Yeah, but India has more than a billion people and they have nukes. As the parent comment said, Holland is tiny and not only geographically or in population.

- It's barely in the top 40 military world powers: http://www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-det...

- It's 17th on GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... (actually below India and Brazil and not so far from Nigeria)

As part of the EU, Dutch people live in the (arguably) world's biggest economy. Outside the EU, they're just 17th and far from most of their neighbours.

You punch above your weight in football though :)

The EU is far from perfect, but we're the ones building it.

Which is to compare with the listing on this page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Edit: I'm not Dutch by the way

That's the thing: Monaco, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein are not even local players. Others in the top of the list are not global players: Norway, Qatar, etc

India and Brazil have very low GDP per capita, but they're absolute weight is so big that they're world players (more India than Brazil if you ask me), at least compared to rich countries like Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, etc

And standard of living doesn't correlate well to geopolitical/economic power which is what GP was talking about with being able to get good terms in trade negotiations.