> Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.
Recently, I also heard the opinion that another country that can be compared to Sing is Kazakhstan... wait?
The comparison is not so ridiculous if you go through with it:
... it is not a city state, but you can say that it is a "two city state." Besides Astana, and Almaty, the nation is effectively a post-soviet wasteland.
... LKY, just as Kazakh president was a socialist and nationalist early on, and of a very radical kind.
... LKY, just as Kazakh president purged every socialist and nationalist the moment he got a nation for himself.
... aside from elites living in ghettos for the rich, the ordinary population is pressed against the wall by low median income.
... to a very big extend, the state gives just enough of handouts to the masses to prevent them from rioting. This way, both Kazakhstan and Singapore can be called a de-facto, but not de-jure socialist states.
... both countries' economies are one trick ponies, despite of decades of dramatic efforts to change that.
... both countries spend lavishly on clearing up their image abroad, but the general populace of both countries can't disagree more with their respective countries popular image.
The biggest noticeable difference is of course that Singapore is cosy with the West, and Kazakhstan isn't.
What is Singapore's trick? Their economy looks moderately diversified to me - GDP comes 13.3% from finance, 19.2% from manufacturing, 17.6% from wholesale and retail trade, 14.8% from "Business Services", and 35% from other stuff:
https://www.tablebuilder.singstat.gov.sg/publicfacing/create...
I assume, the big portion of manufacturing other than output of chip fabs, is the remnant from those years. Add it to that double digits of trade and services will also relate to the same activity.
And a big portion of services labelled as other and business services will relate to offshore banking.
And yeah, both countries run humongous sovereign funds, or better to say, both countries are ran by them.
Historically, nation-states have been mostly defined by culture, which is defined by language, which was mostly defined by communication speed, which was mostly defined by actual transportation speed. That's not an element anymore because all culture can be everywhere at any time. A new approach is required.
Since then, most of the attention has been on tribulations resulting from the common currency, 2008, and migrations, so there is a general unwillingness to rock more boats.
I won't argue the fact that Cyrus was enormously influential to the course of fertile crescent civilizations. That said, really he was just one of the first Fertile Crescent leaders to see not only the weaknesses of the city-state, but the means by which to exploit those weaknesses. (It's just that what he did to exploit those weaknesses was so radically orthogonal to the way things were done at the time that even today we're still calling the guy Cyrus the Great.)
Once the Nation-State idea was out of the bag, city-states just couldn't compete. Even the Greek city states fell to Macedon because by the end of the Theban hegemony, they were all so weak that even Macedon, effectively a baby nation-state at the time, was able to take them out. City-states wouldn't be able to compete today either. You'd always have to have some great power around to back them. Even Federations of city-states have faired poorly historically.
It's like continuing to rely on bronze swords once people got the hang of making iron ones. It no longer mattered all of the reasons that bronze was better for you, because iron was better when it counted. The cat was out of the bag, you could try to put it back in the bag, but everyone's already seen it.
In a world where everyone sorta-speaks English and the power is in know-how and transnational market access, it counts very little that you can mobilise this or that amount of tanks. It counts even less if those tanks are coordinated at a higher level anyway.
The other thing is that a place like Singapore is exceptional. It’s a strategic chokepoont established by a colonial power.
It is sometimes used as one, thought it is also sometimes argued that the advantages of city-states are offset by problems (among others, international instability) unless the city-states are relatively rare and economically engaged with (and buffered from each other by) larger polities.
It's also worth noting that the entirety of Singapore just barely exceeds the area enclosed by Washington DC's beltway.
Whatever their form of government, small city states are always going to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of larger countries. There's effectively only one level of government to deal with, and the despot is always going to live down the road from you and need to use the same public services as you, so you don't get the sort of disconnect e.g. Rome or the British Empire had from its provinces or overseas holdings.