What Defines a Country?

University of Oxford geographer Nick Middleton wrote a book titled An Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist. The world has plenty of them, some you are familiar with, and others you’ve probably never heard of. They are real places, but whether they are "countries" or not depend on what you mean by "country."

The problem, he says, is that we don’t have a watertight definition of what a country is. “Which as a geographer, is kind of shocking,” he says. Some cite a treaty signed in 1933, during the International Conference of American States in Montevideo, Uruguay. The “Montevideo Convention” declares that to become a country, a region needs the following features: a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and “the capacity to enter into relations with other states”.

There are plenty of places that fit this definition, yet that really doesn’t help when you’re a small nation trying -and failing- to gain acceptance from other nations. Not only does a country have to be recognized, but recognized by the right nations. Look at Taiwan: it was kicked off the UN’s General Assembly when China joined. Look at the United Kingdom: it has four countries, but only one seat in the UN. Look at Lakotah, in the upper Great Plains of the U.S.: by treaty, it belongs to the Lakotah Nation,  but the U.S. reneged on the treaty long ago and doesn’t take kindly to secessionist movements. Look at Christiana, a neighborhood in Copenhagen: it considers itself sovereign, but relies on Denmark for everything. Conversely, Denmark owns Greenland, but Greenland has its own government. Read more about countries that don’t exist (or do they?) at BBC Future.