Successful at making them irrelevant in a global economy perhaps. What major innovations and technology are coming out of Vienna now? The best case seems to be that tourism stays busy enough to keep the taxes flowing in to sustain the entitlement programs.
"You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
-- Orson Welles' monologue in The Third Man. Which was set in post-war Vienna.
There are so many obvious counterexamples to your claim as others have pointed out. Mongolia was and is a tiny nation but had one of the largest empires the world has ever seen.
