Country
A country is an area of land, colloquially used as a synonym for sovereign state or other political entities, but also used to refer to the hinterland surrounding urban areas, as well as to describe the culture of people living in these places. Usually, the term country is applied to occupied areas of land, however it can be used to refer to uninhabited areas or wastelands. When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, a state with limited recognition, a constituent country, or a dependent territory. Most sovereign states, but not all countries, are members of the United Nations.
There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world with a range between 193 to 237. This ambiguity is a result of several states having disputed sovereignty status or limited recognition, and a number of non-sovereign entities are commonly considered countries. The definition and usage of the word "country" has fluctuated and changed over time. The Economist wrote in 2010 that "any attempt to find a clear definition of a country soon runs into a thicket of exceptions and anomalies."
Areas much smaller than a political entity may be referred to as a "country", such as the West Country in England, "big sky country", "coal country", or simply "the country". The term "country" is also used as a qualifier descriptively, such as country music or country living.
Etymology
The word country comes from Old French contrée, which derives from Vulgar Latin contrata lying opposite"; ", derived from contra. It most likely entered the English language after the Franco-Norman invasion during the 11th century.Definition of a country
In English, the word has increasingly become associated with political divisions, so that one sense, associated with the indefinite article – "a country" – is now frequently applied as a synonym for a state or a former sovereign state. It may also be used as a synonym for "nation". Taking as examples Canada, Sri Lanka, and Yugoslavia, cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in 1997 that "it is clear that the relationships between 'country' and 'nation' are so different from one to the next as to be impossible to fold into a dichotomous opposition as they are into a promiscuous fusion."Areas much smaller than a political state may be referred to as countries, such as the West Country in England, "big sky country", "coal country" and many other terms. The word "country" is also used for the sense of native sovereign territory, such as the widespread use of Indian country in the United States.
The term "country" in English may also be wielded to describe rural areas, or used in the form "countryside." Raymond Williams, a Welsh scholar, wrote in 1975:
The unclear definition of "country" in modern English was further commented upon by philosopher Simon Keller:
Melissa Lucashenko, an Aboriginal Australian writer, expressed the difficulty of defining "Country" in a 2005 essay, "Unsettlement":
Statehood
When referring to a specific polity, the term "country" may refer to a sovereign state, state with limited recognition, constituent country, or dependent territory. A sovereign state is a political entity that has supreme legitimate authority over a part of the world. There is no universal agreement on the number of "countries" in the world since several states have disputed sovereignty status, and a number of non-sovereign entities are commonly called countries. No definition is binding on all the members of the community of nations on the criteria for statehood. State practice relating to the recognition of a country typically falls somewhere between the declaratory and constitutive approaches.International law defines sovereign states as not under another. The declarative theory outlined in the 1933 Montevideo Convention describes a "state as a person of international law" in Article 1:
- Having a permanent population
- Having a defined territory
- Having a government
- Having the ability to enter into relations with other states
According to the constitutive theory, a state is a legal entity of international law if, and only if, it is recognised as sovereign by at least one other country. Because of this, new states could not immediately become part of the international community or be bound by international law, and recognised nations did not have to respect international law in their dealings with them. In 1912, L. F. L. Oppenheim said the following, regarding constitutive theory:
In 1976 the Organisation of African Unity define state recognition as:
File:Dependent territories.svg|thumb|upright=1.3|Dependent territories and their sovereign states. All territories are labeled according to ISO 3166-1 or with numbers. Colored areas without labels are integral parts of their respective countries. Antarctica is shown as a condominium instead of individual claims.
Some countries, such as Taiwan, Sahrawi Republic and Kosovo, have limited recognition or actively disputed sovereignty from sovereign states. Some sovereign states are unions of separate polities, each of which may also be considered a country in its own right, called constituent countries. The Danish Realm consists of Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland. The Kingdom of the Netherlands consists of the Netherlands proper, Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. The United Kingdom consists of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Dependent territories are the territories of a sovereign state that are outside of its proper territory. These include the overseas territories of New Zealand, the dependencies of Norway, the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, the territories of the United States, the external territories of Australia, the special administrative regions of China, the autonomous regions of the Danish Realm, Åland, Overseas France, and the Caribbean Netherlands. Some dependent territories are treated as a separate "country of origin" in international trade, such as Hong Kong, Greenland, and Macau.
Identification
Symbols of a country may incorporate cultural, religious or political symbols of any nation that the country includes. Many categories of symbols can be seen in flags, coats of arms, or seals.Name
Most countries have a long name and a short name. The long name is typically used in formal contexts and often describes the country's form of government. The short name is the country's common name by which it is typically identified.Unlike the short name, the long name can change more often when the government changes.
For certain states, the long form and the short form are identical.
The name of a country can hold cultural and diplomatic significance. Upper Volta changed its name to Burkina Faso to reflect the end of French colonization, and the name of North Macedonia was disputed for years due to a conflict with the similarly named Macedonia region in Greece. Southern Rhodesia changed its name to Zimbabwe, Northern Rhodesia to Zambia, Bechuanaland to Botswana, the Congo to Zaire and back again to the Congo, Dahomey to Benin, Ivory Coast to Côte d'Ivoire, Swaziland to Eswatini, Persia to Iran, East Pakistan to East Bengal and then to Bangladesh, Ceylon to Sri Lanka, Siam to Thailand, Burma changed its English name to Myanmar, Cambodia to Kampuchea and back again to Cambodia, Byelorussia to Belarus, Kirghizia to Kyrgyzstan, Moldavia to Moldova, or Turkey to Türkiye.
The International Organization for Standardization maintains a list of country codes as part of ISO 3166 to designate each country with a country code. The ISO 3166 standard currently comprises 249 countries, 193 of which are sovereign states that are members of the United Nations.
Flags
Originally, flags representing a country would generally be the personal flag of its rulers; however, over time, the practice of using personal banners as flags of places was abandoned in favor of flags that had some significance to the nation, often its patron saint. Early examples of these were the maritime republics such as Genoa which could be said to have a national flag as early as the 12th century. However, these were still mostly used in the context of marine identification.Although some flags date back earlier, widespread use of flags outside of military or naval context begins only with the rise of the idea of the nation state at the end of the 18th century and particularly are a product of the Age of Revolution. Revolutions such as those in France and America called for people to begin thinking of themselves as citizens as opposed to subjects under a king, and thus necessitated flags that represented the collective citizenry, not just the power and right of a ruling family. With nationalism becoming common across Europe in the 19th century, national flags came to represent most of the states of Europe. Flags also began fostering a sense of unity between different peoples, such as the Union Jack representing a union between England and Scotland, or began to represent unity between nations in a perceived shared struggle, for example, the Pan-Slavic colors or later Pan-Arab colors.
As Europeans colonized significant portions of the world, they exported ideas of nationhood and national symbols, including flags, with the adoption of a flag becoming seen as integral to the nation-building process. Political change, social reform, and revolutions combined with a growing sense of nationhood among ordinary people in the 19th and 20th centuries led to the birth of new nations and flags around the globe. With so many flags being created, interest in these designs began to develop and the study of flags, vexillology, at both professional and amateur levels, emerged. After World War II, Western vexillology went through a phase of rapid development, with many research facilities and publications being established.