Excellent, Lucian,

I mention that indeed in a good number of my other articles. Large nations should not have the purest voting system per se. You are absolutely right. And Germany shows how that can get done.

This article was particularly aimed at showing how few nations in the world can actually call themselves a democracy (people represented by their votes without an underlying game involved).

Germany was the largest nation ever to have proportional voting in place.

The 'fun' part is that if every nation in the world had been a true democracy at that time, then the Nazis would not have come to the fore. Back then in Germany, it was the purest voting system in a world dominated by impure systems (do I sound like a Nazi already : - ) and the others were causing the deeper problems of the time.

The world at the end of the 19th century was extremely competitive and dominated by the two European empires England and France. There were a good number of other empires, too (the US, for instance, was starting to get an empire around that time).

Germany and Italy did not exist until 1871, if I got the year right. These mini states within realized that they were not able to compete in that imperial world and that they had to scale up to become larger nations to compete better.

By the time Germany had achieved the same economic strength as England, we can write down the important year of 1914. The English pound was under enormous pressures because the competition is luring investors away.

The English occupied the world (together with the French), and they therefore blocked the pathway for economic growth for many others. The German desire for Lebensraum is partly based on 'jailers' England and France.

The fascinating part is that the Germans wanted to be like the English, powerful, and so there was no other way than a real head-to-head, and the French would bear the immediate brunt of some of the German frustration.

What I like is that the US ultimately plays the hero's role. After WW I, I think the US was already the new world leader (but no one realized it at the time, including folks here). So, it is only after WW II that the US clearly says 'enough is enough' and ends up standing together with people held captive in colonies and supports their ideals to become independent nations.

After many colonies became independent, companies were no longer bound by imperial boundaries. German companies could, for instance, do business where prior they could not or only under lesser conditions.

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I made sure to mention that large nations should not have too many parties. There will always be difficult times, here or there in the future, and a large nation must have its stability to maneuver through difficult times.

Small nations are encapsulated within the larger setting, and they are therefore already dependent on what the larger nations decide. If they go haywire, they won't end up doing all too much damage to others, while large nations have the capacity to do quite a bit of damage to others before they are worn down by self-inflicted misery.

Besides, a good democracy needs just 5 or 6 parties to make the 3D movements of up&down, left&right, and front&back. More are not needed.

Just two parties can't do that; and one could even say that three or four parties are still not enough political Lebensraum.

Twenty parties, on the other hand, will also not be very effective doing any of these 3D movements well either. Yet particularly large nations must play the democratic game right. Not too much political freedom and also not too little political freedom like we have here in the US.

Then, I also mention how having several layers of empowerment (President, Senate, House) diminishes the power of the voters and puts it straight in the hands of corporations because two or three competing political layers are less effective in making decisions. So, the less they can put in place, the more the larger non-political players can do of what is in their own self-interest and not per se in the collective interest.

Thank you for your comment; it is very much to the point.