Security dilemmas of small states

How 'small' is small? Does the qualifying adjective apply to area? Or to population? Or to resources and wealth? Some states, like Singapore, are tiny but hardly weak. Others appear large, rich, populous and powerful but turn out to be so politically fragile that a small group of determined men can effectively hijack the state, just as with the small and weak, as with Iran. The problem, therefore, is that the upper end of the small-state band is very hard to define. We all think that we know what we mean when we talk about micro-states and there are some candidates for everyone's list, but a definitional approach even a complex one which takes account of size, population and wealth is probably unproductive, at least in a predictive sense. Yet even if we have the greatest difficulty in agreeing what a small state 'is' , we do have some sense of relative weakness and so of the security problems created by that weakness . It doesn ' t make much sense to begin at the other end , however , and say that a weak state is a state that needs external security support . In that sense , west European states are weak states for we feel the need to invoke the power of the United States to offset the power of our Soviet neighbour.