stateling

noun

1. (derogatory, sometimes, uncommon)A statelet; a very small nation-state, or a region that acts like a nation-state.

   “[…]Following the lead / Of some sly stateling, one by one depart / The muster'd conclave, till the bounds are broke / In order unimpeached. […]”

   “With the exception of France, whom the Americans would, perhaps, challenge for seeming now to prejudge the case against them, and Spain jealous for Cuba and Porto Rico, there is scarcely a State or Stateling in European Christendom, from Russia down to the Free Towns of Hamburg, Lubeck, or Bremen, or the Canton of Geneva, which might not be safely accepted as arbiter.”

   “[…] having driven out of existence the old-time private academy, once the boast of every New England village, have reared up a pedagogic caste of stateling schoolteachers whose wooden adhesion to artificial traditions has bred a race of New England men and women as little to be compared in real intelligence with their fathers and mothers as they are in sincere religion.”

   “Nor could she be delighted by the fact that Koweit, that ticklish Arab stateling at the head of the Gulf, was named as the terminus of the line,[…]”

   “And wherever a vernacular could be found that was at all different from Russian its nationalist followers were enrolled and the new stateling was told to be permanent.”