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Originally Posted by Solecismic
You tell Italy the same thing Italy tells San Marino. You are part of a Democratic union. Just like the concept of the United States, or the European Union. Democracy makes this work. When you serve at the will of your people, you have incentive to come together.
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Democracy helps, doing what you can with your own natural resources help, but it does not at all solve this or make it work, for a couple reasons. What happens when different democratic nations decide they have different interests from each other? Italy and other countries may be benevolent to San Marino, but they still absolutely have the economic power to tell San Marino to go pound sand if they wish. Same with Italy/Germany, UK/US, whatever.
Even more fundamentally though, this only works if there are enough democracies to control world resources. There are not. Take aluminum for example. China produces almost 10x as much as the second-largest producer. In terms of global reserves, neither the US or anyone in Europe outside of Russia is in the Top 10. Australia is, so they can help quite a bit, but they produce less than a 20th of what China does. There are many resources this is true for.
The point is, unless democratic countries completely dominate the globe to the point where authoritarian ones are non-factors (which would make this entire conversation academic), there are key resources that any modern society relies upon that they can't make themselves in sufficient quantities because there simply aren't physically enough of those resources in those countries to meet the demand. It's admittedly simplistic, binary, and misleading to divide the world into free/authoritarian segments, but even under that view each relies on the other - neither is or can be self-sufficient. They can get closer than they are, but the mutual dependence is just a fact of life.
This is one part of why we're going to continue to have issues until we realize the necessity, as a species, of a global government.