Scotland's strange consensus that we are small

"We are a small country," she declared. "That is a great thing."

Unionists agree Scotland is small (remember Jack McConnell's "best wee country in the world" shtick?). It's just they are far from as convinced with Ms Sturgeon that this is a "great thing".

But what if they were both wrong? What if it turned out that Scotland was, well, middling?

We have all got so used to the tired and tiresome "small is beautiful" versus "bigger is better" arguments of the indyref that we have never really stopped to ask ourselves how big we really are.

Let's assume that by "country" we mean a sovereign state - the kind of thing we voted not to be last year - or a self-governing dependency.

So where would Scotland rank? Well, in any league table we would be hopelessly average rather than small.

Pleasingly, by my rough measure, Scotland comes 116th in the world by both area and population, out of 250 or so territories, from China to Pitcairn, population 56.

So we are about the same size physically as Panama or the Czech Republic and have a population of around the same as Eritrea or Slovakia.

Our economy would be the 42nd biggest if we were added to a United Nations list of the economies of 193 sovereign states for 2013.

That is just above much bigger Greece and, remarkably, Pakistan, one of the most populous (but most poor) states on the planet.  That, of course, is in nominal terms.

International academics in (the slightly niche) field of small nation studies took a real interest in our indyref. Their perspective can be found here.

But where does this idea that we are small come from? Is it cultural cringe? Well, that is one theory.

But our confident and relatively cringe-free Nordic neighbours also think they are small.

After all, like Scotland, the Scandinavians have bigger neighbours.

In fact, some 4bn of the roughly 7bn people on the planet live in the 10 biggest sovereign states, such as China. So living in a super-state is more common than not.

But is it helpful to think of Scotland as small?

Not hugely, except rhetorically. I mean what politician wants to boast about their average, "mediocre" country?

During the independence referendum campaign Yessers kept - at times randomly - pointing to successful states of our size, as if their scale alone was what made them successful.

Equally crudely, unionists took pleasure in some pretty low-info bashing of two of our smaller (but richer) neighbours, Iceland and Ireland.

Alas, few on either side asked what it was that made some states of Scotland's scale do well and others not. How can Scotland-size states overcome the dangers of stifling consensus or centralisation? How do they manage security and economic risks in an interdependent world?

Malcolm Harvey of Aberdeen University tussles with such questions. He researches "small nations" - although he admits nobody has ever quite decided what constitutes one. His conclusion?

"Size matters, but so too do powers," Dr Harvey reckons. "The small states that prosper and those that do not, do so because of the decisions made by political elites in those states."

In other words, big or small, it is not the size of your country that counts. It is what you do with it.