ABSTRACT
The 200 or so members of the United Nations can be differentiated within a few categories, according to the definitions and discussion given in the previous chapters. There are, in the current world, about ten very large empires containing several hundred small units with legislative assemblies and executive governments. There are also about three dozen successful large states. The larger ones tend to be organizedwith federal formulas containing smaller political units. A similar number of states can be considered to have failed. And we can count more than 100 small nations (including most members of the EU) that would hardly be viable as independent countries without large networks of “imperial” size.
