THE AREA OF STATES

The UN now (I971) has 130 member states. These are separate. and essentially selfgoverning; they do not, however, exhaust the list of sovereign states in the world
today. Switzerland, for example, in accordance with its policy of neutrality, has not
sought membership in the UN, although it was a member of the League of Nations.
The Peoples Republic of China, commonly known as Communist or Red China, was
not admitted until October 1971. Neither the German Federal Republic (West
Germany) nor the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) is a member
because their status and relationship to one another still await definition; nor is
Mauritania, in Africa; nor Mongolia, in Asia. Further, a number of very small statesAndorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and the Vatican City-are not member
states, though some of them do participate in the work of some of the specialized
agencies of the UN.1 Conversely, there is at least one member of the UN, the
Maldive Islands, whose resources are so restricted that it cannot afford to
participate fully in the UNs activities. Altogether there are today about 145
sovereign states, and this list is likely to be increased as territories that have a
colonial status at present acquire independence. A list of sovereign states is given
on pages 27 to 31.
These 145 states range in size from the Vatican City State, with an area of less than

1
4

square mile; to the Soviet Union, with 22,402,200 square kilometers; the

Chinese Peoples Republic, With 9,561,000 square kilometers; and Brazil, with
8,51l,%5 square kilometers. Table 2-1 shows the size distribution and the total area
of states within each of the chosen size categories.
The largest state is about two million times as large as the smallest. The average
size is about 1,040,000 square kilometers, or about 390,000 square miles-about the
size of Bolivia, Colombia, or Egypt-and nearly half are within the range of 25,000 to
250,000 square kilometers (Figure 2-1). V This wide range in size presents some
difficulties. Haggett, Chorley, and Stoddard have proposed a scale of values, which
they call the G Scale, based on G-the area of the earths surface. The G Scale.
expresses the logarithmic ratio of the area of any country or continent to that of the
earth's surface. It can be. obtained from the formula

Gx=log

Ga
Rx

where Ga is the area of the earth and Rx is the area of country x.

On this scale the largest and the smallest countries are as shown in Table 2-2. One
may also suggest how many people a state should contain if it is to function
efficiently. Very small states in this respect have conspicuous disadvantages. They
cannot have as wide a range of industrial production as larger states, and the costs
of government and administration are spread over a smaller number of people.
Such states are, furthermore, likely to be militarily weak As Processor E A G
Robinson has written,

The Growth of a State: North American states and many European states have
achieved their present size as the result of a long period of growth. They have been
able to annex fragments of the territory of adjoining states and to incorporate them
within their own boundaries. France, for example, has extended its territory to the
east over a period of several centuries. Romania grew to its present size from the
two relatively small principalities of Walachia and Moldavia; Yugoslavia, from the
earlier kingdom of Serbia; the United States, from the original Thirteen Colonies;
and the Soviet Union from the state of Muscovy.
Territorial growth of a state appears to be so normal that it has been postulated as a
fundamental law governing the behavior of states. The German geographer
Friedrich Ratzel, whose very great importance we shall notice again in the last
chapter, argued that the boundaries of a state should never be regarded as fixed
nor the state area as something definite.7 The people of a state press against the
boundaries of the state area, trying to force them wider. The area of a state
expands as its culture develops. . . . The lower the cultural level, the smaller will be
the territory of the state, so that the size of a state becomes a measure of its
culture. No primitive people has ever created a large state, nor even one equivalent
in area to an intermediate German state [von der Crosser eines deutsrihen
Mittelstaates].
If one were to accept this view of Ratzels. which was also held by many other
German geographers, the growth of culture would be indissolubly linked with
expansion of territory. Such German writers pointed, in support of their argument, to
the expansion of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to
the westward spread of the United States in the nineteenth century, and to the rise
of the German Reich itself in the late nineteenth century: small states, they claimed,
were on the way out and would sooner or later be absorbed by larger ones. In the
end there would be a few great states of truly continental dimensions. This
argument was predicated upon the assumption, touched upon briefy in Chapter 1,
that the state is an organism and that growth is normal and necessary in an
organism.
We have already rejected this postulate, and we may dismiss also the arguments
which Ratzel and others have erected on this basis. If states expand territorially, it is

because the decision makers choose this as their policy for the state and have the
power to carry this policy into effect; if states contract, it is because they may lack
the power necessary to retain the territory which they formerly held.
lt is better-and more accurate-to regard states as fundamentally stable. Despite a
number of well-known examples of territorial expansion and of unstable boundaries,
the total length of boundary that has not changed is very many times the length of
that which has. The map in Figure 2-2, showing the durability of boundaries in
Europe during the last 450 years, gives a rather ' surprising picture of the general
stability of states.