The big question seems to be: Good for whom, and in what sense? The countries involved? Their leaders? Their citizens? The world? Humanity? This framing helps clarify why the annexation question isn't straightforward.
I think there's likely a political equivalent to optimal currency area theory. Just as economic conditions determine whether a region benefits from sharing a currency, various factors might determine the ideal political unit size. There are cities, states, and empires that would be better off as something else due to their specific context and attributes, though I'm not certain that this would correlate directly with what would be best for their citizens. I can imagine an imperial Athens that provides better material conditions and a city-state Rome that makes better art. And this is almost certainly not the same as what's best for their leaders as they determine it.
Then, I suppose the question is how you determine that for any particular context. How do we know if the right move for the moment is to move toward empire or independence? That doesn't seem solvable without knowing the outcomes we desire and the values we use to constrain our answers, which again rely on knowing who we're answering for.
For what it's worth, the United States definitely has an optimal political area problem, but I don't think the solution is states-as-countries either. It's too big and diverse for one country and too connected for 50. Given a frictionless vacuum, I'd say there are about seven regions with sufficiently collective interests and shared culture to be countries. Even then, I think the ideal might be something like a looser confederation that maintains shared defense, currency, and free movement while allowing for more regional autonomy on other matters.
In a way, the end of empires brought more diversity to the map—but less diversity within each state. Most nation-states were built around ethnic or national identities, which often led to a narrowing of internal pluralism. Take the Ottoman Empire, for example: it’s hard not to feel a certain nostalgia for its remarkably rich mosaic of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities spread across Anatolia, its cities, and beyond. That diversity has now all but disappeared.
There was a kind of pragmatic tolerance toward minorities—so long as they remained within their designated social and political boundaries. Many minority groups thrived economically and culturally under Ottoman rule, yet their success rarely provoked widespread resentment, largely because political power remained firmly in the hands of the Turks.
Empires also allowed individuals to hold complex, layered identities—religious, linguistic, regional, and cultural—in ways that are often difficult within the rigid frameworks of modern nation-states. That, too, is a loss of diversity. And when these layered identities are suppressed or forced into singular national molds, it can become yet another source of tribalism and conflict. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, proved catastrophic for many of Turkey’s minorities—marked by the Armenian genocide, the forced exodus of Greeks, and large-scale population exchanges.
I’m not saying we should bring empires back—or that small, diverse nation-states can’t succeed. Of course they can—and many do. But it’s worth recognizing that, for all their flaws, empires sometimes offered frameworks for managing complexity and diversity that modern nation-states still struggle to replicate.
That's a good point! But I think I'm skeptical that this can generalize to a claim like "empires are good for cultural diversity". Some empires like the Ottomans had tolerant policies, and that's good, but many (more?) were explicitly assimilationist or genocidal. Likewise, a nation-state can have good or bad policies regarding culture; the early Republic of Turkey was probably not a shining example in this respect, and neither were of course the totalitarian regimes in interwar Europe. But some do totally fine, and there are multicultural countries that do exceptionally well, like Switzerland.
I'll note also that the Armenian genocide was carried during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Maybe it would not have happened if the empire weren't on the verge of collapse. But a minority in an empire is not in a great position if sudden political turns can lead from tolerance to genocide when the empire declines, which we can reasonably expect them to eventually.
Even though the violence against Armenians had started earlier, the genocide itself was carried out under CUP control so, it wasn’t really the Ottoman Empire anymore. But honestly, empire or not, I don’t think that’s the key point. Minorities are rarely safe when a political system ,imperial or national, is collapsing. And as you said, nation-states don’t have a great record either when it comes to assimilation or outright violence.
My general impression (and I could be wrong) is that empires tend to be better at managing cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity, not because they’re morally superior, but because they have to be it’s often essential to their survival. Nation-states, on the other hand, often build themselves by reducing diversity to forge a shared identity. That’s why forced assimilation is so common in state-building.
Yes, there are exceptions like Switzerland or Singapore, but they’re tightly controlled environments, and their diversity is relatively limited or very carefully managed. Truly diverse, functional states are rare.
On your broader point — I agree that forced annexation is obviously a bad idea today. Prosperity now comes from trade, productivity, and innovation, not from conquest. I know my take is probably a bit off-topic and a little romantic about empires. We’re not going back to that model (unless the world collapses into chaos… which let’s hope not).
I’m not sure about your conclusion that we become wealthier and more creative by abandoning grand ideas of unity and letting a large number of countries, of all shapes and sizes, experiment on their own terms. I actually think there’s a bit of a contradiction there — because if we truly want to allow all these countries to experiment freely, then some grand ideas of unity probably have to be part of the experiment too, at least for the bigger ones.
I’m all for experimentation — microstates, city-states, charter cities — but what works in one place can totally fail somewhere else. A multi-Sinic civilization might work beautifully. The breakup of Yugoslavia or the Ottoman Empire? Not so much.
I’m not particularly well-read on these subjects, so that might just be a poorly informed opinion on my part. En tout cas, texte très intéressant. Tu as vraiment le don de meubler ma tête avec de longues réflexions.
What a poor example Taiwan is! Since the Kuomintang escaped to it under the protection of the US military it it has been used as an economic weapon against China (who are still not allowed to use most of the advanced chips produced there). If the USA were not using its existence and its resources continuously to attack China there might indeed be some sense in China coexisting with Taiwan.
This framing leaves something to be desired. Taiwan would probably sign a deal with China tomorrow to sell them all the chips they wanted if China would recognize Taiwan's independence and or even just commit not to resorting to military means to annex it. But China refuses to do so. It is also the Chinese government in Beijing who prevents Taiwan from participating meaningfully on the world stage, and has pretty much banned Chinese citizens from visiting Taiwan. The idea that China is being continuously attacked or faces any threat from Taiwan is absurd. These "threats" exist to justify weird nationalists wet dreams of conquest.
It's not great that Taiwan is used as a pawn in games of power between imperialistic states, sure. But it's not clear to me what you mean by "an economic weapon," and your argument making no mention of Taiwan using its own agency to make economic and political choices seems off.
I guess I'm kind of skeptical of strong claims of US imperialism in general. I agree that there's a sense in which a place like Taiwan can't have a fully independent foreign policy, but it's not clear to me that this is *that* different from other US-aligned countries; and it certainly does have a lot of independence in other domains. I don't know how that would compare to Soviet-aligned Hungary though.
How refreshing to think of the decision of whether to annex or to separate as a rational decision that one might discuss outside of a war room.
I think the biggest arguments for separation involves political participation and (what you raise) innovation.
Security is a problem for separating or staying separate, and it can create strange bedfellows. One intro I read to The Prince explained Machiavelli’s entire exercise as an attempt to persuade the Medici to rid Italy of foreign powers so that Florence could go back to being a republic. In other words, Machiavelli wanted a republican city-state with the help of an authoritarian.
I wonder if multi-country civilizations would help to bring about the end of nation-states, which I consider a modern plague.
Finally, I loved Jane Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities. How wonderful to see that the same mind wrote about the relationship between cities and nations and wrote about separatism.
A centralised state creates distance between the political elite and the people. It becomes more difficult to hold politicians accountable in a larger centralised state. Power concentrations lead to abuse. A city state is in that case more preferable.
I would argue a that an important driver of major countries, especially authoritarian ones, being acquisitive is a fear of their governing classes facing the splitting away of territory and peoples already under their control. Russia and the PRC are prime examples. Their systems simply don't or can't tolerate dissent or any meaningful independence. Hence the imperative is to acquire neighboring territory with historical or cultural ties and bring them to heel, so as to eliminate any thought of such territories setting an example for further break-aways.
Yeah, I think that's right. There's some nuance, both Russia and the PRC allow some degree of autonomy to their regions that have large minorities. But there is definitely a phenomenon where allowing a little bit of separatism is seen as a slippery slope to total collapse. I think this is overblown but it comes up even in democratic countries like Canada or Spain.
Excellent essay, clearly written and argued. I'm a lifelong resident of New York City and if there's a place in the United States that's like a city-state, it's here.
The big question seems to be: Good for whom, and in what sense? The countries involved? Their leaders? Their citizens? The world? Humanity? This framing helps clarify why the annexation question isn't straightforward.
I think there's likely a political equivalent to optimal currency area theory. Just as economic conditions determine whether a region benefits from sharing a currency, various factors might determine the ideal political unit size. There are cities, states, and empires that would be better off as something else due to their specific context and attributes, though I'm not certain that this would correlate directly with what would be best for their citizens. I can imagine an imperial Athens that provides better material conditions and a city-state Rome that makes better art. And this is almost certainly not the same as what's best for their leaders as they determine it.
Then, I suppose the question is how you determine that for any particular context. How do we know if the right move for the moment is to move toward empire or independence? That doesn't seem solvable without knowing the outcomes we desire and the values we use to constrain our answers, which again rely on knowing who we're answering for.
For what it's worth, the United States definitely has an optimal political area problem, but I don't think the solution is states-as-countries either. It's too big and diverse for one country and too connected for 50. Given a frictionless vacuum, I'd say there are about seven regions with sufficiently collective interests and shared culture to be countries. Even then, I think the ideal might be something like a looser confederation that maintains shared defense, currency, and free movement while allowing for more regional autonomy on other matters.
In a way, the end of empires brought more diversity to the map—but less diversity within each state. Most nation-states were built around ethnic or national identities, which often led to a narrowing of internal pluralism. Take the Ottoman Empire, for example: it’s hard not to feel a certain nostalgia for its remarkably rich mosaic of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities spread across Anatolia, its cities, and beyond. That diversity has now all but disappeared.
There was a kind of pragmatic tolerance toward minorities—so long as they remained within their designated social and political boundaries. Many minority groups thrived economically and culturally under Ottoman rule, yet their success rarely provoked widespread resentment, largely because political power remained firmly in the hands of the Turks.
Empires also allowed individuals to hold complex, layered identities—religious, linguistic, regional, and cultural—in ways that are often difficult within the rigid frameworks of modern nation-states. That, too, is a loss of diversity. And when these layered identities are suppressed or forced into singular national molds, it can become yet another source of tribalism and conflict. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, proved catastrophic for many of Turkey’s minorities—marked by the Armenian genocide, the forced exodus of Greeks, and large-scale population exchanges.
I’m not saying we should bring empires back—or that small, diverse nation-states can’t succeed. Of course they can—and many do. But it’s worth recognizing that, for all their flaws, empires sometimes offered frameworks for managing complexity and diversity that modern nation-states still struggle to replicate.
That's a good point! But I think I'm skeptical that this can generalize to a claim like "empires are good for cultural diversity". Some empires like the Ottomans had tolerant policies, and that's good, but many (more?) were explicitly assimilationist or genocidal. Likewise, a nation-state can have good or bad policies regarding culture; the early Republic of Turkey was probably not a shining example in this respect, and neither were of course the totalitarian regimes in interwar Europe. But some do totally fine, and there are multicultural countries that do exceptionally well, like Switzerland.
I'll note also that the Armenian genocide was carried during the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Maybe it would not have happened if the empire weren't on the verge of collapse. But a minority in an empire is not in a great position if sudden political turns can lead from tolerance to genocide when the empire declines, which we can reasonably expect them to eventually.
Even though the violence against Armenians had started earlier, the genocide itself was carried out under CUP control so, it wasn’t really the Ottoman Empire anymore. But honestly, empire or not, I don’t think that’s the key point. Minorities are rarely safe when a political system ,imperial or national, is collapsing. And as you said, nation-states don’t have a great record either when it comes to assimilation or outright violence.
My general impression (and I could be wrong) is that empires tend to be better at managing cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity, not because they’re morally superior, but because they have to be it’s often essential to their survival. Nation-states, on the other hand, often build themselves by reducing diversity to forge a shared identity. That’s why forced assimilation is so common in state-building.
Yes, there are exceptions like Switzerland or Singapore, but they’re tightly controlled environments, and their diversity is relatively limited or very carefully managed. Truly diverse, functional states are rare.
On your broader point — I agree that forced annexation is obviously a bad idea today. Prosperity now comes from trade, productivity, and innovation, not from conquest. I know my take is probably a bit off-topic and a little romantic about empires. We’re not going back to that model (unless the world collapses into chaos… which let’s hope not).
I’m not sure about your conclusion that we become wealthier and more creative by abandoning grand ideas of unity and letting a large number of countries, of all shapes and sizes, experiment on their own terms. I actually think there’s a bit of a contradiction there — because if we truly want to allow all these countries to experiment freely, then some grand ideas of unity probably have to be part of the experiment too, at least for the bigger ones.
I’m all for experimentation — microstates, city-states, charter cities — but what works in one place can totally fail somewhere else. A multi-Sinic civilization might work beautifully. The breakup of Yugoslavia or the Ottoman Empire? Not so much.
I’m not particularly well-read on these subjects, so that might just be a poorly informed opinion on my part. En tout cas, texte très intéressant. Tu as vraiment le don de meubler ma tête avec de longues réflexions.
What a poor example Taiwan is! Since the Kuomintang escaped to it under the protection of the US military it it has been used as an economic weapon against China (who are still not allowed to use most of the advanced chips produced there). If the USA were not using its existence and its resources continuously to attack China there might indeed be some sense in China coexisting with Taiwan.
This framing leaves something to be desired. Taiwan would probably sign a deal with China tomorrow to sell them all the chips they wanted if China would recognize Taiwan's independence and or even just commit not to resorting to military means to annex it. But China refuses to do so. It is also the Chinese government in Beijing who prevents Taiwan from participating meaningfully on the world stage, and has pretty much banned Chinese citizens from visiting Taiwan. The idea that China is being continuously attacked or faces any threat from Taiwan is absurd. These "threats" exist to justify weird nationalists wet dreams of conquest.
It's not great that Taiwan is used as a pawn in games of power between imperialistic states, sure. But it's not clear to me what you mean by "an economic weapon," and your argument making no mention of Taiwan using its own agency to make economic and political choices seems off.
Fair enough. If you believe Taiwan has more independent agency from the US than Hungary did from the USSR in 1956 then you have a valid point
I guess I'm kind of skeptical of strong claims of US imperialism in general. I agree that there's a sense in which a place like Taiwan can't have a fully independent foreign policy, but it's not clear to me that this is *that* different from other US-aligned countries; and it certainly does have a lot of independence in other domains. I don't know how that would compare to Soviet-aligned Hungary though.
How refreshing to think of the decision of whether to annex or to separate as a rational decision that one might discuss outside of a war room.
I think the biggest arguments for separation involves political participation and (what you raise) innovation.
Security is a problem for separating or staying separate, and it can create strange bedfellows. One intro I read to The Prince explained Machiavelli’s entire exercise as an attempt to persuade the Medici to rid Italy of foreign powers so that Florence could go back to being a republic. In other words, Machiavelli wanted a republican city-state with the help of an authoritarian.
I wonder if multi-country civilizations would help to bring about the end of nation-states, which I consider a modern plague.
Finally, I loved Jane Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities. How wonderful to see that the same mind wrote about the relationship between cities and nations and wrote about separatism.
A centralised state creates distance between the political elite and the people. It becomes more difficult to hold politicians accountable in a larger centralised state. Power concentrations lead to abuse. A city state is in that case more preferable.
Yes, one of the many ways the feedback loops between government and policy effects don't work as well when the state is large.
I would argue a that an important driver of major countries, especially authoritarian ones, being acquisitive is a fear of their governing classes facing the splitting away of territory and peoples already under their control. Russia and the PRC are prime examples. Their systems simply don't or can't tolerate dissent or any meaningful independence. Hence the imperative is to acquire neighboring territory with historical or cultural ties and bring them to heel, so as to eliminate any thought of such territories setting an example for further break-aways.
Yeah, I think that's right. There's some nuance, both Russia and the PRC allow some degree of autonomy to their regions that have large minorities. But there is definitely a phenomenon where allowing a little bit of separatism is seen as a slippery slope to total collapse. I think this is overblown but it comes up even in democratic countries like Canada or Spain.
From a game theory perspective, what are the differences between a collection of city-states and an empire when dealing with outside powers?
Excellent essay, clearly written and argued. I'm a lifelong resident of New York City and if there's a place in the United States that's like a city-state, it's here.