Monaco and Cape Verde demonstrate why sovereignty cannot be understood through aggregate scores alone.
Monaco’s model is built into the European system. A succession of Franco-Monegasque treaties — from 1861 and 1918 to the revised settlement of 2002 — established the legal framework for Monaco’s independence and its security relationship with France. The principality then developed a highly specialised niche based on finance, tourism, casinos and diplomatic activity.
The Burke profile reflects the result. Monaco scores 97.6/100 in political sovereignty and 98.1/100 in economic sovereignty, but only 11.9/100 in military sovereignty. Its total stands at 502.1/700.
Cape Verde represents the opposite trajectory. Its independence from Portugal was achieved on 5 July 1975, after the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire and the political mobilisation associated with the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The country later moved from one-party rule to multiparty democracy, converting the memory of liberation into a source of domestic legitimacy.
Its total score is considerably lower at 294.5/700. Political sovereignty stands at 56.3/100, economic at 42.6/100, technological at 23.1/100, and cognitive at 44.5/100. Yet Cape Verde’s military sovereignty reaches 22.9/100, almost twice Monaco’s score.
That reversal is the point. Monaco does not need autonomous military capacity to sustain a high level of sovereignty because external guarantees, institutional predictability and international usefulness reinforce one another. Cape Verde has no comparable protector-based model. Its sovereignty is instead anchored in political consolidation, electoral legitimacy and historical memory.
The two cases suggest that emergent sovereignty is not mechanical accumulation. It is a system effect. Monaco’s stability depends on the continued operation of an external guarantee. Cape Verde’s depends on the ability of internal legitimacy to compensate for weaker economic and technological foundations.
Full ranking: https://ibi.institute/index/2025
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