So you prefer a world with as many states as possible, or with larger, fewer states?

Which world do you prefer?

  • A balkanized world, with as many small states as possible

    Votes: 37 44.0%
  • A world with larger, fewer, countries, with many empires\federations

    Votes: 47 56.0%

  • Total voters
    84
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That's a tough choice, but I think that a balkanised world narrowly wins for me.

EDIT: Probably because it allows different cultures to develop as a nation state, without interference from others.
 
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A country with fewer countries would make travel, trade, and commerce generally simpler. But a world with plenty of countries would reduce corruption, give each ethnic minority it's own nation (YMMV if that is good or bad) and would reduce the larger nations from exerting widespread influence like OTL Empires did.

I'm going to go with Larger nations.
 
Reading Alternate History, I think that uber-balkanisation or space-filling countries are each one more preposterous than the other.
 
That's a tough choice, but I think that a balkanised world narrowly wins for me.

I tend to agree. It is a very narrow margin, but I tend to favour states with a fair degree of ethnic unity.

Still, federations and confederations certainly work for me if they control a large enough territory (United States, Brazil, Canada, Australia, etc) can work for me, but that shared culture has to be there.

I tend to dislike world's with fewer countries also because it reminds me of Eurofed (the banned poster, not the idea of European federation)...
 
I am absolutely in favor of a world with as many small states as possible. Some people disagree, but I really believe in the right to self-determination - meaning every people, if it so wishes, should have the inalienable right to establish its own independent country.

That said, I also believe in open borders and free trade and immigration between all those states, so my ideal would be a "confederacy of open borders" spanning the entire globe, and consisting of countless small and fully autonomous nations. :)
 
More states, but not in the sense that one nation dominates other nation(s) but where we federalize as many nations as possible into a single state. Ultimately, the goal should be world unification.
 
Federations don't have to smother local culture, the HRE is an example of an Empire made up of statelets, and other empires had only nominal control of constituent countries.
 
it depends on the project, but i typically try to go for moderation on both. in my ASB ATL, there's mostly a few superstates and empire-unions with some lesser powers which are still rather large and have colonial empires through to the present-day (of 2032!), but there's also some smaller ones like Switzerland, Haiti, Uruguay, Nepal, and Liberia. even then, alot of the smaller ones are more powerful than they should be because of close associations with much more powerful countries, like Cuba getting more prominence through Spain (even though its still a lesser power despite controlling most of South America), Iran can throw more weight around in the Middle East thanks to an alliance with the United States, the Balkan states are closely aligned to superpower Russia, and the Arab League together make for a formidable opponent if they ever go to war (with a collective population of over 400 million--read, more people than the United States--stretched across 17 countries)

by the very end of the TL, though, most of these larger countries will be divided into many smaller states, mostly via decolonization but many "noncolonial" countries will divide as well
 
It depends on the nature of the larger, fewer states. If they're empires, then no. If they're federations or confederacies, I'd lean more towards them.
 
A Balkanized world would be chaotic, without any significant global governance, with a multitude of laws, customs and wars. So I will go with supra-states, with almost equal power, in order to stabilize the International System. Is almost Manifest Destiny of Earth. :rolleyes:
 
My personal preference is to have areas where there are few nations that have remained united like Brazil that become divided into several states and the most balkanized areas in OTL like the Balkans become controlled by one or two nations.
 
I'd say federations with some reserve powers for the constituent political sub-units, or confederations with heavy integration. But still, I think that movement toward a unified World-State, or at least relatively few national/supra-national states with a Global Cooperative Government of some kind is preferable to balkanization.
 
Those aren't exclusive alternatives. At the present time there is a very large number of nations, but most of them are microstates. Let's just look at the New World. Would it be more or less "balkanized" if Canada, the U.S.A, and Brazil were each two or three nations (adding 3-6), but Grenada, Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, Antigua, Anguilla, St. Kitts-Nevis, and St. Vincent formed an "Antilles Federation" (consolidating 8 into 1)?
 
I prefer neither, a medium sized number of mostly medium sized states - Mexico as it stands rather than all of what had been New Spain united, say.

Too many just larger states strain disbelief, but I dislike balkanization.
 
Small countries can't really sustain very advanced high-tech economies, at least not without being tied into larger economic federations/networks: and the creation and maintenance of such systems in turn need the support and military protection of larger nations. As Braganza says, a purely "small states" world would be anarchic. So if it was a purely binary choice, I'd go with fewer, larger. But as Rich says, it's unlikely that in a more or less democratic world either situation would be the case.

Bruce
 
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