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Notes on San Marino

36 points yorwba 12 hours ago 10 comments

EdwardDiego 7 hours ago | parent

Fascinating read, especially about how San Marino stayed independent, love this writer's work.

vivzkestrel 2 hours ago | parent

would be very interesting to see you spend 6 months in india and tour kashmir, kerala, north east india, west, cities, rural areas etc.

arjie 1 hour ago | parent

This seems like one of those Florida retirement communities that are gated. Except it’s in Italy. Similar dynamic.

motionlessveloc 47 minutes ago | parent

...did you read the article? San Marino is a bunch of random villages in the Italian countryside, indistinguishable from the Italian side except in the one pretty spot that gets all the tourists, and the one larger town near Rimini that has all the tax free shops etc. No gates, no Florida.

isolay 35 minutes ago | parent

> Their populations are content, their governments are highly functional, their economies hum along, and nothing of note has happened in any of them since World War II.

Another reminder that boring is good.

akurilin 13 minutes ago | parent

I've heard that kind of description used for Switzerland as well. Accurate?

stana 12 minutes ago | parent

"in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." (Harry Lime in the movie "The Third Man")

defrost 3 minutes ago | parent

Cute.

In reality, of course, they produce a great deal more than cuckoo clocks; one of the most competitive pharmaceutical industries in the world, industrial chemicals, defence technology, agriculture, financial services, food processing, etc - up to a trillion or so per annum IIRC.

ykl 16 minutes ago | parent

This was a delightful read! I found the section on San Marino's political adventures in the 20th century particularly amusing; they did a mini version of everything else that was going on the world in the 20th century, but it turns out that when you're a small peaceful moderate country, it's hard for things to get too too out of hand at any given moment. Like yeah sure they had a Fascist period followed immediately by a Communist period, but apparently in the mildest way imaginable, and it's been mildly moderate ever since.

jcranmer 2 minutes ago | parent

One thing I sort of wished was touched on a little more: the concept of country is surprisingly modern. Modern international relations theory tends to trace the concept back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, but honestly, even that is really too early.

The map shown of 14th century Europe is doing better than most in that recognizes that several borders (but still too few) are fuzzy rather than lines on a map. The other problem you run into is that, in most non-state societies (in the Weberian sense of "monopoly on the legitimate use of force"), political linkages tend to be fragile and based more on personal ties so that a Big Man's successor may well repudiate the alliances and homages the Big Man makes. Which makes it hard to draw maps, because is Burgundy a part of France? The Duke of Burgundy is as often as not fighting the French king.

This is what makes adjudicating the "oldest continuous republic" hard, because at what point do we say that the homages San Marino is paying stops counting as being part of that country?