaning policies are being eroded as time goes by, which is not ideal, but is still better than nothing I guess.

However, since we trade our service based economy for essentially everything else, how does socialism help a nation so dependent on the world around it being capitalist to survive?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to offer an unpopular opinion and say that any state that is too small to sustain its population using its own territory is not viable and needs to either expand its territory or be assimilated by a larger neighbor. The pretense of independence of microstates is just that, a fiction. When a country is entirely dependent on others its sovereignty is on paper only. Its people will in reality be subject to the whims of other larger countries while at the same time not being able to have any say in the policies of said countries. This is effectively a colonial relationship. A microstate that is relatively well off due to serving as a finance haven may be a privileged neocolony but it is still a neocolony.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Does this mean that Norway is by your definition a neocolony?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Norway is a big country. The topic was microstates. Basically anything smaller than Luxemburg is not viable as an independent state. Though i would make an exception for island nations with enough territorial waters to feed their population and have a viable economic basis despite their small landmass.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

What makes Luxembourg specifically the lower limit of area for a viable country? If it is that a country smaller than Luxembourg cannot feed its current population using only the resources of its land and territorial waters, then my point is that there are also countries way bigger than Luxembourg for which this is also the case -- but you could not call these countries microstates or neocolonies with a straight face.