Why Do Confederations Survive Longer and Better than States

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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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Source

* 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.