Notes on San Marino
50 points by yorwba 15 hours ago | 15 comments
nico 59 minutes ago
For a moment I thought it was about the city/neighborhood in LA, where The Huntington Library is (highly recommend to visit this place)
replyEdwardDiego 10 hours ago
Fascinating read, especially about how San Marino stayed independent, love this writer's work.
replyisolay 3 hours ago
> 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.
replyAnother reminder that boring is good.
stana 2 hours ago
"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")
replydefrost 2 hours ago
Cute.
replyIn 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.
adg001 58 minutes ago
The cuckoo clock was intended to be a contemporary reference to the Renaissance period, not an exhaustive assessment of what Switzerland contributed to the present day.
replydefrost 35 minutes ago
In the flow of comments;
reply and nothing of note has happened in any of them since World War II.
Further again, that quote appears to address present era Switzerland 500 years after the infamous time of the House of Borgia.
arjie 3 hours ago
This seems like one of those Florida retirement communities that are gated. Except it’s in Italy. Similar dynamic.
replymotionlessveloc 3 hours ago
...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.
replyykl 2 hours ago
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.
replyvivzkestrel 5 hours ago
would be very interesting to see you spend 6 months in india and tour kashmir, kerala, north east india, west, cities, rural areas etc.
reply
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?
It is not, at all. This is a bit of contrarian wankery a certain type of academic likes to get up to, but there are a hundred counterexamples that disprove it in an instant. For one: China. Even as dynasties changed, there was absolutely a sense of a unified Chinese sphere that transcended "I owe my fealty to this guy who owes his fealty to that guy". This sense of "Chineseness" continued even when foreign barbarians, first Genghis Khan and then later the Manchu, invaded and established their own dynasties.