Country

• 1. Introduction

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  A country can wave with wheat fields, be girt by sea, have a founding date, be democratic and free, be English speaking, culturally diverse, war torn or Islamic. The philosopher Simon Keller gathered that strange list of properties to make a point. We attribute so many different kinds of things to countries that the word almost slips through our fingers. In 2010, The Economist put it plainly: any attempt to find a clear definition of a country soon runs into a thicket of exceptions and anomalies. So what is a country? Is it a collection of citizens, a project, an idea, an ideal? Some philosophers reach further, imagining a country as an organic entity with its own life and character, or an autonomous agent, just like you or me. The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz studied Canada, Sri Lanka, and Yugoslavia and concluded that the link between country and nation shifts so much from place to place that no single rule can hold them all. This is a word that means a sovereign state, a rural field, a music genre, and a place of belonging all at once. The questions ahead ask what counts, who decides, and how a country tells the world who it is.

• 2. What Counts As One

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  Taiwan, the Sahrawi Republic, and Kosovo each hold limited recognition or actively disputed sovereignty from other states. The breakaway state of Transnistria has no recognition at all. This is the heart of the ambiguity. A country can function as a sovereign state, a state with limited recognition, a constituent country, or a dependent territory, and the boundaries between those categories blur. A sovereign state holds supreme legitimate authority over a part of the world, yet some entities that lack that status are still commonly called countries anyway. Constituent countries show how one sovereign state can contain several. The Danish Realm is made up of Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. The Kingdom of the Netherlands joins the Netherlands proper with Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. The United Kingdom brings together England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, each a country in its own right. Dependent territories add another layer. The British Overseas Territories, the Crown Dependencies, Åland, Overseas France, and the special administrative regions of China are sometimes called countries because of their autonomous administration. A few, including Hong Kong, Greenland, and Macau, are even treated as a separate country of origin in international trade. That trade quirk hints at a larger question about who gets to confer existence at all.

• 3. The Question Of Recognition

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  The 1933 Montevideo Convention set out four marks of a state as a person of international law. It must have a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the ability to enter into relations with other states. This is the declarative theory, and Article 3 of the convention pushes it to a bold conclusion. A sovereign state can exist even if no other country recognizes it. Because the convention restated customary international law, its principles reach beyond its signatories to all subjects of international law as a whole. The European Economic Community, the European Union through its Badinter Committee, and the legal scholar James Crawford, the Whewell Professor, have voiced similar views. The rival idea cuts the other way. Under the constitutive theory, a state becomes a legal entity only if at least one other country recognizes it as sovereign. In 1912, L. F. L. Oppenheim framed it sharply. International law does not say a state is not in existence as long as it is not recognized, but it takes no notice of it before its recognition. In 1976, the Organisation of African Unity called recognition an act of sovereignty for each member of the international community, to be taken individually. State practice in the real world tends to land somewhere between these two poles.

• 4. What's In A Name

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  Upper Volta became Burkina Faso to mark the end of French colonization. A name carries cultural and diplomatic weight, and changing one can rewrite a country's relationship with its past. North Macedonia spent years in a naming dispute tied to the Macedonia region in Greece. The map is dense with such rewrites. Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and Northern Rhodesia became Zambia. Bechuanaland became Botswana, Dahomey became Benin, and Swaziland became Eswatini. The Congo became Zaire and then the Congo again. Persia became Iran, Siam became Thailand, Ceylon became Sri Lanka, and Burma changed its English name to Myanmar. East Pakistan passed through East Bengal before settling as Bangladesh. Most countries carry both a long name and a short name. The long form usually appears in formal contexts and often describes the form of government, and it tends to change more often when the government changes. The short name is the everyday name people use, and for some states the two forms are identical. To bring order to this shifting roll call, the International Organization for Standardization keeps a list of country codes under ISO 3166. The standard currently counts 249 countries, of which 193 are sovereign states and members of the United Nations.

• 5. Flags And Anthems

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  Genoa, one of the maritime republics, could be said to have flown a national flag as early as the 12th century. In those early days a flag was usually the personal banner of a ruler, and even Genoa's served mostly for marine identification at sea. Widespread civilian use of flags arrived only at the end of the 18th century, with the rise of the nation state and the Age of Revolution. The revolutions in France and America asked people to think of themselves as citizens rather than subjects under a king. That shift demanded flags representing the whole citizenry, not just a ruling family. Across 19th century Europe, national flags came to stand for most states, and some began to knit peoples together. The Union Jack signaled a union between England and Scotland, while the Pan-Slavic and later Pan-Arab colors expressed unity across nations in a shared struggle. As Europeans colonized much of the world, they exported the flag as part of nation building, and the study of flags, vexillology, eventually emerged at professional and amateur levels. National anthems followed a parallel path. The custom of an officially adopted anthem became popular only in the 19th century, though some patriotic songs predate that designation. A few states still have no official anthem and rely on de facto ones. The United Kingdom uses God Save the King and Sweden uses Du gamla, Du fria, while Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau serves Wales within the United Kingdom.

• 6. Sorting The World

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  For the 2020 fiscal year, the World Bank drew its income lines in dollars. A low-income economy had a gross national income per capita of $1,025 or less in 2018. Lower-middle-income economies ran from $1,026 to $3,995, upper-middle-income economies from $3,996 to $12,375, and high-income economies reached $12,376 or more. These thresholds turn the messy idea of development into a measurable scale. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs sorts the world differently in its annual World Economic Situation and Prospects Report. It groups states as developed countries, economies in transition, or developing countries, using per capita gross national income alongside geography. Its developing regions include Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, while economies in transition sit in the former Soviet Union and South-Eastern Europe. The World Bank also tracks regional trends, dividing the globe into areas such as East Asia and Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. It sorts countries by its own operational policies too, into International Development Association countries, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development countries, and Blend countries. These ledgers measure income, yet they cannot capture the positive emotional bond a person feels toward a country, the devotion and attachment that goes by the name patriotism.