State Capacity Without Self-Provision: Separating Political Authority from Capability Provision in Small States

Small states are commonly analyzed through a capacity problem: they face high fixed costs, thin administrative pools, and vulnerabilities that make it difficult to reproduce the institutional apparatus of larger states. Yet this framing can obscure an important distinction between possessing a capability, directly providing it, and retaining political authority over the arrangements through which it is obtained. This paper develops a provision-authority separation framework for small-state capacity. It argues that a state can access monetary, customs, administrative, security, or other capabilities through durable external arrangements without thereby transferring all political authority over the relevant policy domain. Liechtenstein provides a structured case because its statehood combines extensive external provision with continued international sovereignty and demonstrable instances of policy divergence from its principal partner, Switzerland. The paper distinguishes three analytical questions: whether a capability is reliably accessible, who supplies or administers it, and where politically meaningful authority remains. It introduces the concepts of provision-authority separation and externalized state capacity, together with a qualitative capability-architecture test. The contribution is integrative rather than a claim that dependence, delegation, or external shelter are new phenomena. The central claim is that state capacity and state self-provision are not the same thing: the institutional location of a capability does not by itself determine where political authority resides.