Determining What Qualifies a Country As a Country

Comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones of Map Men who previously used their sharp humor to find the logic in determining the number of continents on Earth, hilariously pondered aloud as to how many countries are considered countries according to seemingly arbitrary rules set by the United Nations, the Montevideo Convention, and other international agreements.

How many countries are there? Does the UN’s official list of 195 include them all? Which ones are missing? Does Sealand count?

They also wondered why their own country is counted as one (United Kingdom) instead of four (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).

Countries in the UN have to be not only autonomous but sovereign and those two words don’t mean the same thing. ‘Autonomous’ means you come up with all your own laws and taxes and so on but ‘sovereign’ means you have the last word on these laws and taxes and there is no one higher up who can interfere. Many autonomous regions around the world can’t become sovereign until they’re let go by their host countries So that’s why the UK is a member of the UN but the four countries that make it up, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland… are not.