[dredmorbius]

The question of stability is an interesting one.

There's a long-standing observation that countries in which stable political, economic, and technological cultures have emerged have tended to have natural defences. The British Isles and Japanese archipelago in particular both avoided successful foreign invasion or even significant attack for nearly 1,000 years, until the 20th century.

Contemporary stability has more to do with Superpower alliances than geography, though geography still matters. The grand central-European plain had been the parade ground of invading armies since before the Mongol invaders, but today is largely peaceful, so long as one looks underneath the NATO umbrella. Ukraine suffers not only flat geography, ready river and sea access, railway infrastructure, and a long and unrespected border with Russia, but status as an unalligned state, whose prior security treaties with Russia have been abrogated.

The first four factors are common to numerous other states, it's the last which has proved critical to its history since 2014.

And such alliances don't require especially robust economic capability. Among the 31 members of Nato are wealthy states in absolute (Germany) and per-capita (Liechtenstein) terms, but also some of the poorest, notably Montenegro at 75th worldwide per capita and ranked 46 of 50 among European states in overall GDP (2023). Albania, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia are other states with low overall or per-capita GDP:

  State     GDP EU rank   GDP/capita (WW)
  -----     -----------   ---------------
  Albania:           40              101
  Belgium:           12               18
  Bulgaria:          26               73
  Canada:           n/a              n/a
  Croatia:           29               54
  Czechia:           19               37
  Denmark:           16                9
  Estonia:           35               38
  Finland:           18               15
  France:             3               21
  Germany:            1               16
  Greece:            22               39
  Hungary:           24               51
  Iceland:           37                6
  Italy:              4               25
  Latvia:            34               50
  Lithuania:         30               44
  Luxembourg:        27                1
  Montenegro:        46               75
  the Netherlands:   7                12
  North Macedonia:   42               92
  Norway:            13                3
  Poland:            10               49
  Romania:           17               55
  Slovakia:          25               45
  Slovenia:          31               34
  Spain:              6               29
  Turkey:             8               53
  United Kingdom:     2               22
  United States:     n/a             n/a

Notes:

- I've listed the North American members, but omitted their GDP as these are not European states.)

- EU rank is 1--50 inclusive.

- GDP/capita rank is 1--134 within Europe, based on global IMF rankings of 192 states worldwide.

Sources:

- GDP overall: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>

- GDP/capita: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...>

Takeaway: Alliances trump GDP or per-capita income.

[kbenson]

Yes, but my worry is that what looks like a trend is but a small part of a larger cycle. We've seen what happens when complex political alliances fail with WWI (even if they were more a web than an overarching umbrella), and Ukraine problem was not just that it was unaligned, but that it was choosing to align itself.

How sure are we that the trends we see during periods of somewhat large economic growth (on average, overall for most nations) will continue when that environment is not the same? As more and more countries enter the end/modernity stage of economic bootstrapping (and China and India did), what pressure does that out on nations already at that level?

More than NATO I think trade agreements keep the world together (and drive membership of NATO) as codependency might as well be formalized. If some of that codependency goes away, and countries decide to protect and encourage local sectors (which might be more feasible in a low growth environment, I'm not sure), do the other relationships stay the same?

I'm not claiming to have answers, but I do have a lot of questions and see a whole lot of unknowns.

[dredmorbius]

Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

How the global political landscape might change in a post-growth world is the stuff of thousands of speculative fiction and cinema plots.

You're looking outward at multinational alliances based on today's (mostly) nation-states. Another consideration is how those states themselves might fare. It strikes me as quite possible that larger states (the US, China, India, Indonesia) might well fragment, and even mid-sized powers (Spain, the Netherlands, Mexico) could splinter. The political situation in the US has been described as a "cold civil war" for some years (see: <https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/29/a-cold-civil-wa...>). Russia has been fighting to retain or regain ceded Soviet territories since the mid-1990s. There are separatist movements of various shades in Spain (Catalonia, Basque region), Belgium (Waloonia), the UK (Scotland, Northern Ireland), Canada (Quebec), India (multiple), Indonesia (multiple), Israel (Palestine), the Philippines (multiple), just as a list of more developed and stable nations. (I'm omitting Africa entirely, a huge list of itself, most of the Middle East, and Central and East Asia, largely as those deviate from the Western / OECD conditions fairly markedly.) China is of course unified, but has ethnic strife (Uygers and Tibetians), reintegrated regions (Hong Kong), and contested territories (Taiwain, Arunachal Pradesh, South China Sea, ...).

There've been outright separations: Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia into Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia (Balkans gonna Balkanize...). And reunifications, most especially of Germany.

The map of Europe has hardly been constant, and even as recently as the mid-19th century is largely unrecognisable today: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=P9YnYRk8_kE>

Another factor to consider is that the same trends which would likely lead to degrowth will also make massive military campaigns far less viable. This affects not just the field of battle, but the entire logistical pipeline as well as the capability to build and resupply weapons, vehicles, ships, and ammunition. I'm reminded that the introduction of the sweet potato to New Zealand utterly reshaped that region's tribal landscape: the cultures with potatoes could march and campaign further than those without. (If I recall, this is discussed in one of Jared Diamond's books.) More recently, introduction of muskets to the Maori led to another technological-superiority disruption: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars>. Reintroduction of horses and the introduction of firearms to Native American cultures had similar effects.

Other thoughts:

- NATO exists not only as a bulwark against the USSR / Russia, but to protect access to Middle East oil and gas on which Europe depends in the extreme. Falling significance of both could alter that calculus.

- International shipping relies on safe seas and ports. Transoceanic trade blossomed under the British Navy and has flourished under American naval protection. Piracy exists only in small backwaters now (notably Somalia, though small-craft boardings are not unheard of particularly in central and Latin America, and S.E. Asia), and overt shows of force are not exceedingly common, but there are regular patrols off the Horn of Africa and Gulf of Aden, that I'm aware of. Rogue states including Iran and North Korea have attacked or commandeered vessels. Much as with shooting down commercial airliners, this is immensely disruptive to trade, and can result both in wide diversions of shipping routes and cessation of trade to unfriendly ports. Submarine warfare by both Axis and Allied forces was devastating during WWII, and both costs and countermeasures were extensive. NATO plays a role here as well.

[dredmorbius]

I can't believe I forgot to mention Russia as a fragmented state (relic of the USSR). Elephant (or bear) in the room, and all that.

And whilst I'm adding commentary: the legacy of colonialism and arbitrary drawing of borders by colonial powers (the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East in 1918, and the highly-inorganic map of Africa, which seems to be slowly rationalising though not entirely smoothly) resulted in exceptionally arbitrary borders which bear little relationship to communities and cultures on the ground.

One might make a similar argument about state borders within the United States, most especially west of the Mississippi, where straight-ruled lines ignore rivers, divides, cultural, and economic clusterings.

The weighted-Voronoi diagram "United States of Craigslist" map reveals an alternate organisation based on the nearest localised Craigslist instance:

<http://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2011/07/chalkboard-maps-unite...>

And of course, there's how New Yorkers view the world:

<https://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/>