How and why do tiny countries like Singapore and Monaco exist? Why aren’t they just a part of the larger country surrounding them?
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Singaporean here. We were previously part of another bigger country, Malaysia. But due to political and racial differences (oversimplifying a lot here) Singapore got expelled from the Malaysian Federation and became independent by ourselves.
There wasn’t any real impetus to merge with another country. We’re an island that isn’t contiguous with anywhere else. And the next nearest neighbour, Indonesia, pretty much fought an undeclared war/state-sponsored terrorism in the past few years, so no we weren’t joining them.
Singapore just focused on surviving as a microstate, and somehow we did. It definitely helped that being small and having only a couple of million people isn’t too hard to govern
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