You would think that bigger countries would tend to invade smaller countries throughout history. At least to the point where it becomes hard to govern because of the size. We now have close to 200 countries in the world. How come all of those countries have managed to stay independent, or gain their independence?
Many or most of them were occupied by the bigger powers, mostly the European ones. Todays smaller countries mostly won their independence relatively recently.
It’s not just the small ones either. The USA had to have a war of independence, India did much the same thing 171 years later. All the West Indian countries were ruled by others at one time and in fact it’s hard to think of a country that has never been conquered at some time in history: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Thailand, China, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Ethiopia are the only ones I can find listed.
As to why they got their independence back - it’s pretty much down to money. For one reason or another, it just became too expensive to hold on to them.
Kevin Dolgin re: the microstates of Europe:
[T]he smallest EU member is Vatican City (about which I’ve written, for that matter), or Monaco (ditto). But these countries, along with places like Liechtenstein and San Marino aren’t really countries, regardless of their legal status. They’re principalities, or autonomous doohickeys, existing as enclaves because some treaty at the end of the Napoleonic wars forgot about them. Or, in the case of the Vatican, because popes pay taxes only to themselves and can excommunicate you if you disagree. None of these countries ever had their own currencies and they certainly never had their own languages.
(More here: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/malta-part-i)
A lot of small countries have had powerful patrons. On of the main reasons Portugal and Belgium exist, for example, is because they had Britain as an ally.
Big countries have also liked to keep small countries as “buffer zones” between powerful nations, in order to discourage wars and protect their interests.
Some are in relatively inaccessible places, like mountainous regions or islands. If they don’t have some large amount of easily exploited natural resources or some other strategic value, it may not be worth keeping a military presence there.
I’m not a historian, but did take world history back in the day. IIRC Iran (Persia at the time) was conquered by Alexander the Great back in the day. Afghanistan, obviously, has been conquered much more recently, with an occupying army being in place as recently as a few months ago. Even if we don’t want to count the US invasion of 2001 as being “conquered” that still leaves the Soviet invasion of the 1980s and the British back in the 1800s and who knows how many others before that (Ghengis Khan maybe?, Indian kingdoms?, Persians?).
And wasn’t Ethiopia an Italian colony in the twentieth century?
Some accidents of history as well. Invasion may or may not expunge the existing country. Depends on the intent of the invader. Sometimes they are happy to simply control an existing country, othertimes they wish to adsorb the land into their own. Control is an easier answer, it can be effected by little more than installing a puppet administration and some troops. You then skim off the top to enrichen your country. This leaves the country to exist after your country is long gone. Probably to be invaded again, and so on. But in the carve up after a war, a country may survive despite multiple invasions. Yet other countries might vanish in the same carve up. New countries might be formed in the carve up as well. Sometimes the older country never quite goes away and pops back. Europe is filled with examples of all of the preceding.
I don’t think that list is quite right…
China has a long history of falling apart into warring states which then either conquer each other or are conquered by an outside force that sets up a new and eventually legitimate dynasty (most notably, the Mongols)
Iran Incidentally was also conquered by the Mongols.
Saudi Arabia was of course one of the first places conquered in the Islamic Conquests in the 7th century.
Afghanistan isn’t as uninvadable as recent history implies. They were conquered by - who else? - the Mongols.
Thailand might be close, although they were forced into a client state relationship with Burma a couple of times.
Nepal could be another candidate, though it was united through conquest so I don’t know if that counts or not.
Bhutan is probably a good example.
So is Ethiopia.
In my analysis above I didn’t include brief conquests of these sorts. So I didn’t count the US or British or Mughal or Timurid invasions of Afghanistan. If we want to count those, I think Bhutan is the only country on the list that counts.
According to one of my school-era teachers when discussing - if I recall correctly - the Holy Roman Empire, one cause of fraction in Europe was a Frankish custom to divide all your belongings between your children when you die.
If Charlemagne conquers most of Europe and has three children, then most of Europe will be divided into three parts; if those children each have three children, then everything will split into nine parts; and so on.
You end up with a system of recursive division, but where all of the individuals are family and equals.
Obviously, the “family therefore friends” thing only holds for so long. At some point they stop being close family, so you can start marrying among each other, to join lands, and conquests might flip a bunch of micro-states back into a larger realm, but the Frankish custom of dividing possessions - including land - between your children will do a pretty good job of keeping anything from ever staying big for a long time.
While centralized monarchies may have helped to reduce that effect, at the level of the nobility I believe that similar customs sort of continued through to relatively modern times. Each noble might have their fiefdom and be the nominal leader of that region. When two states would war against each other, the smaller fiefdoms might be a bit like chess squares, forming the units of land divisions. But, having their own rulers, those units were semi-autonomous and could choose whether to join with their own king, sit it out, swap sides, or use the chaos to split off and stop having to pass money upstairs.
Gavelkind succession. Eventually replaced by Primogeniture. (At least, these are the names the game series Crusader Kings gives to what were undoubtedly much more complicated concepts, but they are real historical terms as well). Apparently, the shift throughout Europe from Gavelkind to Primogeniture was associated with decreased rates of regicide and fewer wars of succession, so that’s nice. (And incidentally it works out that way in Crusader Kings as well… your spymaster’s workload upon succession is directly correlated to the number of siblings you have, under Gavelkind)
The Holy Roman Emperor, in the latter part of the Empire’s history, was actually elected by the Elector Princes of the realm (a group known as The Electoral College).
At the end of the day the answer to OP is: because of reasons unique to each country’s history. You have to actually read up on that country to get specifics. There are some broad strokes you can find in common across some number of small countries, but not all of them:
- The country was kept independent due to various political machinations/concerns of larger countries in large treaties / peace settlements
- The country has geographic feature that make it difficult to subjugate, often combined with a lack of compelling reasons to really push the matter, essentially making it a “not worth it” situation
- The country was some sort of possession or “exurb” of a larger country / empire, that at some point was “granted” independence, and that independence has been maintained to this day
- The country is a small “nationstate” (meaning a state that is primarily made up of and for one specific ethnicity) that, in the age of pre-nationalist history was conglomerated into some larger form, but in the age of nationalism saw itself break apart along with many of its neighbors–there’s a few regions where you find a number of smallish nationstates near each other, and most were previously in some form of larger government
- The country is part of some intentional “carve out” or delineation of lands previously held by a larger power
Some small states actually share multiple of these factors, others none, others only one.
It’s notable that the Congress of Vienna, held in 1815 to basically “settle” a number of European territorial affairs, and to basically build the framework for modern Europe (this was done in the wake of the powers involved defeating Napoleon and breaking up his short-lived European empire), a number of microstates or small states maintained their sovereignty by the skin of their teeth. It would not have been all that remarkable had the Congress for example ended Andorra and Monaco’s sovereignty.
Would we? And does examining the history of the world bear this out? Yes, a lot of history focuses on a small number of big countries and their expansionist tendencies, but the driving forces behind conquest differ throughout history, or at least the justifications vary and who you have to justify war to differs. I think “Why don’t large countries use their resources to conquer more land?” is just as important a question to ask here as “How come small countries manage to stay independent?”
An interesting set of excursions on a related topic, if you’ve time, is Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms
Of course, there’s also a discussion to be had about whether one can call territories governed by this or that dynasty “countries” in the post-Versailles/Wilson sense. Many territories within the vanished German/Austro-Hungarian/Holy Roman Empires (and some parts of the Romanov Russian Empire) were governed, at least to some degree, in accordance with local rules and customs.
In the last half of the 20th Century traditional imperialism just became a financial, military, and moral pain in the ass. Big countries slowly discovered corporations were better at exploiting the resources of small countries than armies were. Why invade a country when you could just bribe it’s leaders or ship arms to a stubborn leader’s domestic opposition? If you encourage division inside a weak country you can end up with two or more smaller and more easily manipulated countries. Big countries are less concerned about what color areas are on the map as they are about how much influence they wield over all the tiny multi-colored dots on it.
Also some of the “small” countries aren’t really that small, just look so by comparison to the larger powers.
Monaco is an interesting case. The Grimaldi family spent several centuries playing France, Spain, and Genoa off against each other. France supported its independence as a big F.U. to Spain. Spain considered it stolen property, but was rarely willing to go to war over it. The population was originally Genoese, but Genoa wasn’t really interested in controlling it. Eventually, the Grimaldis negotiated a treaty in which France and Spain both recognized its independence, and the Grimaldis’ princely title.
Define “small”.
For a lot of the small-ish ones, it’s because the national boundaries coincide with the land occupied by a specific “people”, more or less, subject to historical forces. So for example, the Netherlands is its own nation because that’s where the Dutch live. Same for the Swiss, Austrians, Bohemians/Moravians (Czechs), Hungarians, Poles, Moldovans, Slovakians, and so on. Some have always been that way, others have recently got their independence after the breakup of larger countries, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, etc…
Some nations are basically historical remnants that never got completely assimilated into the surrounding larger countries- Vatican City, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, etc…
Others, particularly in South America, are basically the original Spanish colonies that ended up independent after a few growing pains (First Mexican Empire & Federal Republic of Central America), and where there hasn’t been much in the way of invading and conquering each other in the past couple of hundred years.
Also, perhaps it depends on what you mean by “independent”. Are they really independent in the sense that they have some hope of fending off invaders; are their economies not entirely parasitic upon those of their large neighbors? It seems to me that some micronations exist entirely by the good graces of the countries that surround them. Would France really ask Andorra, pretty please, if it was okay for their army to march through if doing so would help them in a war with Spain? Does Italy think it needs to honor San Marino’s sovereignty in any real sense?