Liechtenstein’s independence has always been more symbolic than real. To live here is to know that sovereignty is not something we practice but something we borrow — from Austria once, from the German Confederation later, and now most deeply from Switzerland. Our defense, our currency, even much of our administration is outsourced. It is a strange position: a state that exists, but whose existence is contingent upon the goodwill and power of others. To call this freedom is to drain the word of its meaning.
The question, then, is whether a people so small can ever claim sovereignty in any genuine sense. Many conclude that size condemns us to dependency. I reject this. For me, the smallness of Liechtenstein is not our weakness but our strength. A country of fewer than 40,000 people has no need to reproduce the bureaucratic leviathans of larger states. We can build forms of community that are direct, democratic, and rooted in solidarity. We can achieve what larger nations only theorize — the everyday practice of communal freedom.
To imagine this future, we must begin by analyzing the material realities of our present. Our economy is dominated by banks and trusts that serve foreign wealth, not the workers and farmers of this land. Our social fabric is bound by a monarchy whose legitimacy rests not on the people, but on the inertia of tradition. Our political sovereignty is undermined by reliance on Switzerland, whose military and financial umbrella ensures our survival at the cost of our autonomy. These are not accidents; they are structures, and structures can be dismantled and rebuilt.
A communal Liechtenstein would mean more than changing laws; it would mean changing the basis of life itself. Defense would not be contracted to a neighboring state but organized as a civic duty, with every able citizen participating in the protection of the commons. The economy would not be subordinated to tax avoidance schemes but grounded in cooperative enterprises and community trusts. Education would not prepare our youth to be managers of foreign capital but to be stewards of our shared resources and democratic institutions. In short, sovereignty would no longer be defined by treaties but by lived practice.
Critics will say this vision is utopian. They will point to the crushing power of global capital, the geopolitical realities of Europe, the fate of past communal experiments like the Paris Commune. These critiques are not without weight. The Commune, too, was small, vulnerable, and ultimately crushed by forces far larger than itself. But its failure was not inevitable — it was a failure of arms, of alliances, of timing. To learn from it is not to abandon the dream of communal freedom, but to prepare more thoroughly for its defense.
A Marxist-anarchist perspective teaches us to see both the contradictions that bind us and the possibilities they open. The contradiction of Liechtenstein is that we are formally sovereign yet materially dependent. That contradiction cannot be resolved by pretending size makes politics irrelevant; it can only be resolved by organizing power differently. The task is not to imitate the centralized states that dominate Europe, but to model another form of life: communal, solidaristic, and sovereign in practice rather than in name.
This article is not the end of an argument but the beginning of one. The small can be free. The weak can become strong. But only if we dare to act not as subjects of a borrowed independence, but as citizens of our own freedom. That is the possibility before Liechtenstein — fragile, dangerous, but also more real than the hollow sovereignty we live under today.