Confederation Longevity Database

* Article: Commons Governance in a General Theory of Confederation Durability; Introducing the Confederation Longevity Database (CLD); a Comparative Historical Analysis. By Mark D. Whitaker. Draft OF appendix 6 in book draft, The Glomos: Nested Global Ecoregions for Representative and Sustainable Living.

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The Confederation Longevity Database (CLD): Explaining Differences in Past States, Leagues, Confederations, Federal States, and ‘Proto Glomos’ Useful for Understanding the Evidence-Based Sustainable Plan of the Full Glomos as an Improved Confederative Design of Six Principles.

Abstract

"Why do some political confederations persist for centuries while others collapse within decades? Existing explanations emphasize military capacity, fiscal extraction, or bureaucratic centralization. Drawing on a newly assembled comparative dataset—the Confederation Longevity Database (CLD)—this article advances a different claim: embedded commons governance institutions predict confederal survival better than military power alone. Analyzing 55 historical confederations across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas (1100 BCE–present), institutional features were coded related to commons management, centralization, military organization, cultural integration, and ecological regulation. Using comparative survival analysis and robustness checks, we find that confederations with durable, collectively governed resource institutions (forests, pasture, fisheries, irrigation, land commons) exhibit significantly longer lifespans than those relying primarily on coercive military coordination. The findings challenge state-centric models of political durability and suggest that institutionalized ecological governance is not a peripheral feature but a core survival mechanism. The article concludes by discussing implications for contemporary regional alliances and emerging planetary governance architectures."

Summary

Mark Whitaker:

"Six characteristics were found across all these leagues that arguably made them more long-lived, representative, and sustainable the more factors they had.

These six factors are:

(1) bottom up regional development in representative regional deliberation,

(2) multiple regional autonomous groups then in bottom up cross-regional deliberation,

(3) in which those autonomous groups’ territories are based on ecoregional boundaries and commons management for the long-term future of an environmental resource, which includes the whole ecology now from points #1 and #2 by having more singular regional and cross-regional input from all singular regional commons,

(4) some kind of autonomous institutional design for the centralization that avoids extending one partner’s formal institutions over others, with the aim being to preserve all regionalism instead of to surmount it by the autonomous institutional design, and

(5)

• (5.1) generally the military ability to withstand a common enemy, foreign or domestic, which is an enemy typically more unrepresentative and degradative that seeks its own military consolidation for more unrepresentative and degradative goals of extraction of social and ecological wealth from the territory of the league, and thus, aims to destroy the league’s autonomy, longevity, representation, and sustainability together; however

• (5.2) some confederations avoid the development of any internal permanent military arrangement for this ‘military ability’, because that is seen almost always as coming to dominate the confederation itself, unrepresentatively and degradatively, which would unravel the earlier five points and longevity itself.

The additive definitions of these terms are noted in the above Table 10. On the one hand, “leagues” are different by being thinner associations. They are generally missing the first three factors and only come together permanently or temporarily on the fourth point for coordination or leadership during military attacks. There are many ancient Greek Leagues for mutual defense in war for instance. (However, many of those even had cultural homogeneity that encouraged ‘commons in league’ arrangements equally, as seen in the tables below.) Plus, there are modern ‘leagues’ though these are now generally called ‘military alliances.’ The multiple bilateral military arrangement between the United States, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan is a league, against the group of China and North Korea as another league. Both of these modern leagues are organized like the ancient Athenian-centered relationships of the Delian League, or the Spartan-centered bilateral relationships of the Peloponnesian League, in which Sparta was the first, organizing, and largest member of the league which had veto power over all league deliberations—because such deliberations of allies were rarely institutionalized as important anyway given the bilateral organization of the Peloponnesian League. This is very similar to the United States or China in their modern leagues where a lack of group league deliberation or autonomous league institutions exists. On the other hand, NATO is a confederation—because it has its own mutual institutional design separate from the mere and ongoing bilateral arrangements of allies within it, and because there is more polity legitimacy given to mutual deliberation among allies.

On the other hand, federal states are different by having overarching central associations with top down jurisdictions that generally demote the first two categories of bottom up regional deliberation or bottom up cross-regional deliberation. Federations always have an autonomous permanent institutional design, while confederations only sometimes do. Thus, federations (federal states) find it easier to develop a top-down hierarchy within that confederation in which generally past regional autonomy and the representative deliberation are very constricted by the federal level or even created by the federal level only. This centralization of a federal ‘overlord’ leadership category can create and authorize even local urban or regional jurisdictions themselves, like seen in modern France, Germany, and Japan.

Therefore, confederations are in the middle of both leagues and federal states. In comparative retrospect though, if that middle path of confederation is made, it is made to last far longer. Furthermore, such a confederation will last even longer if it has another factor: commons based institutions and ecoregional boundaries as involved in the main purpose of confederation in the first place.

So, commons institutions are hardly just a modern dream. Commons institutions are a basic arrangement of many past confederations that has been ignored because of the lack of comparative analysis of such leagues and their environmental governance of the past and ignored because research on the commons remained mostly an analysis of ‘commons in states.’ Instead, commons research should have started with the richer trove of information found by the analysis of ‘commons in leagues.’

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Excerpts

Introduction

Mark Whitaker:

"The long-term survival of political systems has been a central concern of political theory from Polybius to modern institutional economics. Yet most empirical work on political longevity focuses on states and empires, marginalizing confederations, leagues, and federative systems as unstable or transitional forms This neglect is striking. Confederations—from the Achaean League to the Iroquois Confederacy, from the Hanseatic League to the Dutch Republic—often endured longer than centralized empires facing similar geopolitical pressures.

Why?

This paper advances a core thesis:

Confederations endure when they embed governance of shared ecological and economic commons into their political architecture. This is one factor of six factors that comprise long-lived confederations.

So, rather than treating ecological governance as a secondary variable, it is treated as a first-order institutional feature shaping legitimacy, coordination, and resilience.

How do we design longevity, representation, and sustainability together successfully, so our polities last thousands of years? How do we blend these into truly civilizational cultural forms, that are resilient to short external shocks and problems from our degradative enemies—that may conquer us sometimes, though we keep rising like a phoenix from the flame after the conquerors fail sooner or later while we survive? To answer these questions with a true solution for making the long-lived, representative, and sustainable polity of the future, the full Glomos plan learns from failures of the past and actually surprisingly learns from very successful working models of the past, called here the ‘proto Glomos’ arrangements of the past. Plus ca change.

The set sampled for this analysis is naturally “all states and leagues in world history”. This means data that includes their internal contexts, their external contexts, their institutional designs, how they collapsed or remained persistent, and most importantly-- ‘how well did it work?’ — i.e. which version of states or leagues were the most successful in being long-lived, representative, and sustainable together, instead of becoming a dystopia of self-destructive, shorter-lived, tyrannical, and degradative collaborations?

The data for states already has been analyzed by others in the literature , and that is summarized elsewhere in Chapter 6.1. However what has been ignored in the literature is a more comparative analysis of leagues and confederations alone. [Birch et al, 2022; Arkush et al. 2025] So, the basic data for this analysis had to be gathered personally. It is reproduced below in notes for a “Confederation Longevity Database” (CLD), because such a database failed to exist anywhere else in the existing literature for reference.

It is key empirical evidence that

(1) the Glomos is a better governance arrangement than states and

(2) a better internal architecture for states as well as

(3) under conditions seen in history of ‘soft annexation’ of confederations that temper the problems of martial states repeatedly and encourage their longer lives (Latin League in the Roman Republic; pre-1865 United States in the federal state; Dutch Confederate Republic in the modern Dutch state; Swiss Confederacy in modern Switzerland, Māori iwi in New Zealand, etc.)

Most quantitative studies of political longevity focus only on states and empires, and implicitly treat confederations, leagues, and federations as transitional or failed forms. This bias obscures the fact that many confederal systems (e.g., the Haudenosaunee, Swiss, Dutch, Hanseatic, etc.) have demonstrated exceptional institutional and cultural durability, often exceeding centralized states’ lives up to 2 to 5 times, when measured across representative, ecological/sustainable, legal, and identity dimensions. This appendix shows how the full Glomos comes from an argument from hard empirical data on what are the best long-lived, representative, and sustainable governments in the world in the “Confederation Longevity Database” (CLD). This is a structured comparative dataset designed to analyze the survival, collapse, dormancy, and revival of non-unitary/confederal political systems from antiquity to the modern era. The CLD adapts the logic of Seshat and MOROS though introduces new variables capturing polycentric governance, ecological commons management, veto power, exit rights, soft annexation, many different kinds of survival, and even the capacity of many confederations to rise like a phoenix from the flame in a nearly immortal civilizational cultural form , even if conquered for the short-term by short-lived states that get conquered themselves by the durable cultural forms of many long-lived confederations that refuse ever to die. Plus, a major gap in existing theories of political longevity is the role of ecological and commons governance. Indigenous confederations (e.g., Haudenosaunee, Wabanaki, Blackfoot, Māori iwi, etc.) frequently embedded political authority within seasonal land-use regimes, sacred geographies, commons-based resource management, and ritual enforcement of restraint. Ancient Greek confederations are the same—with strong commons institutional elements in their most long-lived examples. Plus, early-modern European leagues such as the Swiss Confederation and Hanseatic League were based on commons institutions equally. Both relied on shared alpine commons, forests, fisheries, and trade corridors as the main institutional anchors to their confederations, instead of only treating these as exogenous variables to their confederation.

In short, first, mainstream political science treats ecology as an exogenous constraint, when the empirical reality of confederations show that people involved in confederations treated ecology as an endogenous institutional variable. In the supermajority of all cases of confederation in world history, people treated ecology, commons management, and conflict management between different groups for the same ecological resources as rationales why the confederation formed in the first place. That has been mostly ignored.

Second, why it has been mostly ignored is that modern political theory does address federations and confederations, but largely through a normative or constitutional lens rather than a historical-comparative one like discussed here. Classic federalist theory (e.g., Madison, Hamilton) framed confederations as inherently unstable due to collective action problems, insufficient coercion, and vulnerability to external threats. This view heavily influenced later scholarship, reinforcing the assumption that confederations either centralize or collapse. However, no one of that generation made an empirical analysis of all confederations to actually prove that point.

Instead, when you do gather a dataset to prove it either way, you have to admit that confederations are better than states on many levels.

First, confederations are the longest lived polities that people have ever created in the world, with the average from the current database of 55 confederations showing an average of 313 years (311 or 315 years, depending on whether the Triple Alliance/Aztec Empire is included as a borderline case).

Meanwhile, states have a disappointing showing as the shortest lived and most humanly and ecologically destructive arrangements of polity that people have ever created. Depending on the datasets (mentioned in Chapter 6.1), people have found the average life of states to be between 150 to 220 years, and the average life of empires even shorter than this upward bound lifespan of states.

Third, confederations come together regularly for ecological conflict management in single regions and among multiple regions and for creating commons institutions ‘in common’ across all regions. This is a two-tiered level of sustainability for why confederations are longer lived. Confederations by using many commons institutions in a region and by using commons in cross-regional collaboration, typically have these two levels of representative deliberation in them—two levels that can be missing in most states. This is another rationale why confederations last longer than states that are regularly without this representative arrangement.

Fourth, the confederation itself is a great check and balance against any centralized permanent army or military establishment developing a tyranny over people or the environment, which if it does happen, is connected to less representation and less ecological soundness over time. Thus more confederations by keeping away a centralized military encouraged better this desired trifecta of longevity, representation, and sustainability far better than any state ever has done. Plus, even looking at the few long lived states shows that they did a ‘soft annex’ of a confederational architecture within them in their history. So the few long lived states are really pseudo-confederations themselves, and thus are a hybrid with a confederate core miscategorized to be placed entirely in ‘state’ averages of longevity.

So, these four points, each showing a benefit of confederations over a state, question the normative stress placed on states or federal principles of supremacy. Why pretend that states are normative or better, when they are really the worst across these four points and thus have the hardest time maintaining themselves or their ecologies over time compared to confederations which are far more representative with the peoples and far more deliberative about their ecologies?

The Confederation Longevity Database makes these alternatives to states scientifically legible without flattening them into failed states-in-waiting. The CLD provides a foundation for evidence-based institutional design, and from its knowledge, the Glomos appears as the ultimate result of that evidence-based design for merging longevity, representation, and sustainability. By treating confederations as a legitimate comparative category and identifying historically grounded survival heuristics, policymakers can draw on centuries of institutional experimentation rather than relying on abstract theory or contemporary precedent alone. The core lesson is simple and profound: political systems last longest when they govern least, but govern well—especially over the commons they share.

The point here is that instead of lumping states and leagues together to find average ‘governance longevity,’ or instead of assuming confederations are weak and only prefatory of states, and instead of assuming that states are ‘more stable,’ these three untested assumptions have only misled us about the even shorter lives of most states on average and misled us on the tremendous longevity of leagues and confederations. Unfortunately, pioneering databases like Sechat and MOROS assume state primacy and longevity simply by ignoring the far longer lives of many confederations compared to states, and/or lumping in confederations into a state database. This artificially inflates the average lives of ‘states’ in this way. On the other hand, here, when you separate states and leagues/confederations into two different databases for two different averages, to see if modern assumptions are correct about the longer lives of states and the greater stability of states, both these two points are quickly falsified as the main two lies of political philosophy of our time. In other words, most modern political philosophy that worships states is really an uncritical normative perspective instead of a scientific perspective.

When you do separate these datasets, a more comparative and systemic analysis of the longevity of leagues compared to the longevity of states has a stark twofold result immediately that was previously hidden. These two results started the further analysis below that created the Confederation Longevity Database and its subcategories below.

The first two results were as follows.

(1) Leagues of various sorts tend to live far longer lives than states, sometimes double to quintuple (400 to 1,000 years or more) compared to the short the average life of a state or empire, which seems a fruit fly by comparison. Little wonder that states seems to lack all institutional memory of how they perpetuate the same bad mistakes tragically, case after case, over and over without improvement that leads to their self-destruction, while leagues and confederations have such a long institutional memory that ongoing conservation and improvement is almost expected over the centuries. Before the CLD, the previous database series of analysis of ‘states’ found their averaged lifespan to be anywhere only between 150 to 220 years, depending on samples under which the analysis was conducted. (See elsewhere in Chapter 6.1 for a review and critique of this literature). So, states themselves are argued to have far shorter lives on average than even this, and empires even more so, if these are discretely separated for their own averages and the truly long-lived groups of confederations are taken out of any average for states. In short, leagues’ far more extreme longevities may have been padding states’ far lower averages, even while modern pro-state rhetoric falsely denigrated leagues as having shorter lives!

(2) The great majority of leagues and confederations in history have an ecological commons architecture. This is for environmental protection through regional deliberation and representation and for conflict management over resources and common infrastructures between multiple regions. Comparatively speaking, this wholly seems to have been ignored twice over: in the literature about leagues and in the literature about the commons. Instead, most analysis of leagues rarely mention the commons or ecology despite how crucial are these variables in league/confederation formation or clearly as a major factor in greater league longevity. Plus, most analysis of commons institutions themselves stems mostly only from modernist analysis over the last 1000 years or so, by Ostrom and others. While a past literature on the commons has been formative and useful, its two main biases now appear in stark relief, so they are removed in the below analysis. These two biases are the limitation on time and the limitation of the analysis to ‘commons in states’. Both a limited temporal sampling to only pre-modern and modern times about the commons, and only an analysis of ‘commons in states’ have biased our understanding of what commons are and how much more universal they are, far more than even Ostrom believed since her analysis exclusively focused on ‘commons in states.’ It is argued here that ‘commons in states’ is the wrong sample to start with, if a majority of leagues/confederations have commons architectures and if only a minority of states have commons architectures. So, in short, commons architectures appear in a supermajority of leagues, while only appearing in a minority of states and empires.

So, if we only think of commons institutions as if all of them are in a polycentric arrangement ‘within states,’ we mislead ourselves about history of the commons in three ways: in the misinterpretation of basic demographics of commons institutions, in the basic institutional locations in which they reside, and in the basic conditions under which they are more regularly generated and protected. In short, commons institutions are far more common in leagues, though leagues hardly are as common as states. However, perhaps leagues and confederations would be more common, if people were aware of these facts and could judge the data for themselves on how leagues and confederations are a better route toward a long-lived, more representative, and sustainable future once we stop trying to hitch the commons to states exclusively, and instead try to hitch a widespread confederation of sustainable regions within states themselves to transform them to be a more perfect union. This is clear on the four aspects mentioned above. This is the plan of the Glomos.

As said above, after those two early points were found, these facts were missing in the literature so much that this special appendix was made to summarize the basic data about this separate category of governance called ‘commons in leagues’ or ‘confederations within states.’ The summary list across world history below is meant to be exhaustive, and it is a list that no one seems to have made before. This is because most analyses of leagues are case studies in history, instead of analytical comparative studies in history about their comparative factors. Plus, there has been scant comparative focus on human-environmental relationships or unique eco-institutional architectures of leagues versus states either. The older literature has been less focused on comparative statistical survival curves or environmental protection and more on just case-to-case institutional comparison in the political science of the league’s relationships instead of the political ecology of the league’s relationships. However, more recent work (e.g., Arkush et al., 2025 Birch et al., 2022 ) beginning to treat league duration quantitatively yet still is ignoring the issues of the supermajority of ‘commons in leagues.’

The wider result of these comparisons and contrasts between states and leagues went beyond these two first comparative facts about them.

(3) It helped develop a hypothesis that there are six factors of longevity shared across all states and leagues, with commons architectures obviously being one of these factors of longevity, for them to appear so prominently in leagues versus states (though still existing in some lower-capacity states). So, there is more of a continuum instead of a dichotomy between confederations and states, given more of these six longevity factors that states or leagues have, the longer they live on average, and even the longer they are loved as organizational results that people want to perpetuate in their lives enough to revive them if they are lost. After a state dies, few ever want to revive it! However, confederations repeatedly are revived if they are lost by thoughtless invasions (mostly), and improved over generations and multiple versions over time—showing they are loved enough to resuscitate. The confederative, long-lived, representative, and sustainable governance can be so loved their peoples (or so difficult to organize against, by being so representative and sustainable that the only groups that hate it are the inveterately blind plutocratic rich) that such sixfold forms regularly become durable civilizational cultural forms that outlast their territorial integrity and keep influencing future less representative states to be more representative and sustainable as well!

So, once leagues combine longevity, representation, and sustainability well like this, people restart or remain culturally durable even if they experience territorial collapse from accidental external invasion or external natural disaster. This continuing cultural memory in their peoples about a good and ethical form of governance is the true resilient success of any ‘proto Glomos’ in the past—the term created here to show that there are Glomos-style confederations in the past sharing the same factors as suggested here that would be a better future plan for us all, from which we can learn to improve even more. Plus, these proto Glomos examples below show how treasured these rare examples of good governance are to have them become so deeply a part of a fresh civilizational cultural form that refuses to die even when losing territorial reality and continuing to live to possess even later states with their representative, deliberative, and sustainable ethics instead.

On the other hand, if states or leagues lose any or up to all of these six factors, they start to become the most hated governance ever experienced by their peoples. As such, it is easy to see how if a governance model ever starts to lose larger numbers of these six longevity factors, it only makes the governance more short-lived by the growing internal dissention over the growing inability of protecting against external invasion and the growing facilitation of internal social and environmental risk by being so unrepresentative in the first place. This can lead to aggregate desire in their peoples

(3a) to defect from such states at any moment possible;

(3b) to allow others outside to come in and to destroy them, in a ‘self-conquest’ in which many people join willingly to wreck their past unrepresentative state willingly and happily, if they had been unable to destroy their own unrepresentative state by themselves in the past, and

(3c) the widespread desire of state peoples to change their identities in the future, to try to forget that they ever were part of such a state and beholden to its unethical, unrepresentative, and degradative leadership.

As a result, the worst governments of the world are such a bad memory that they fail to make any durable cultural form, except as a warning of what to avoid. Meanwhile, the best confederative governments of the world are such a good memory for their peoples that they have a hard time ever letting them go, since they cherish the memory of them and keep trying to recreate them later even if they lose territorial continuity and even if it means repollinating their confederative, representative or sustainable ethos into an unrepresentative state that has swallowed them. This is how a true civilization works, with ongoing continuity in cultural transmission of a confederation, because something deep is valued in its ethics and organization over time that protects it so much that it can start a virtually immortal influence on a people’s future.

(4) From this analysis of six factors of longevity for governance, a special sub-category of these polities of leagues or confederations started to be seen in the data of world history that had up to five or all six of these criteria of longevity and were the truly longest lived of the leagues for being so arranged. These ‘saturated’ confederations will be called the ‘proto Glomos.’

There are estimated to be 22 examples of ‘proto Glomos’ in the past. From these more than any other governance arrangements

(4a) we can learn about their durable successes to make a more perfect union, and

(4b), we can learn about the tragic issue why the majority of these ostensibly long-lived leagues failed: simply put, the more short-lived, unrepresentative, and degradative states destroyed mindlessly these longer lived, representative and sustainable polities, then of course, these toxic states winked out and destroyed themselves soon despite all their hubris and trouble to create a grand military conquest.

Many of these conquering states were destroyed by their own people sooner than later by ‘3a, 3b, and 3c’ above.

(5) A fifth point was noted in this analysis of all these supremely ‘saturated’ and long-lived leagues: only these proto Glomos in history are loved enough to be kept as civilized cultural forms, long after territorial losses. As said above, even some of these proto Glomos leagues recover like a phoenix from the flame and regain territory later because they developed such a civilizational cultural continuity in their forms that they were treasured as timeless models from the past that influence the future. (5b) The flip side of this is that all other kinds of governance arrangements tend to be forgotten in time. However, the few examples of proto Glomos form the core cultural memories of governance ideals across the world, and that makes such saturated confederations exactly like civilizational forms (as described in Chapter 5.3.2).

So, from all these five points, we can learn to improve the full Glomos solutions toward a more perfect union.

Obviously, the criteria for evaluating all states and leagues across world history is somewhat easy: the question is ‘did the state or league expand the life span of the people, and of the many different regional units’ within them in collaboration with each other, without damaging them and destroying their environments in the process?’ In short did a state or a league do its population good or harm, in the long run? To elaborate this as a study of comparative longevity, the methods become a process of looking at any unique or contrasting longevity variation in any particular case of state or league compared to the average longevity, and seeing if that variation in the degree of longevity (up or down) relates in some way to the degree of these six factors of longevity being present in the case, compared to the averages of all cases. This is the neutral way to evaluate results of all states and leagues across history as a competitive race with each other. In short the question becomes ‘in comparative retrospect to other states and leagues, did the people and regions involved in one state or league actually survive and thrive far better than the average, or were they only damaged along the fresh tangent of the collaboration itself and were hampered from thriving by the state or league and failed far earlier than the average?’ What is being evaluated is a judgment on all states and leagues: did the collaboration as a state or league become something useful for people maintaining themselves cross-regionally and maintaining their environments, or was it just a terrible waste of time, a dead-end, and a mistake since people were further abused and corrupted which led them to destroy regional units, environments, and collaborations faster, compared to the average of the others.

(6) Thus, from this analysis comes an integrated definition of all kinds of polities across six factors, that universally can describe all governance arrangements: with states hardly requiring any longevity factors, with leagues having 2, with confederations having 3 or 4, and with federal states having a decline back to only 3, and with proto Glomos arrangements having 5 mostly though sometimes 6 if it continues to the present day. All six factors are the true definition of what polity longevity means: it approaches immortality in a civilizational cultural form for a people that refuses to die even when conquered, and is very prone to revive even centuries later to transform even the conquering state that swallowed it. Thus, the proto Glomos leagues are the closest in history where we as people got a social organization ‘right enough’ to have the greatest combined longevity, representation, and sustainability. So, the full Glomos would have all six factors durably, worldwide, and would influence all residual short-lived states worldwide as improvements upon them, between them, or within them.

(6b) Effectively, this means that all governance evolution beyond a mere state is a check and balance on the many problems of states."

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Six historically verified factors that promote the longevity of confederations over that of states

Mark Whitaker:

"Six more historical points about strategy and tactics for longevity can be said from a review of 54 different leagues in world history. When these leagues are sorted by a ‘League Longevity Table’ below, that table additionally starts to note these following six historical points plainly.

First, having all six factors of longevity tends to make the world’s longest lived confederations or even states. These are the cream that rises to the top of the list in world history, as empirically noted and repeatedly noted in what kinds of organizational designs get sorted on top when sorting by league longevity. They all start to look the same, like the ‘proto Glomos.’ So, the proto Glomos are the cream of world history. This is more than just a personal hyperbole. They are factually and empirically the whole top of the League Longevity Table, below. So, if you want to build a future for longevity, representation, and sustainability, you should create something like the proto Glomos confederation in history—and obviously you can improve on that by making the full Glomos. The proof is how the top of the League Longevity Chart are all proto Glomos confederations only. Plus, the only two ongoing and still-living confederations are modern Switzerland and the modern Netherlands—and both of these are proto Glomos arrangements--another point in the Glomos’ favor. Next, the only confederacies that their members valued so highly as a cultural and civilized form as to keep them going for hundreds of years even after they lost their territory, are the proto Glomos confederations as well.

Second, that last point brings up another sobering point about how to improve past proto Glomos now. Even though many proto Glomos do have all these points, yet over time most past proto Glomos have failed only on one all-important point: 5.1 and 5.2—mostly 5.1. This is a great tragedy. It is phrased as the tragedy of ‘what good does it serve to develop a long-lived, representative, and sustainable confederation just to be so militarily weak that a more short-lived and temporarily powerful unrepresentative and degradative polity wrecks it, when the short-lived state is already on a pointless path to self-destruction anyway, and starts to dismantle much better polities that it is unable to appreciate?’ So, in much of our past tragic history, “ignorant short-lived states repeatedly wreck wise long-lived proto Glomos confederations”, thoughtlessly, from the outside. This only happens because most proto Glomos fail to develop a military apparatus or self-reliant military culture strong enough. This is a very serious problem that has to be solved in the full Glomos. In other words, without ignorant short-lived states wrecking the wise long-lived proto Glomos confederations by external military conquest, we can be confident to argue from the data of history that all proto Glomos in the past would still be with us today. We might model both the Netherlands and Switzerland because they are the only two proto Glomos cross-regional confederations that mastered the art of building a strong military culture that does 5.1 without doing 5.2. The Dutch in particularly are known for being able to remove their consolidated military apparatus by the 1600s after they won their independence from Spain (keeping 5.1, and adding 5.2)—allowing more secure decentralization and deliberation once more, instead of letting a permanent military develop to destroy their independence, representation, and greater commons institutions around water and land (sustainability) in time. The United Provinces removed four fuels of this federal addiction. (1) The United Provinces of the Netherlands deliberately reduced central authority after their revolt with Spain by removing the standing army in peacetime. This weakened ‘the federal addiction.’ (2) Plus to further demote the federal addiction, by the 1600s the Dutch Republic reverted back to letting provinces keep taxation control. (3) Even further reducing the federal addiction, any autonomous central institutional designs were only meant as cross-regional venues for deliberation instead of designed to command regions. Plus, despite allowing a private commercial consolidation, (4) the Dutch Republic refused to allow that commercial consolidation to create an oligarchy that might want to enforce or to create its own desired cultural or religious uniformity on the whole state culture. That further would deprive people and make different factions prone to a federal addiction. So four kinds of fuels can fire this federal addiction, as mentioned above, and the Netherlands (and Switzerland) have avoided all four so far.

So in comparative retrospect, what the Dutch Republic did compared to Rome or the early United States was that when the Dutch had external military threats from Spain or France, they managed it by a temporary centralization. The critical lesson here is that the Dutch rolled permanent power back to the provinces after temporary crises. Alternatively, Rome and the modern U.S. tend to lock in ‘temporary’ crises as permanent emergency federal centralizations that accrued over time to demote all power devolution to the provinces or states within it. So, as the early United States began to fall apart internally throughout the first half of the 1800s [what hath god wrought, xxxx; Madison biography, xxxx], instead of deciding upon decentralized solutions, the leadership of the United States chose to continue toward the military conflict of the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65 instead of allowing secession, exit, or devolution. Plus, even though it was good that the United States shrank the federal military after the U.S. Civil War, what remained was a centralized federalized state and a centralized private corporotocracy that both became superordinate above all regional states for the first time.

Both of these public and private technocratic trends effectively ended the ‘early United States’ confederation’ at that point, and it set a route for ‘rigged competition’ for the controls of the federal empire that the United States became, rigged between the two ‘choices’ of only more federal control or only more corporate control of the federal system, which amounted to the same outcome. Plus, after World War II, the United States even further lost factor 5.2 once a permanent military technocracy did begin to develop—which was key to ending the previous competition between public technocracy and private technocracy in the history of the post Civil War period (1865-1939) because the growing ‘military technocracy’ globally was an allied project in which a series of permanent private corporate military companies could profit when subsidized by an equally agreeable federal technocratic budgetary and tax largesse.

For a third observation about the League Longevity Table below, some of the long-lived proto Glomos leagues are hard to really call leagues anymore because they are ‘zombie leagues’ that have failed in a more “hybrid” way, by living on after they are truly dead.

This means some of the leagues listed in this table should really be considered to have far shorter lives, since their lives ended when they were colonized or their lives as leagues never really happened since an external military protectorate invented them in the first place! So, in many leagues we see this ‘hybrid’ outcome of what will be called “soft annexation” instead of always outright conquest, since some leagues become militarily protected by a wider unrepresentative and degradative martial polity that either fails to destroy them or simply invents them out of whole yet counterfeit cloth to serve its martial purposes. Effectively, what is happening in these ‘zombie leagues’ is that another conquering state is providing 5.1 and 5.2 for a failing league or a league that failed to ever be live and autonomous for itself in the first place. This failure to protect themselves militarily saves them from the costs and political risks of developing their own corrupting military establishment and martial culture of course, yet such a zombie league is hardly thriving as it should when it is under an external tribute and control like this for hundreds of years. This would be like the northern Greek Amphictyonic League ‘kept alive’ under foreign Macedonia for its own extraction purposes and political purposes. It is like the Lycian League which was only a Roman Protectorate for its entire life span—starting in life from the outside spark of Rome, like a Frankenstein monster, animated only under its allowances and alliance changes to minimize the power of Crete. And if it is a zombie league created by Rome it is easy for Rome to close the league as well, as it did, when politics changed once more after Caesar’s death.

So, for a fourth observation about all leagues in world history, some leagues are formed entirely by the outside military consolidation of others, so those are hardly good examples of proto Glomos arrangements like the later Hellenic leagues entirely formed entirely by Macedonia instead of the Greeks themselves or like the Lycian League.

A fifth observation is analyzed in its own table later, below: that the most long-lived leagues have deep ecoregional / commons institutions built into their political legitimacy and organizational designs.

Happily, sixth, the League Longevity Table below notes that none of the proto Glomos ever failed by internal dissolution, and it notes that some like the Netherlands or Switzerland did solve points 5.1 and 5.2 successfully as well—from which we can learn how to improve it for all the Glomos in the future.

Plus, by the 1980s, this proto Glomos heritage of the Netherlands is even responsible for making that state the first major leader in sustainability metrics in what is called “ecological modernization”. Both the Netherlands and Switzerland still lead in modern sustainability metrics, unlike all other nations, and this is of course due to centuries of these nations being on this path already by being more ideal proto Glomos states already in the first place, that in their deep past has encouraged them to have long-lived governance by wider representative, deliberative, and sustainable commons policies already.

For instance, the Netherlands currently places first in Europe on the Green Transition Index, a multi-criteria sustainability ranking. [3]

Plus, in the Arcadis Sustainable Cities Index 2024, Dutch cities excel in urban sustainability metrics so much that the capital of Amsterdam ranked #1 globally on this index that measures holistic sustainability performance. [4]

For Switzerland, it ranks as top in Europe in the Legatum Prosperity Index in the sustainable environment subscore and in the representative governance subscore [5].

The Legatum Index blends wealth, governance, education, health, and environment into a composite score. Plus, Switzerland routinely is in the top three or five happiest nations globally. [6]

The Happy Planet Index (HPI) shows how well a state merges human well-being and high quality of life with ecological well being, in a composite score that involves measures of life expectancy, well-being, ecological footprint, and inequality into a single measure. The HPI penalizes social inequality, so Switzerland performs well because its outcomes are more equitable than many other high-income countries. Plus, in comparing a nation's policies to protect biodiversity and habitat, Switzerland has a strong Red List score that reflects how species conservation and biodiversity survival is higher in Switzerland relative to its peers. [7].

Plus, in Switzerland, the statutory forest protection is now around 30% of national land—protected by law since 1876 and growing over time since then as a percentage as coming out of medieval commons institutional heritages and shared ethics for this across Switzerland because of the commons institutions in the highlands. However, there is always room to improve since it seems Switzerland’s Species Protection Index and Terrestrial biome protection scores are lower in the EPI, showing some gaps in habitat representation. This is something that the Glomos’s nested watershed and ecoregions as a trellis inside Switzerland could fix systemically for the long term. [8]

Back to the beginning point: league or state longevity comes from all six points, without creating internal inequalities from the centralization of such forces. This is obviously harder to do in the past, given the huge number of failures of leagues and confederations and the rarity of ongoing territorial survivability of proto Glomos style nation states like the Netherland and Switzerland. However, ranking the top in the list, it optimistically shows how many confederations can be classified as proto Glomos in world history, and it shows the proto Glomos leagues are always the most long-lived social organizations, far longer in life than any average state or empire, because they are the most representative and sustainable polities—at the same time. Plus, almost all of these leagues whether they are short lived or even when they are long-lived are only destroyed from the outside (shown by the italics), and only rarely from internal decay (shown by the underlines). In other words, if you develop something like the Glomos, you have a great chance of making something immortal and having a sustainable civilization forever—if you can avoid ignorant states and empires mindlessly swarming you like fruit flies and wrecking you in the process of their mere short lives."

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Advantages of the Confederate Model

Mark Whitaker:

"What about some survival heuristics? Note the top 20% of these leagues have solidly five or six of the earlier proto Glomos points. All six points are argued to encourage them to last centuries longer than others leagues, and definitely longer than all other states by sometimes five times the life span. However, it is more than just the fourth point above about commons management. From the longest-lived cases (Amphictyonic, Iroquois, Māori, Hanseatic, Cretan, Dutch, etc.), we can extract more than the six points earlier. There are fully eleven concrete heuristics here that are more historical points for balancing longevity, representation, and sustainability:

• Symmetry of Member Units: Once one unit can reliably convert collective institutions into unilateral advantage, the confederation enters a decay phase.

• Ritualized Legitimacy > Administrative Legitimacy: If legitimacy lives in ritual, law-speech, or sacred geography, it survives leadership failure. Empires die when offices lose credibility; ritual systems don’t.

• Polycentric Authority: Multiple overlapping centers like councils, cities, clans, sacred sites, etc., are used as a group instead of having one central power. Therefore, it is unlikely there can ever be a single ‘decapitation event’ taking out all cultural or political leadership since everyone is leadership in a sense, so there is very little that could wreck fully cultural transmissions or political arrangements of such a system.

• No Permanent Central Army: Standing armies create fiscal extraction, repeated elite coups, internal domination, and an expansion and degradative pressure on themselves and others. The longest-lived confederations used militia-on-demand, alliance warfare, lacked central treasuries, and only had durable militaries during warfare and demoted them during peacetime.

• Defensive, Not Expansionary, Military Posture; External Threat Without Internal Domination: There is a “Goldilocks zone” or sweet spot around the military infrastructures and cultures of durable long-lived confederations: having “enough” outside and irregular dangers to justify cooperation, yet “not too much” permanent danger that would justify permanent cultures and permanent armies of coercion internally. Equally this can be phrased as: “too much peace → fragmentation” versus “Too much threat → militarization → empire.” Standing offensive capacity accelerates internal domination long before and far more than achieving external security.

• Exit Is Always Possible from the Confederation (Even If Rarely Used): Durable confederations allow exit legally, and make exit costly socially or economically, instead of militarily. The moment exit becomes treason, the potential for collapse accelerates from unexpected outcomes of any battles to maintain a confederation against the will of its own members.

• Elastic Constitutions and Procedures, instead of Hard Rules and Deadlines: Rules are stable in principle, yet flexible in procedure and administration case by case; these are Ostrom-style “graduated sanctions”, judged case by case, instead of based on legal codes about ultimate authorities and their ultimatums and dictats. Written constitutions are good, yet leadership mindsets employing them that are unable to bend, tend to snap.

• Economic Coordination Without Fiscal Extraction; Non-Extractive Central Authority: Confederations collapse when the center becomes fiscally autonomous and parasitical upon the periphery of its members. Thus, trade leagues last longer than politicized tax empires because trade coordination is more important in a continuous sense of sustainable trade, compared to the tribute/tax/extraction that only cares about ongoing growth of that extraction. For instance, the Hanseatic League outlived dozens of monarchies because it coordinated flows, instead of tribute. It failed to even have a treasury to house fiscal extraction. The purpose of the league was hardly interpreted as raising enough tribute or taxes among members to fund centralized collective endeavors, though was arranged as ongoing deliberations of particular projects and management deliberations—case by case—of trade routes, trade voyages, military convoys, fishery management, forest management, with embargoes on trading with rogue members to keep the coordination.

• Ecological Embedding; Ecological Reproduction as a Constitutional Function: Long-lived confederations align boundaries with watersheds, coasts, and plains. They embed commons management into the boundaries of governance. On the other hand, ecological misalignment kills any chance of durable institutions that to have economic, cultural, and social durability, have to be based on ecological durability of lifeways and trades. Confederations that refuse to reproduce or improve their ecological base choose by default to centralize and to expand coercion on others to survive—and thereby destroy themselves and others in the process of their expansion.

This is the whole point of the Glomos of course: to make it more explicit how that ecological alignment contributes to longevity, representation, and sustainably all at once.

• A Narrative of Mutual Non-Domination: The most durable confederations tell themselves a story of their group desire in many different zones “not to be ruled or destroyed by others,” instead of a story of an imposed cultural unity. “We join so no one rules us.” Instead of the watchword of a confederation being ‘e pluribus unum’ (one from many), long-lived confederations have a watchword similar to the following: ‘multi recusant ut unus regi’ (many refuse rule by one), or ‘multae regiones unius imperium recusant’ (many regions refuse rule by one), or ‘multi unius imperium recusant’ (many refuse rule by one), or ‘multi deliberant ut unius imperium recusent’ (many deliberate to refuse rule by one). This is explicit in: Iroquois Great Law of Peace, Dutch revolt ideology, Achaean federal rhetoric, Old Swiss Confederation, etc.

• Deliberate Underreach; Constitutionalized Decentralization; Cultural–Ritual Integration Without Ideological Uniformity: Confederations survive by shared treasured ways of deciding and deliberating, not shared central doctrines. If decentralization is not legally entrenched, centralization will emerge by crisis accretion. They do less than they could with their autonomous institutional designs.

For instance, there is sometimes: an intentional lack of a central treasury (Hanse); an intentional block to standardize culture, impose religion, or institute a singular leadership cadre (Swiss Confederation, Haudenosaunee); the lack of an attempt to equalize economic outcomes or to equalize voting powers or local laws and instead to tolerate regional variety among league members’ legal and taxation systems; the intentional lack of a permanent central/federal army; graduated voting systems based on population scales instead of equally of central votes (Lydian League; Haudenosaunee, etc.); the desire to coordinate mere economic expansion zones for all groups (Chalcidian League and it only choosing to institute common currencies and other standardizations like weights and measures) instead of centralized redistribution from tribute to all groups. The opposite of all these would be imperial institutional designs. These are best resisted in the longest lived confederations by simply refusing intentionally to develop the institutional architecture for it in the first place as indicated above, so fingerholds of a federal addiction are unable to start grasping control at all, since there is nothing to grasp, instead of only relying on some kind of elite ‘self-restraint or moral codes’ as the only restraint. Confederations show that the best defense against the federal addiction is just refuse to build it, and they will not come."

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Tables

Commons Institutions in Leagues and Confederations

Click on the link for the separate page.

Longevity of Leagues and Confederations

Confederation / League	Region	Dates	Longevity (Years)
Mi’kmaq Confederacy (Mi’kma’ki)*	NE North America	ca. 1000 CE – present (without territory)	~1000
Guarani Confederations*	S. Brazil / Paraguay	ca. 1000 CE – present	~1000
Māori iwi (tribal confederacies)*,**	Aotearoa / New Zealand	ca. 1200 – present	~825
Council of Three Fires (Anishinaabe Confederacy)*	Great Lakes	ca. 1200 – present (without territory)	~825
Muisca Confederation (→ Spanish Empire)	Colombia, South America	ca. 800 – 1537	~737
Old Swiss Confederacy → Swiss Confederation*	Switzerland	1291–1798; 1803–1848; 1848–present	730
Blackfoot Confederacy (Niitsitapi)*	Northern Plains, North America	ca. 1200 – 1877	~677
Haudenosaunee Confederacy (“Five Nations”)*	NE North America	ca. 1140 – 1796; continuing coordination	~656 (pre-colonial)
Tupi Confederacies (incl. Tamoio, Tupi-Guarani)*	Brazil	ca. 1000–1600 / ca. 1400–1567	~600 / 167
Cretan Leagues	Crete	ca. 650 BCE – 67 BCE	~583
Amphictyonic Leagues (Anthela / Delos / Delphi / Troezen)*,**	Greece	ca. 1100–800 BCE – 338 BCE / 131 CE	~1231–462
Natchez Paramount Confederacy	Mississippi River region	ca. 1200 – 1731	~531
Kaya Confederacy** (→ Silla)	SW Korea	ca. 42 CE – 562 CE	~520
Hanseatic League	Northern Europe / Baltic	ca. 1150 – 1669	~519
Dutch Republic → Kingdom of the Netherlands*,**	Netherlands	1581–1795; 1815–present	~425
Mahan Confederacy	SW Korea	ca. 100 BCE – 300 CE	~400
Jinhan Confederacy	SE Korea	ca. 100 BCE – 300 CE	~400
Byeonhan Confederacy	South Korea	ca. 100 BCE – 300 CE	~400
Samhan Confederacy (aggregate)	Korean Peninsula	ca. 100 BCE – 300 CE	~400
Mapuche Butalmapu Confederations	Chile / Argentina	pre-contact – 1800s	~400
Latin League → Roman Republic	Central Italy	ca. 700 – 338 BCE	~362
Aymara Señoríos / Colla Confederations*,**	Lake Titicaca region	ca. 1100 – 1450 CE	~350
Neutral Confederacy	Great Lakes	ca. 1300 – 1653	~353
Inca Confederation → Inca Empire	Cusco, South America	ca. 1200 – 1533	~333
Muscogee (Creek) Confederacy	SE North America	ca. 1500 – 1830	~330
Hellenistic Client Leagues**	Eastern Mediterranean	ca. 300 BCE – 30 BCE	~270
United States (→ Federal Empire)**	North America	1776/1783 – 1865 (→ present)	89–250
Mayapan Confederacy → Spanish Empire*,**	Yucatán	ca. 1200 – 1441	~241
Achaean League (early)	N. Peloponnese	ca. 500 BCE – 280 BCE	~220
Reformed Boeotian League / Theban Federation	Central Greece	379 BCE – 171 BCE	208
Ionian League	Western Anatolia	ca. 700 BCE – 493 BCE	~207
Wendat (Huron) Confederacy*	Great Lakes	ca. 1450 – 1650	~200
Illinois (Illiniwek) Confederation	Mississippi Valley	1400s – late 1600s	~200
Peloponnesian League → Spartan Empire**	Southern Greece	ca. 550 BCE – 362 BCE	~188
Wabanaki Confederacy*	NE North America	1680 – 1862; revived 1993 – present	~182
Aetolian League	Central Greece	ca. 370 BCE – 189 BCE	~181
Fante Confederacy → British annexation	Gold Coast (Ghana)	ca. 1700 – 1873	~173
Maratha Confederacy	Deccan Plateau, India	1674 – 1818	144
Achaean League (federal)	Greece	280 BCE – 146 BCE	134
Boeotian League (early)	Central Greece	ca. 520 BCE – 386 BCE	~134
Lycian League**	SW Anatolia	168 BCE – 43 BCE	125
Triple Alliance / Aztec Empire	Central Mexico	1428 – 1521	93
Ikko-ikki (Ishiyama Hongan-ji) League	Japan	ca. 1488 – 1580	~92
Chalcidian (Olynthian) League	Northern Greece	ca. 432 BCE – 348 BCE	~84
Sikh Confederacy	Punjab	1716 – 1799	83
Powhatan Confederacy	Virginia	ca. 1570 – 1646	~76
Delian League → Athenian Empire**	Aegean	478 BCE – 404 BCE	74
Northwestern / Western Lakes Confederacy	Great Lakes	ca. 1740 – 1794	~54
Pueblo Revolt Confederation	SW North America	1680 – 1696	16
Mawooshen Confederacy	Maine & Acadia	ca. 1600 – 1615	~15
Hellenic League (League of Corinth)**	Greece	337 BCE – 322 BCE	15
Wabash Confederacy	Ohio Valley	ca. 1780 – 1792	~12
Arcadian League	Peloponnese	370 BCE – 362 BCE	8
Māori cross-tribal confederacy (Kīngitanga)	New Zealand	1858 – 1864	6
Tecumseh’s Confederacy	Great Lakes	1808 – 1813	5

More information

Copy of introduction excerpt also at: Why Do Confederations Survive Longer and Better than States

Contact author Mark D. Whitaker at (mwhitaker@khu.ac.kr)

References:

• Birch, Jennifer 2022. Premodern Confederacies: Balancing Strategic Collective Action and Local Autonomy. Front. Polit. Sci., 09 February 2022 Sec. Comparative Governance. Volume 4 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.807239

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2022.807239/full; Elizabeth Arkush, Paul Roscoe, Jennifer

• Birch, Ben Raffield. 2025. Problematizing ‘alliance’ in anthropological archaeology, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 79 101706, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2025.101706. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278416525000510)]