Long-distance coercion fails because states cannot police distant provinces

Evidence

As the Spaniards had discovered to their cost in the Netherlands, simple coercion is not enough, if only because at such distances the resources of the state are not up to providing the policing required. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1764

Categorization

• XREF: Observation distance as a constraint on enforcement parallels how the loss of sight removes observability in Saramago — both are failures of the monitoring substrate, echoing the reader’s Luhmann framework.