According to the United Nations (UN), there are 193 countries. But there are some absences from this list. The two most famous are Taiwan, whose independence is not recognized by China, and the Vatican, which, despite being outside the UN register, is a “permanent observer” of the entity, a status that gives the right to vote at conferences. Palestine is also an observer state. Furthermore, the UN does not account for possessions and territories. Greenland, for example, is excluded because it is part of Denmark.
To earn a membership card, the country must have defined borders, economic support – a currency helps a lot – and national sovereignty. And still must be recognized by the other members of the club. But the UN list is not the only one. Some sports associations also have their own. This is the case of the International Olympic Committee, with 206 members, and FIFA, which has 209. Territories such as Aruba and the Cayman Islands, not recognized by the UN because they belong, respectively, to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, are part of both entities.
If you think there’s too much country for too little world, know that this is a relatively new thing: at the beginning of the 20th century, there were only 57 nations. “After the 1st World War (1914-1918), the end of the Austro-Hungarian empires, in Europe, and the Turkish-Ottoman empire, in the Middle East, gave rise to new countries, such as Austria and Iraq”, says the historian Maria Aparecida de Aquino, from USP. Decades later, the independence of former colonies in Asia and Africa further divided the map. At that time, India and Pakistan (1947) and Mozambique (1975) emerged, among other countries.
In the 1990s, with the end of the Soviet Union, the world gained another wave of nations, such as Ukraine and Uzbekistan. And new divisions are still drawn in conflict zones. Kashmir, on the border between India and Pakistan, and Chechnya, in Russia, claim independence at bayonet point. The newest countries recognized by the UN are Montenegro, a former Yugoslav republic that gained independent country status in 2006, and South Sudan, which in 2011 gained its independence from Sudan after a long and bloody civil war.
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