askchapo

I'm a fan of the Matt Christman take. I may be roughing this up pretty badly but: it's got a lot to do with European geography having enough natural borders to create small individual states, but not sturdy enough natural borders to prevent conflict. You end up with a shitton of small-ish states in a perpetual arms race, which means they'll be looking for every advantage possible. Even if it comes at a cost to the stability of the existing order writ large, they'll take it because losing in the arms race is a much more immediate existential threat to the individual states. China had those warring states, but the natural borders were weak enough that they eventually settled into a single state. There's a thousand other factors, too, but I hadn't seen this mentioned from skimming the top few comments in this thread.