Size does matter! In sovereignty too!

By the end of the first quarter of 2025, the assets under management of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, have reached a record US$11.5 trillion, according to several financial portals, including Investopedia, which reported this figure in April this year. At the end of 2024, the assets under management were still at US$10.5 trillion, which means an increase of 10%. To visualize this unimaginable amount of wealth, compare it to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the EU economies: more than 45 times the GDP of Hungary and more than twice the GDP of Germany, the EU’s largest economy.

If we look at the 10 largest asset managers in the World at the end of 2024, this list includes eight Americans and two Europeans – France’s Crédit Agricole and Switzerland’s UBS – in 7th and 9th place respectively. Even more shocking is that if we were to put the EU’s ten largest economies on this list, only Germany and France would be ranked in terms of GDP, and none of them would be in the top three… And to make matters worse, the assets managed by the world’s ten largest asset managers are more than twice the size of the GDP of the EU Member States!

Source: Own compilation based on fund managers’ annual reports for 2024, Wikipedia, globenewwire.com, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Economic Outlook data.

Of course, many other important economic rankings and actors – the world’s largest banks, manufacturers, service companies, etc. could be cited to illustrate the dramatic decline in sovereignty of states in the 21st century. And economic actors are ‘only’ one factor in this ‘formula’: There are also the international organisations with considerable rights and economic power, such as the EU, NATO, UN, IMF, WTO, WHO, and private sector NGOs, such as Medecins Sans Frontieres, which employs 45,000 people and has a budget of EUR 2.4 billion (2023), and WWF, which has five million supporters, Oxfoam International, CARE International and Amnesty International, which are present in more than 100 countries around the world, are highly organized, have significant financial resources and influence in their areas of operation that rivals that of medium-sized countries.

Of course, social science is also trying to react to these changes, albeit often belatedly, and many new conceptions of sovereignty have been put forward since Jean Bodin (1530-1596), a French jurist and one of the early pioneers of modern state theory, first coined the concept of sovereignty (souveraineté) (“La souveraineté est la puissance absolue et perpétuelle d’une République.” “Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a republic.” – Jean Bodin: Les Six Livres de la République, 1576) However, the sovereignty principles of the Peace of Westphalia (equality of rights of states, territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs), Rousseau’s popular sovereignty, the constitutional sovereignty of the 19th century, and even the much talked about shared sovereignty theories of the European Union are strongly legalistic and sought to exclude other aspects, including economic . It was only after World War II that some interest in economic sovereignty took off in response to the institutionalization of the world economy, globalization and neo-colonialism that began after 1945. However, the neo-liberal economic policies that have dominated since the 1980s – free trade, deregulation, privatization, the Washington Consensus, etc., followed by the 2008 global economic crisis and its consequences, e.g. the de facto Greek bankruptcy and the COVID crisis in 2020, and the Russian-Ukrainian war, raise a series of questions about sovereignty, from which the economy, energy, technology, i.e. non-legal aspects, cannot be excluded. Who decides on budgetary policy: national parliament or troika? How much room for maneuvering does a state have if it falls into debt? Is it possible to have a competitive European industrial policy with the current energy prices and energy procurement?

As economic sovereignty becomes more and more important, it is inevitable to take into account the differences between the SIZES of states and economic organisations. Monaco and France may be legally equal as two states, but if we look at the scope for economic sovereignty of the two countries, they clearly have completely different options, which their decision-makers shall take into account, otherwise they would not be successful leaders of their countries. In the same way, the sovereignty of the United States as a superpower and the sovereignty of a small state like Denmark are different: and when the two meet, as is the case with Greenland, the smaller state will in all likelihood have to give up its sovereignty and perhaps accept that the United States can protect Greenland from the influence of China or Russia. And it is not acceptable to the United States that only Denmark and/or the Greenlanders should have sovereignty over Greenland, its protection, its economic treasures, its ever-expanding navigable waters, etc.

The importance of economic sovereignty, sovereignty over technology, energy, food, etc., determines foreign policy, geostrategy, conflicts and their resolutions today (and in my opinion, in the past). And whatever sovereignty “type” is considered, the SIZE can never be ignored!

Photo credit: Ivan Radic / Flickr