A Bit More Detail

Outlook India's Vivek Menezes writes about how the Indian state of Goa, once a Portuguese enclave, has flirted with the idea of being a Singapore-like city-state.

At that very beginning of decolonisation in Asia, the Portuguese dictator Salazar found a lot to like in what was happening in the British-ruled port city — its new Legislative Council included only six (later nine) elected seats out of twenty-five, and only British subjects were eligible to vote. Meanwhile the colonial system remained dominant. Salazar figured this an excellent model for the four-centuries-old Estado da India Portuguesa.

Even after the Council yielded to a fully-elected Assembly, and the UK Parliament passed the 1958 State of Singapore Act accepting the establishment of an independent state, Salazar still looked for a Singapore-type solution to the increasingly thorny Goa crisis, as Nehru and Krishna Menon grew progressively restive about the last colonial "pimple disfiguring the face of India". The Portuguese dangled promise of a NATO port at Mormugao to his allies, and it took a Russian veto to stymie the US/UK-led United Nations resolution demanding withdrawal of Indian troops after their mercifully bloodless takeover in 1961.

In the immediate aftermath of Indian annexation, the Goan freedom fighter (he famously got into a fistfight with the colonial Governor General) António Anastásio Bruto da Costa led a group demanding "Goan Goa" with "full sovereignty" to be achieved via "natural right to a plebiscite." This "third force" also looked to Singapore as a model of what might be possible in Goa.

With those political questions resolved, visions of Singapore continue dancing in the minds of a very wide range of contemporary observers of India's smallest state. As India Today — the national media outlet that gets Goa most consistently wrong — ludicrously put it in 2013, "the steady march of urbanisation, experts predict, will turn tiny Goa into a Singapore-like city state miraculously untouched by the woes of overpopulation and urbanisation."

Why these supercharged fantasies for famously laid-back Goa? Perhaps the promise of manageable size, with per-capita GDP and human development statistics dramatically higher than the neighbours? Both Singapore and Goa are centuries-old pockets of globalisation, with relatively cosmopolitan leanings. If it could happen there, it could logically follow that it can also happen here.

Bloomberg's Jason Clenfield has an engaging article about how citizenship, especially for many small countries, is not only a birthright: It's also a source of income.

In 2006, the tiny Caribbean state of St. Kitts and Nevis was in deep trouble. Its sugar plantations had closed a year earlier, gang violence had given it the dubious distinction of having one of the world’s highest murder rates, and only two governments on Earth were more indebted. A three-hour flight south of Miami, the country of 48,000 people was more or less unknown. Certainly, the two specks of volcanic rock in the middle of the West Indies weren’t of much interest to the world’s rich. St. Kitts and Nevis had run a citizenship-by-investment program—had sold passports—since 1984, but it didn’t get much attention and was never a moneymaker.

Then a Swiss lawyer named Christian Kalin showed up.

Thanks to Kalin, St. Kitts has become the world’s most popular place to buy a passport, offering citizenship for $250,000 with no requirement that applicants ever set foot on the island’s sun-kissed shores. Buyers get visa-free travel to 132 countries, limited disclosure of financial information, and no taxes on income or capital gains. The program became so successful that St. Kitts emerged from the global financial crisis far ahead of its neighbors in the Caribbean. “It’s been a complete transformation,” says Judith Gold, head of an International Monetary Fund mission to the country.

Just as Kalin put St. Kitts on the map, Bloomberg Markets will report in its April 2015 issue, the reverse is also true. It made his reputation. Before St. Kitts, Kalin’s firm, Henley & Partners, was an obscure wealth management and immigration consultancy, and Kalin was working out of a small branch office in Zurich. Tall, with a runner’s build, Kalin was known as a researcher, he says, not the hard-nosed dealmaker he’s become. His claim to fame was having edited a 766-page guide to doing business in Switzerland, a tome found in every one of the country’s embassies.

Soon, prime ministers from around the world were seeking Kalin’s advice, in the hope he could reproduce the magic of St. Kitts, where he effectively created a resource out of thin air for a nation that had few. Many countries allow wealthy foreigners to buy residency cards through what are called immigrant investor programs, but before the financial crisis, St. Kitts and another Caribbean island called Dominica were the only ones selling citizenship outright. Since then, another five countries have gotten into the game. More are coming.

Foreign Policy's Michael Wise has an article examining the surprising resilience of something that looks awfully like absolute monarchy in early 21st century central Europe.

The principality of Liechtenstein, wedged between Switzerland and Austria in the Alps, is unique in the world as the last German-speaking monarchy extant.* Like many other microstates in the post-Second World War world, Liechtenstein has become prosperous thanks to its marketing of its sovereignty as an asset, becoming--among other things, and yes, like the Channel Islands off of Europe's Atlantic coast--a tax shelter. The princely family has done by all accounts a decent job of shepherding Liechtenstein's transformation into one of the wealthiest polities in the world. The only problem is that the princely family also insists on retaining a tight control over domestic politics. Calls for full democratization--specifically, lifting the prince's veto over popular referenda--have been met by promises from the princely family that, if a constitutional referendum scheduled for the 1st of July succeeding in overturning the veto, they would abandon the country to an uncertain quasi-republicanism.

(The referendum failed, 76% voting against.)

With a net worth estimated at $7 billion, the silver-haired monarch ranks among the world's richest heads of state, and he owns one of the most important art collections in private hands. His conservative principality, nestled between Austria and Switzerland, has the planet's second-highest GDP per capita, and it is an island of economic stability in troubled Europe. But discontented rumblings are afoot after Prince Hans-Adam's heir, 44-year-old Prince Alois, threatened to veto the result of a referendum last fall aimed at overturning Liechtenstein's ban on abortion.

Although Prince Hans-Adam supports a formal division of church and state, he and his family do not hide their Catholic devotion. Eighty percent of their principality's population of 36,000 is also Catholic. A massive carving of Jesus on the cross looms over the fireplace in Prince Hans-Adam's vaulted office, and when he showed me around the 130-room castle this past winter, we stopped in a chapel adorned with a Gothic altar where he and his offspring pray regularly.

But unlike in the United States, where the battle over abortion rights is part of a larger cultural war, the tempest in Liechtenstein is not primarily related to religious belief: Rather, it centers on the extraordinary degree of political power retained by a dynastic leader in the heart of 21st-century democratic Europe.

"Dominions … are either accustomed to live under a prince or to live in freedom," wrote Machiavelli. Liechtenstein is accustomed to having some of both, but Prince Hans-Adam clearly tipped the balance when he used a 2003 constitutional referendum approved by 64 percent of the electorate to increase his leverage over parliament and the courts, obtaining power to irreversibly veto any law, dissolve the legislature, and appoint judges. But since November's unsuccessful bid to allow abortion -- it failed in the wake of a princely threat to veto it if it gained voter approval -- a new citizens' initiative is pushing for limits on the royal veto prerogative.

Even so, neither power nor money fully satisfies Prince Hans-Adam, who talks in terms of generations rather than the short-term goals of most elected leaders. To ensure a smooth succession, in 2004 he appointed his son Prince Alois as his representative in running day-to-day government matters, but he remains head of state and still exerts considerable influence. Prince Hans-Adam, free from the daily rigors of governance, has recently sought international recognition by writing a book -- called The State in the Third Millennium and published in 10 languages so far -- presenting Liechtenstein's odd constitutional monarchy as a model for other countries.

[. . .]

The prince, whose aristocratic roots stretch back nearly a millennium, describes himself as "a convinced democrat committed to a form of democracy that far exceeds what is normal today," even if it's hardly the norm nowadays for monarchs to be more than symbolic leaders much less have anywhere close to his degree of power. But he sees no contradiction in tenaciously clinging to inherited dynastic privilege. Prince Alois, who attended the British Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, is only slightly more circumspect, warning parliament in March that the princely house would not serve as a "fig leaf" for policies it did not support and "would completely withdraw from political life in Liechtenstein" if it lost the "necessary political instruments."

Adherents of the prince in the tiny country, once part of the Holy Roman Empire and only actually inhabited by the Liechtenstein royal family since 1938 (they lived primarily in Austria and what is now the Czech Republic until the rise of Nazism) hail what's called a "dualistic" political system, whereby policy is shaped jointly by the princely house and a 25-member parliament. A large portrait of Prince Hans-Adam hangs in the chamber as if to keep an eye on the proceedings. The legislators, who serve on a part-time basis, rose in the prince's defense on May 23, voting 18 to 7 against the citizens' initiative as part of the procedure to put the referendum on the veto power before the public. Although open threats of a royal veto are rare, David Beattie, a former British ambassador to Liechtenstein, notes that the prince and his son regularly meet behind closed doors with officials, so "it's impossible to know how many times government policy may have been influenced by the possibility of a veto."

(I exclude Luxembourg from consideration, owing to the Grand Duchy's allegiances to the Low Countries, as well as the implantation of French as a language of wider communication alongside the slow elevation of Luxembourgish to the status of national language. nwhyte?)

I was reminded of Thomas M. Eccardt's 2005 Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe by a post that Hans Connor made over at Nissology, linking to an essay by UPEI professor Henry Srebrnik describing microstates and their ascent to viability.

In the past considered too tiny to be full partners in the international community, these countries were viewed as anomalies, merely the leftover quirks of history.

When the League of Nations was founded after the First World War, none of them joined. And when the successor United Nations was formed in 1945, again none were among the original 51 signatories to its charter.

However, post-war global decolonization resulted in a wave of sovereign microstates, most of them small islands in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and South Pacific. Today's Commonwealth (of which Malta is a member) is largely a collection of such countries.

This paradigm shift allowed the European microstates to take their rightful place as full members of the international community.

[. . .]

No longer is size an impediment for countries wishing to make their mark in the world.

The limits of sovereignty in the modern world are amply demonstrate by these polities' survival and relatively improved position; microstates are cool. As the sovereign microstates of western Europe pioneered this category of statehood, undertaking a comparative study would make sense.

Eccardt argues that despite the widely differing particulars of the history of the seven microstates of Europehe chose for his study--Andorra, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, San Marino, the Vatican City, and, giant of the category, Luxembourg--they share certain characteristics in common. They have recently evolved into fully sovereign states as determined by the international state system, for intance, moving out just far enough from under the shadow of a patron, but their development of such and even their survival is almost entirely as a fluke, a consequence of great power rivalries allowing very small polities a chance, and frequently not complete (few have their own militaries). Their economies, Eccardt points out, are driven by their ability to exploit their sovereignty, frequently offering financial services including both above-the-board banking and tax sheltering. They've frequently had traditional, pre-democratic systems of government survive long into the modern age, with Liechstenstein's prince having so much power to cause some to question the country's status as a democracy and the Vatican City--of course--being run by the Roman Catholic Church. Each microstate has tried to preserve its cultural heritage to varying degrees, most arguably being at least more successful than comparable nearby regions, but the economic development driven by their exploitation of their sovereignty certainly plugs them into the international system (Luxembourg and Malta are European Union member-states in their own right, and the others are closely associated with the EU) and incidentally attracts relatively very large numbers of immigrants.

The utility of Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe lies in its detailed exploration of the similarities shared by the oldest microstates in the world, answering the question "What is a microstate?" quite well. The parallels brought forward by Eccardt can easily be used to study other, non-western European microstates, highlighting their similarities and perhaps making predictions about their future development. In a world marked by the changing nature of sovereignty generally, illustrated by the continued development of new microstates may continue to develop (the Faroes, perhaps?) and compromises over sovereignty that other microstates must make (post-crash Iceland's European Union bid is an example), makes the study of the microstate more universally relevant that one might think. If you've ever been interested in very small countries--hey, even if the only thing you know about the microstate is the Grand Fenwick was a great background for funny stories--you wouldn't do at all badly to read Eccardt's tome. "Everything counts/in small amounts."

I ask my readers because of two worrisome articles.

The Inter Press Service's Suad Hamada writes, in "Foreign Labourers Targeted Throughout Bahrain", about attacks against foreign labourers whose communities--of one South Asian background or another--came under suspicion after not joining in the general strike.

Eight migrant workers died and approximately 49 sustained various injuries since Mar. 17 when the government with the support of Cooperation Council of the Arab Gulf States (GCC) peninsula shield troops started cracking down on demonstrations blocking roads in Manama - the financial capital of Bahrain. The government has also declared a three-month state of emergency to be enforced by the Bahrain Defence Force.

Most expats are not yet considering leaving the country, hoping for the situation to revert to normal. They fear losing their jobs and not finding new ones back home.

On Mar. 13 before the beginning of the attacks, the Civil Disobedience Support Committee sent a letter to foreign embassies in the country asking diplomatic missions to ask their nationals to leave immediately, while warning that the routes leading to the airport might not be safe. IPS obtained a copy of the letter.

Expatriates, mainly migrant workers from Asia, are in high demand for their skills and are valued for their low salaries - essential to prop up sustainable growth in Bahrain. Migrant workers represent almost half of the country’s population of 1.2 million. Migrant labour in the region is a huge source of remittance income in the workers’ home countries - and some embassies here seem to be taking the violent hate crimes against their nationals with a grain of salt.

Reuters, meanwhile, suggests that immigrants--many given citizenship, in marked contrasted to precedents elsewhere in the Gulf, to weaken the Shi'ite majority--are also coming under rhetorical fire.

Thousands of mostly Shi'ite Muslim Bahrainis protested on Wednesday against giving citizenship to Sunni foreigners serving in the military, whose troops have killed seven in the worst unrest since the 1990s.

[. . .]

A thorny issue for all opposition groups has been Bahrain's practice of giving citizenship to Sunni foreigners serving in the kingdom's armed forces, which they see as an attempt to alter the country's sectarian balance.

The protesters marched by the immigration authority in Manama, chanting anti-government slogans and holding up signs that read "Stop naturalization!"

"All those that are naturalized will be pro-government, and those in the police and army will follow their orders even if they are against the Bahraini people," said protester Khaled Ali.

Only half of Bahrain's population of about 1.2 million are native Bahrainis. Protesters said they only oppose settling those foreigners who are recruited to serve in the armed forces.

The opposition also complains that families of naturalized Sunnis have better access to government services such as housing, education and health.

"We want them out because they're sharing the services with original Bahrainis. We have to wait 15 years for (government) housing, and they get it immediately after arriving," said Ali.

Opposition activists estimate that up to half of Bahrain's approximately 20,000-strong national security apparatus could be made up of Sunnis from Pakistan, Jordan and Yemen.

Is Bahrain's political crisis becoming an ethnoreligious one, too?

Geocurrent Events' Martin Lewis considers this question.

'[T]hematic maps are portraying these exiguous sovereign states as sizable circles, their regular geometric shapes indicating that they are not mapped to scale (as in the second map posted above). Although unspecified, the rationale seem to be that such entities deserve depiction on any state-based map, as they are indeed internationally recognized sovereign states. Leaving them off or mapping them (invisibly) to scale would unfairly deny them their rightful places within the so-called community of nations. In the standard model of geopolitics, all sovereign states are juridically equivalent individuals, and it would hardly be right to deny certain individuals recognition simply because they are smaller than others.

But recognizing microstates in such a manner entails severe geographical distortions. In the second map above, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Lichtenstein, Malta, and the Vatican City are vastly enlarged, appearing substantially larger than Luxembourg. All other countries in Europe are basically mapped to scale here, but the micro-countries are treated as deserving special notice. In a number of sources, microstates are literally mapped at vastly finer levels of resolution than others, merely by virtue of their anomalous sovereignty. In the maps used in the CIA World Factbook, one kilometer of Monaco is equal to roughly 1,400 miles of Russia.

In the standard world model, all sovereign states are portrayed as equivalent units, entities of the same scope and capacities that interact as fellow members in the “international community.” From data tables to encyclopedia and almanac entries, sovereign states tend to be depicted in the same manner, regardless of their area or population.

[. . .]

Treating microstates as equivalent to ordinary countries wastes effort and leads to misleading comparisons. Consider, for example, the Wikipedia table of average life expectancy across Europe, posted above. The numbers given seem to indicate that there is something quite special about Andorra, which posts longevity figures well beyond those of other states. In actuality, the average age of death in Andorra is much the same as it is in neighboring areas of northern Spain and Southern France, as Andorra is merely one of many similar regions in this vicinity, albeit one that happens to have sovereignty. By juxtaposing Andorra with France and Spain rather than with neighboring districts of the same scale in northern Spain and Southern France, a distorted picture results.

[. . .]

Ironically, in our drive to portray all countries in an egalitarian way, as if they were all individuals worthy of equal consideration, we end up depicting the world’s human individuals in a preposterously unequal manner. Consider the distortions that result when Nauru and India are regarded as equivalent units of the human community, worthy of the same level of attention when it comes to tabulating basic information about the world. The population of India (1.2 billion) is more than five orders of magnitude greater than that of Nauru (10 thousand), and its land area is larger still. By insisting on their equivalence, the standard world model seems to advance the claim that Nauru is 100,000 times more recognition-worthy than India, or perhaps even that each Nauruan counts as much as 100,000 Indians. Yet such an unhinged view of the world, one might argue, is essentially encoded in the very principles of the global political order. As represented in the United Nations General Assembly, each citizen of Nauru essentially has the voice of 100,000 citizens of India.

I'd suggest that weighted averages would offer a way out of these distortions, but how would it be weighted, and where?

Go, read.

Daniel Drezner is in Dubai now, and he's somewhat skeptical about the city-state's prospects.

Ever since I arrived, I've been trying to figure out the best way to explain Dubai. Here's what I've come up with: If Stanley Kubrick had an unlimited budget and was making a movie about Las Vegas glitz, Dubai would be his set.

What do I mean by this? Well, like Kubrick's films, Dubai is underpopulated in an odd way, and the lack of people gives the place a very odd feel. There are shiny hi-tech malls, stores, and skyscrapers galore, but there isn't much else. From a citywide perspective, looking from the top of the Burj Khalifa, one sees all the new skyscrapers, a few blocks of the old part of town, and then... desert.

Even in the shiny parts of the city, there just aren't enough people to fill up the space. Everywhere I looked, there were way too many workers per customer. The Dubai Mall, for example, is truly massive, with every western brand name that still exists and a few (Rainforest Cafe, Benetton) that I thought had gone under. There was an entire wing of racy lingerie stores. I don't honestly if there's sufficient demand to keep these stores afloat, however.

Lest one think this is criticism, it isn't. I'm rooting for Dubai to succeed. If enough people come to the place, I think the Kubrickian oddness will wear off (though, not, perhaps, in the Armani Hotel. The hotel literature informs me that "every detail has been personally chosen by Armani to reflect his passion for stylish comfort and functionality." To your humble blogger, it seems like Mr. Armani has expended considerable sums of money to bring back the tacky wood finish of late 70's American suburbia, combined with the creeping isolation of Kubrick's The Shining). Any country that embraces the service sector with the same vengeance of North America is fine by me.

Drezner no longer thinks, as he did in 2008, that Dubai can stand as a model for general economic development in the Middle East, even among the Persian Gulf's microstates, since he thinks there's only room for one entrepôt--"Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Kuwait" will have to come up with some other model.

Thoughts? He asked specifically for people from Dubai to come and comment over at his blog.

Fred Halliday's Open Democracy article on the question of how the Catalanophone Pyrenean microstate of Andorra can adapt to a rapidly changing environment, characterized not least by the disappearance of the tax haven.

Three decades after Pete Seeger's visit, a modern constitution confirmed the power of the representatives of the banking elite that have long dominated the principality. As long as the economic prospects were fine, and a steady stream of day-visitors from Barcelona and Toulouse, each under four hours away by car, came for duty-free goods and to take money from their undeclared bank accounts, there was no reason to change. But the shifting economic climate - as well as pressure from France and Spain over banking secrecy - has altered that.

The elections of April 2009 for the twenty-eight seats in the Andorran parliament brought to power for the first time the Andorran Social-Democratic Party (PSA), headed by the lawyer Jaume Bartumeu. The traditional ruling party, the Reformist Coalition (and a recent split from it, Andorra for Change [ApC]) were pushed into opposition. There is also a small Green Party, which won 3.5% of the vote, and supports the PSA: its representatives are proud to declare that they are the first party in Andorran history to call for a "republic", i.e. the abolition of the "co-princes" arrangement.

All parties have committed themselves to meeting the demands of the new European banking and taxation systems: if Switzerland is unable to resist pressure from Europe and the USA, it is evident even to the most resistant of Andorrans that they cannot either, even as they point out that the biggest fraud in Europe is not the existence of tax-havens, but the European Union's VAT system. Sarkozy's threats, and the sharpening of the global-governance response to the crisis reflected in the formalisation of the Group of Twenty (G20) at the Pittsburgh summit on 24-25 September 2009, have served to focus minds in the co-principality.

However, as younger Andorrans are quick to point out, it is not just the banking and tax systems that are in need of change, but the whole "Andorran model" of banking, duty-free and winter sports. At present, considerable efforts are going into promoting Andorra as an all-year round tourist resort. The country has a rich heritage of Romanesque churches - although, sadly, over 80% of all the original frescoes are now housed elsewhere (in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, in private collections in the United States and other, unknown, places, and, in the case of some works stolen by the visiting members of the Gestapo during the second world war, in Germany). The country can certainly boast a healthy climate and its mountain slopes are ideal for summer walking.

Dharma Adhikari's Open Democracy essay "Bhutan’s democratic puzzle", describing the combination of low-level ethnic cleansing and marginally competent absolute monarchy that promises interesting things in the future for the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, reminds me again why the concept of Gross National Happiness strikes me as more than faintly Orwellian.

The Post-Chronicle was one of many news sources that carried this happy news.

Montenegro says Japan has recognized the Balkan country as an independent state, ending more than 100 years of a state of war.

Akiko Yamanaka, Japan's deputy foreign minister and the prime minister's special envoy is scheduled to arrive in Podgorica next week to deliver a letter to Montenegrin officials declaring the war is over and Tokyo recognizes Montenegro as an independent state, Belgrade's B92 radio reported Friday.

The countries have been in a technical state of war since the 1904-05 Russo-Japan War and Montenegro sided with Russia. A local historian told B92 that Montenegro's participation in the war was symbolic.

On May 21, Montenegro voted to secede from its union with Serbia and since then has been recognized as independent state by the United States, Russia, China and many other countries.

Montenegro's declaration of war against Japan was one product of this country's long tradition of Russophilia, this Russophilia stemming from tsarist Russia's support of the Orthodox Christian Slavs of the Balkans--particularly the Serbs--against the declining Ottoman Empire. Montenegro's final emergence as a sovereign state during the belle époque owed much to Russian financial and military support.

After some reluctance to support Montenegro's separation from post-Yugoslav Serbia several years ago, Russia since came around to support an independent Montenegro as a state that provided useful opportunities for Russians, particularly from the perspectives of tourism and banking. It might not be too inaccurate to say that, in the Russian imagination, Montenegro is not entirely dissimilar from Cyprus. (As an aside, it's worth noting that Montenegro's relationship with Japan has a chance to develop de novo from an interesting start.)