In the Company of Microstates, P.E.I. Is a Giant

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Europe is home to five miniscule microstates - these are countries that are geographically extremely small and, with one exception, have populations far less than 100,000.

While the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, a former British colony encompassing 316 square kilometres, has only been an independent country since 1964, the others - Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino - have been self-governing jurisdictions for centuries.

San Marino traces its existence back to the late Roman Empire and claims to be the world's oldest republic. Andorra arose out of a 13th-century treaty that created a jurisdiction jointly ruled by a Catalonian bishop and a French count. Monaco also emerged in the 13th century as a Genoan colony under the control of the House of Grimaldi. Liechtenstein had been part of the old Holy Roman Empire and acquired full sovereignty at the beginning of the 19th century.

Andorra, with a territory of 468 square kilometres, is nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain, and Liechtenstein, at 160 square kilometres, is in the Alps between Austria and Switzerland. Monaco, just two square kilometres in size, is surrounded by France, and San Marino, at 61 square kilometres, is an enclave inside Italy.

Compared to these countries, Prince Edward Island, at 2,194 square kilometres, is a giant.

Malta has a population of 410,000, Andorra 85,000, Liechtenstein 36,000, Monaco 35,000, and San Marino 31,000.

(Vatican City in Rome, the home of the Catholic Church, is technically a state and has observer status at the United Nations but it's not a real nation. Iceland and Luxembourg are by some definitions microstates, but they are far larger in area and population than these five countries.)

In the past considered too tiny to be full partners in the international community, these countries were viewed as anomalies, merely the leftover quirks of history.

When the League of Nations was founded after the First World War, none of them joined. And when the successor United Nations was formed in 1945, again none were among the original 51 signatories to its charter.

However, post-war global decolonization resulted in a wave of sovereign microstates, most of them small islands in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean, and South Pacific. Today's Commonwealth (of which Malta is a member) is largely a collection of such countries.

This paradigm shift allowed the European microstates to take their rightful place as full members of the international community.

Today, these tiny entities are all members of the greatly-expanded 192-member United Nations. Andorra and Malta joined in the 1960s, and the very tiny states of Liechtenstein, Monaco, and San Marino in the 1990s.

They participate fully in European affairs. All are members of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). They belong to many other international organizations as well.

They conduct bilateral diplomatic relations with many countries around the world. Andorra has five embassies abroad, Liechtenstein six, Monaco nine, San Marino 14, and Malta 23. They also staff numerous consulates and diplomatic missions in various capitals and other cities.

Professor Barry Bartmann, one of our colleagues in the Department of Political Studies at UPEI and a specialist on the politics of microstates, recently interviewed many of their UN-accredited diplomats in New York for a study on their foreign relations.

No longer is size an impediment for countries wishing to make their mark in the world.