Eli5 how did it happen that in Monaco and Liechtenstein two men were able to create their own country?
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the question isn’t about how those countries were created, because that is just as any country via the feudal system establishing itself after the fall of Rome. The real question is how they remained independent with those much larger neighbors who could’ve easily conquered them.
In medieval Europe, there were loads of small countries, baronies, duchies or marches. Those slowly conglomerated into larger empires like France or Spain. With a much larger empire as your neighbor, you were either their friend, you get swallowed or you have protection.
Monaco and Luxembourg just managed their foreign policy well enough to always have either someone protecting their freedom from larger neighbors or they simply had good enough relations to them so there was no will to conquer them.
Same goes for Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino or the Vatican.
Monaco was for a long time not part of France but rather one of the north Italian city states. Even though it was on the wrong side of the alps to gain defenses from the French it is surrounded by their own mountain range and most of their allied had huge navies. Even when the city was lost to France they were still considered an independent principality and just vassals of France rather then part of France proper. There were just too much cultural and economic ties to the Mediterranean and Italian states, as well as a huge issue of military defense.
Lichtenstein have a much less interesting history, it was just part of the Holy Roman Empire. The empire was a lose collection of various Germanic states. Unlike in France or Aragon the Holy Roman Emperor never were able to gain full authority, never were able to form an independent imperial army and were even unable to form a monarchy as it was an elected lifetime position. So as one of the many strong states in the HRE Lichtenstein were sort of independent and had a lot of autonomy.
But in both cases the big shakeup was the Napoleonic wars. Both of these countries were invaded, along with most of the rest of Europe. And Napoleon loved to create nations. He invented the Italian nation from people and land that used to belong to various other nations. Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. was largely built up because Napoleon thought they should be nations. So even after the fall of Napoleon, at which point Monaco was lost to Sardinia, there were huge conflicts all over Europe as boarders had been redrawn and nations moved around. And in order to prevent a new World War of the magnitude of the Napoleonic wars the concept of buffer states were invented. The people who were living between well established nations and did not feel like they belonged to either of them would instead form their own states to make it harder for the large countries to fight each other. Lichtenstein was one obvious such state and were encouraged to gain independence. Monaco was a boarder state between France and Sardinia, now Italia, and therefore ended up with independence. Oddly enough though the area between Monaco and Italy were given to France in the independence treaty making them no longer a boarder state.
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