Abstract

This study tests whether the deep incorporation of a small state into larger economic and institutional systems necessarily entails a loss of sovereign agency. A comparison of San Marino and Singapore shows that the decisive factor is not the intensity of external ties, but the state’s ability to choose their architecture, distinguish between delegated and retained powers, distribute dependencies across alternative channels, influence the rules, and reproduce this system over time.

The empirical point of departure is provided by the seven-dimensional Burke Index profiles. Singapore scores 599.8 out of 700, while San Marino scores 469.8, for an overall gap of 130 points. Singapore’s largest advantages are in the military (+53.0) and technological (+38.5) dimensions. San Marino, however, slightly outperforms Singapore in the political (+2.8) and economic (+0.3) dimensions. This configuration already demonstrates non-additivity: similar political and economic scores coexist with radically different capacities to provide security, technological infrastructure, and diversification of dependence autonomously.

The central conclusion is that both countries produce sovereignty through integration, but they employ different models. San Marino practices sovereignty through selective institutional accession: the euro, the customs union, close ties with Italy, and association with the EU single market compensate for the lack of scale, while creating an asymmetry of rule-taking. Singapore practices sovereignty through portfolio-based and nodal integration: multiple agreements, logistics and financial functions, diversified supplies, national defense, and participation in shaping digital rules allow it to turn external openness into leverage. Deep integration therefore reduces sovereign agency only when the state loses control over the boundaries of participation, available alternatives, and the cost of exit.

1.  The research puzzle

San Marino and Singapore both belong to the category of small states, yet occupy opposite positions in the world system. San Marino is a microstate territorially enclosed by Italy, uses the euro, and is embedded in the European economic and legal space. Singapore is a global city-state located on a strategic maritime route and connected simultaneously to several regional and global centers.

A conventional resource-based logic would suggest an almost linear relationship between the scale of autonomous resources and freedom of action. The emergent model poses a different question: can a state compensate for its inability to produce many goods autonomously by choosing partners, combining regimes, and converting the functions that others need from it into bargaining resources?

Integration is treated here not as a binary variable—inside or outside—but as a configuration of powers and dependencies. A state may participate very deeply in an external architecture while retaining agency if it controls the terms of access, possesses alternative channels, and participates in changing the rules. Conversely, formal independence may coexist with low sovereignty if abandoning a single indispensable partner would trigger a systemic crisis.

2. Methodology

The seven dimensions of the Burke Index are interpreted as the resource base, while seven mechanisms describe the processes through which that base is converted into strategic capacity:

Conversion Sovereignty (CS): the capacity to convert access to external systems into domestic competencies, revenues, infrastructure, and state capacity. Dependence Architecture Sovereignty (DAS): the capacity to distribute critical dependencies across partners, regimes, and routes. Alternative Sovereignty (AS): the existence of practically accessible substitutes for a supplier, market, currency, legal regime, or security framework. Reversibility Sovereignty (RS): the ability to alter the parameters of integration without disproportionate damage to basic functions. Boundary Sovereignty (BS): the capacity to set the limits of external regulation and determine which powers are delegated and which remain national. Second-Order Sovereignty (SOS): the capacity to participate in shaping the rules of the integration environment itself. Reproductive Sovereignty (RPS): the capacity to reproduce over time the administrative, technological, and social conditions of autonomous action.

The central causal chain is: integration → conversion of external access → architecture of dependencies → alternatives → reversibility → boundaries → influence over rules → reproduction of agency. Failure at any intermediate link can transform interdependence into subordination.

3. Resource profiles 

San Marino has a highly asymmetric profile: very high political and economic scores coexist with a minimal military score and a comparatively weak technological resource. Its agency therefore cannot be based on self-sufficiency. It must emerge through institutions, treaty guarantees, specialization, and precise delimitation of powers.

TABLE 1. Resource profiles

Singapore’s profile is considerably more balanced. Even its lowest score—65.1 in the military dimension—is higher than five of San Marino’s dimensional scores. A strong technological, informational, and cognitive base enables Singapore not merely to adapt to external rules, but also to create compatible standards, digital regimes, and infrastructural solutions.

The aggregate score nevertheless does not resolve the research puzzle. San Marino’s political advantage shows that durable and legitimate institutions are possible without substantial material autonomy. Singapore’s advantage demonstrates a different interaction effect: its technological and defense base increases the value of economic openness because it reduces the likelihood that integration will become unilateral coercion.

4. Two models of integration

San Marino: Selective Accession San Marino is embedded primarily in the Italian-European system. Its customs union with the EU has operated since 2002; the country uses the euro under a monetary convention and maintains a bilateral regime of movement of persons with Italy. In practice, the European architecture supplies monetary, commercial, labor, and regulatory infrastructure that a microstate could not efficiently reproduce on its own.

This integration is highly concentrated. Assessing San Marino’s external position is complicated by limited statistics, but available data indicate that Italy absorbs about 90 percent of exports and supplies about 79 percent of imports. National defense also falls within the sphere of responsibility of the Italian armed forces, while San Marino’s own formations perform limited, predominantly domestic functions.

The Association Agreement with the EU is intended to deepen San Marino’s participation in the internal market. It provides for the four freedoms, dynamic regulatory alignment, cooperation in education, research, and social policy, and a jurisdictional role for the Court of Justice of the European Union in interpreting the agreement. Access to financial services is to be granted gradually, over a horizon of up to fifteen years, and will depend on the quality of supervisory and anti-money-laundering systems.

San Marino’s model is therefore not an abandonment of sovereignty but an exchange of part of its autonomous rule-making capacity for access to scale. Its success depends on whether the republic can use transition periods, special provisions, and joint bodies to protect specific interests rather than merely transpose rules made by the larger party.

Singapore: Portfolio Integration Singapore is also deeply dependent on external systems, but distributes that dependence across a larger number of frameworks. As of March 2026, the country had 29 trade agreements in force and five legally binding digital-economy agreements. It simultaneously operates through ASEAN, the WTO, bilateral agreements, and plurilateral formats.

Rather than acceding to a single internal market, Singapore constructs an overlapping portfolio of regimes. Different agreements connect it with the United States, the European Union, China, India, Japan, Australia, ASEAN members, and the trans-Pacific space. This reduces the probability that a single center can gain comprehensive control over trade, finance, technology, and logistics.

Integration remains vital: Singapore imports more than 90 percent of its food and almost all of its energy supply. Yet dependence is structured through diversification of sources, reserves, domestic buffer capacities, and international partnerships. In 2023 food came from 187 countries and territories, compared with 172 in 2019. High external dependence thus coexists with a low degree of monopoly by any single supplier.

5. Conversion sovereignty

San Marino converts the external architecture into three principal assets. First, use of the euro and the customs union lowers transaction costs. Second, freedom of movement and ties with Italy provide access to labor markets and services. Third, European regulatory alignment can increase confidence in financial and commercial institutions.

This conversion, however, is partly passive. If the country merely applies external rules without developing national supervision, statistics, and technological competencies, integration expands access but not autonomous capacity. The shortage of balance-of-payments and international-investment-position data noted in external assessments points to an informational constraint on sovereign governance.

Singapore performs a more complex conversion. Foreign trade is transformed into logistics, financial, manufacturing, and technological functions; water scarcity into competencies in reuse and desalination; and food scarcity into a system of diversified supplies, reserves, and agricultural technologies. Its four national water sources combine local catchment, imported water, NEWater, and desalination.

The key difference lies in the accumulation of transferable competencies. Singapore’s capabilities in water technology, digital trade, and supply-chain management retain value even when a specific partner changes. San Marino’s model depends more heavily on continued access to a single regional architecture.

6. Dependence architecture

San Marino’s DAS is characterized by depth but low diversification. Italy simultaneously serves as its principal market, supplier, transport corridor, source of labor, cultural-linguistic environment, and guarantor of external defense. The European Union provides the monetary, customs, and increasingly regulatory framework.

Such concentration does not necessarily produce direct coercion because relations are institutionalized by treaties and both Italy and the EU benefit from the microstate’s stability. Yet the dependencies are highly correlated: a crisis in relations with Italy could simultaneously affect trade, mobility, energy, finance, and security.

Singapore applies a portfolio principle. Food sources, trade agreements, investment ties, and diplomatic partnerships are distributed among several centers. In energy, a combination of gas, solar power, regional electricity imports, and future low-carbon carriers is being developed; imports of up to 4 GW of low-carbon electricity are planned by 2035.

The portfolio does not eliminate systemic risks. All these links depend on open sea lanes, functioning international law, and the absence of major conflict among leading powers. Diverse dependencies may become correlated if the United States and China demand a political choice or if global shipping and energy markets are disrupted simultaneously.

On DAS, Singapore is substantially stronger: it does not eliminate external dependence but breaks it into partially substitutable channels. San Marino compensates for concentration through legal predictability but has fewer opportunities to redistribute its ties.

7. Alternative sovereignty 

San Marino’s alternatives are constrained by geography. The country cannot replace Italian transit with an equivalent route and lacks an autonomous currency, defense system, or large-scale technological system. Its AS is therefore primarily institutional: participation in international organizations, direct relations with the EU, diplomatic ties, and recourse to treaty procedures.

San Marino belongs to the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the IMF, the World Bank, the OSCE, and other organizations, and maintains diplomatic or consular relations with more than one hundred states. These ties do not materially replace Italy, but they reduce the risk that the republic’s external subjectivity will be reduced entirely to a bilateral channel.

Singapore has considerably more functional alternatives. Its FTA network allows it to shift markets; its food-security strategy combines diversified imports, local production, stockpiles, and global partnerships. In water supply, imports are supplemented by domestic catchment, reuse, and desalination.

Singapore’s alternatives are nevertheless costly. Desalination is energy-intensive; local food production is constrained by land; and new energy routes require cross-border infrastructure. AS therefore does not mean self-sufficiency, but the existence of prepared substitutes at an acceptable cost.

8. Reversibility sovereignty 

San Marino’s reversibility is asymmetric. Formally, the republic retains statehood and decision-making authority, but withdrawal from the euro architecture or customs regime would impose extraordinarily high costs. Geography makes a return to autonomous monetary, trade, and defense systems practically unrealistic.

A more realistic form of RS lies not in exit but in incremental adjustment of participation. The EU agreement provides for gradual access by the financial sector and the possibility of not opening all segments simultaneously. Transition periods allow San Marino to adapt supervision and assess consequences before full integration.

Singapore’s RS rests on reserves, infrastructure, treaty diversity, defense capacity, and an administrative ability to reconfigure supply chains rapidly. Its food-security strategy explicitly combines source switching, stockpiles, and a domestic buffer. Its water strategy reduces dependence on a single import channel through technologically controlled sources.

Yet the termination of global trade is not a reversible scenario for Singapore. Its agency lies not in the possibility of abandoning integration, but in the capacity to change its configuration faster than external shocks can destroy basic functions.

9. Boundary sovereignty 

BS is particularly important for San Marino. The EU agreement entails dynamic regulatory alignment, application of common competition rules, and European Commission oversight of state aid. The Court of Justice of the European Union becomes the final arbiter on questions concerning the interpretation and application of the agreement. This expands market access but narrows national discretion.

The sovereignty of this model depends on the quality of boundaries negotiated in advance: exemptions, special protocols, transition periods, the composition of joint committees, and dispute-settlement procedures. If these limits are transparent and voluntarily ratified, an external rule may expand effective capacity. If they change without meaningful participation by San Marino, integration becomes rule-taking.

San Marino’s domestic institutional model provides an additional safeguard. Sovereignty constitutionally belongs to the people; legislative authority is exercised by the sixty-member Grand and General Council, while two Captains Regent jointly guarantee the constitutional order. Their short six-month term and collegiality limit the personalization of decision-making.

Singapore draws boundaries through state control of critical infrastructure, regulation of capital and ownership, land management, national service, and strategic reserves. The concept of Total Defence integrates military, civil, economic, social, digital, and psychological resilience. The boundary of participation is drawn not around minimizing external ties, but around retaining control over systemically critical functions.

High administrative autonomy, however, is not identical to socially distributed agency. International assessments point to constraints on freedom of expression, assembly, and association, as well as the long-term dominance of a single party. This creates a risk that the effectiveness of BS may be achieved at the cost of narrower informational feedback and pluralistic correction of policy.

10. Second-order sovereignty 

San Marino’s SOS rests on the legal equality of states and institutional presence. Membership in international organizations gives it a voice unavailable to a subnational territory of comparable size. The republic has chaired the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, demonstrating an ability temporarily to perform an institutional role disproportionate to its material weight.

Within the European economic architecture, however, its influence is limited. Dynamic alignment means that many rules applied domestically are formulated by EU institutions in which San Marino does not possess member-state status. Joint committees and consultations can mitigate this gap but cannot eliminate the structural asymmetry.

Singapore possesses a more pronounced SOS. It uses bilateral and plurilateral agreements as laboratories for rule-making, particularly in the digital sphere. Digital-economy agreements establish reference points for electronic payments, digital identity, artificial intelligence, data protection, and cross-border interoperability.

The logic is one of progressively scaling rules: national practice becomes a bilateral standard, then a regional regime, and potentially a multilateral norm. The signing of the ASEAN Agreement on Electronic Commerce during Singapore’s ASEAN chairmanship illustrates its ability to use integration not merely as access to rules but as a channel for producing them.

In SOS, Singapore therefore has a substantially greater capacity to connect existing architectures and create interoperability standards. San Marino primarily seeks recognition of its particular circumstances within rules shaped by others.

11. Reproductive sovereignty 

San Marino reproduces agency through institutional longevity, rotation, and cultural identity. Two Captains Regent are elected every six months and jointly serve as heads of state. The system combines representative and direct democracy, while political rights and civil liberties are generally respected.

RPS, however, requires not only preservation of the form of the state but renewal of functional competencies. The low technological score and dependence on external defense mean that integration must be accompanied by training national regulators and specialists in EU law, cybersecurity, statistics, and financial supervision. Otherwise, institutions may preserve symbolic continuity while losing the capacity to understand and adjust the rules they apply.

Singapore reproduces agency through long-term planning, education, the civil service, national defense, and infrastructure investment. Its water systems, stockpiles, and trade agreements are designed not as one-off responses but as continuously updated portfolios. Military readiness is sustained through national service and the nationwide Total Defence model.

The weakness of Singapore’s RPS lies in political and informational concentration. Limited competition and pressure on independent criticism may reduce the system’s ability to detect errors and generate alternative strategies. Administrative continuity is therefore high, but its adaptability depends on the quality and breadth of feedback.

12. Systemic comparison

TABLE 2. Systemic comparison

For San Marino, political and cultural resources compensate for the deficit of scale, but the compensation is incomplete. Political 94.8 and economic 87.6 enable it to conduct treaty relations and preserve institutions; military 12.1 and technological 56.3 sharply increase the cost of exit and dependence on external infrastructure. Emergent sovereignty arises above all through the legal capacity to secure a special status.

For Singapore, technological 94.8, informational 87.6, and cognitive 89.2 interact with economic 87.3 and military 65.1. This configuration allows it to turn integration into nodal power: other actors value access to its ports, finance, data, standards, and market. Connections become not merely constraints but assets.

13. Testing the paradox 

The comparison confirms that the depth of integration and the loss of sovereignty are not linearly related. 

First, integration can substitute for scale. San Marino obtains monetary, defense, and market infrastructure without bearing the cost of producing it autonomously in full. Singapore obtains food, energy, and markets that its limited territory cannot provide.

Second, the form of integration matters more than its volume. San Marino is incorporated primarily into a single regional system; Singapore into a portfolio of partially overlapping systems. Equally high openness therefore produces different concentrations of risk.

Third, integration is sovereign only when boundaries exist. Transition periods, exemptions, national control of critical infrastructure, and review procedures turn the transfer of powers into a manageable instrument. Without such boundaries, access to external scale is purchased at the cost of discretion.

Fourth, alternatives and reversibility are distinct. An alternative is the existence of another channel; reversibility is the ability actually to switch to it within the necessary time and at an acceptable cost. Singapore sustains both through reserves and diversification. San Marino more often possesses the legal right to choose than the material capacity to exercise that choice.

Fifth, the most mature integration creates second-order sovereignty. Singapore uses agreements to shape digital rules. San Marino gains an international voice, but in its relations with the EU it primarily adapts to an acquis already produced elsewhere. The distinction between rule-making and rule-taking is a central indicator of the quality of integration sovereignty.

14. Testable hypotheses

1. Managed-depth hypothesis: the positive effect of integration on sovereign agency increases when treaty exemptions, transition periods, and review procedures are available.

2. Concentration hypothesis: at equal levels of openness, a state with lower correlation among external dependencies has higher DAS.

3. Functional-alternative hypothesis: the formal presence of multiple partners increases AS only when infrastructure and administrative switching procedures exist.

4. Exit-cost hypothesis: RS is inversely proportional to the aggregate short-term cost of changing monetary, trade, energy, and security frameworks.

5. Nodal-power hypothesis: a small state obtains disproportionate SOS when other actors depend on the connectivity, standardization, or mediation functions it provides.

6. Selective rule-taking hypothesis: adoption of external rules increases sovereignty when gains in access and trust exceed the loss of national discretion. 7. Defense-threshold hypothesis: autonomous defense capacity expands the permissible range of economic integration by reducing the risk of external coercion.

8. Informational-correction hypothesis: political and administrative centralization increases short-term coherence but may reduce long-term adaptability when independent feedback is weak.

9. Reproduction hypothesis: integration remains sovereign over time only when knowledge, regulatory competencies, and control over critical data are localized.

Conclusion

San Marino and Singapore confirm the central proposition of emergent sovereignty: participation in a larger system is not equivalent to subordination to it. Integration becomes a source of agency when a state converts external access into internal competencies, distributes dependencies, preserves practically realizable alternatives, defines treaty boundaries, and participates in shaping rules.

San Marino demonstrates a legal-institutional model. It compensates for the absence of scale through the euro, the customs union, relations with Italy, and international organizations. High political and economic scores allow it to preserve statehood and negotiate special status, but the concentration of trade, monetary, transport, and defense ties limits material reversibility.

Singapore demonstrates a portfolio-nodal model. It does not reduce dependence on the outside world; rather, it distributes that dependence across markets, treaties, and suppliers, creates reserves and its own critical capabilities, and then uses its centrality in flows to influence rules. Its higher aggregate index reflects an important resource advantage, but the emergent outcome arises specifically from the interaction of technology, information, governance, defense, and the treaty network.

The correct question, therefore, is not “How deeply integrated is the state?” but “Who determines the terms of integration, how many practically accessible alternatives exist, what is the cost of reconfiguration, and can the state influence the rules of the system?” Sovereignty declines not with the number of connections, but with the loss of control over their configuration.