How Many Countries Are There?

The number of countries in the world is not simple to determine.

• The United Nations, founded in 1945, has 191 members. Andorra joined in July 1993; East Timor and Switzerland are the most recent new members, but some states are not members (e.g., Taiwan). Ukraine and Belorussia (former Soviet republics) were members for decades before they became independent.

• Telecommunication companies have assigned 182 international telephone dialing codes, mostly to countries. The old East German code, 37, is now used by the three independent Baltic republics. The Vatican recently got its own code too, but Canada shares the dialing code 1 with the United States and Caribbean islands. Greenland, officially part of Denmark, also has its own telephone code. Even the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans have their own codes!

• Other measures of national status exist: 185 nations belong to the Universal Postal Union, including Australia's Norfolk Island and the United Kingdom's Isle of Man, but not South Africa or Taiwan.

• World currencies -- 168 in all -- are another way to define national status. But many countries use the same currency: Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc; Monaco, the French franc; Micronesia and Ecuador, the U.S. dollar; and the Vatican, the Italian lira. Some countries (Ukraine) have two currencies.

• The International Standards Commission has assigned two-letter codes to 239 entities, including the Falkland Islands. Antarctica even has its own: AQ.

• Finally, Coca Cola claims to be sold in 195 countries, not including Cuba, Libya, and Iraq because of U.S. trade embargoes. Source: The Economist (1993), p. 48.

• Read about the last remaining colonies in the world. Do you think the USA has colonies? Which colony is the largest in area?

Is Taiwan a country?  How does the U.S. government deal with Taiwan?

There are a thousand ways of going wrong in discussing Taiwan, mostly because its political situation has created a through-the-looking-glass world of twisted semantics and dogmatic naming conventions. First, what is it? A sovereign nation by all appearances, but China (or "Communist China" in the cold-war parlance of Taiwan's government) sees it as simply a renegade province, to be returned in due time.

Taiwan attempts to get around this by distinguishing between the land and the government. So the Republic of China (ROC), the government that Mao drove off the mainland, is the rightful ruler of China, albeit in absentia save one bit: the main island of Taiwan and some tiny surrounding islands. Official guides to Taiwan still begin by describing with a straight face China's land mass, population and history, eventually arriving at the awkward admission that most of this is unfortunately not under ROC control at the moment.

Journalists usually avoid the obstacle course by referring to Taiwan as an "island" and moving on. But foreign governments are forced to tread a more delicate line. A State Department memo of "Dos and Don'ts" on Taiwan that was leaked to the Washington Post earlier this year gives an idea of how tough this can be. Since the American government does not recognize Taiwan as a country ("use `jurisdiction' or `area' "), its officials (called "consultants," since the staff of the pseudo-private American Institute in Taiwan that serves as the de-facto embassy must temporarily resign from the foreign service) refer to Taiwan's "authorities" rather than "government". When the American ambassador ("AIT director") meets his Taiwanese counterpart ("director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office") to sign a treaty ("AIT-TECRO agreement"), the meeting is "unofficial."

Even within Taiwan, words are loaded. Never mind that almost all of the country's inhabitants are ethnically Han Chinese, just like the people on the mainland: the word "Taiwanese" is used to describe someone whose family settled on the island before 1949 (often centuries before), a group that makes up about 85% of the population. "Mainlanders" are the minority who (or whose parents) arrived with the forces of Generalissimo Chiang. AIT staff have had to invent the painful neologism "Taiwans" to refer to all of them together.

Transcribing names of people and places is tricky too. Almost the whole world now accepts the mainland's "pinyin" method of Romanizing Chinese ("Mao Zedong" and "Beijing"), but Taiwan rejects it. It has not standardized on any of the half-dozen other methods either, though the Wade-Giles system ("Mao Tse-tung") is widely used, so visitors often find that business card addresses, signposts and maps are hard to reconcile. This survey will stick with whatever seems most appropriate in the context. Apologies for any offence.

Source: The Economist, 7 Nov1998.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 1 April 1996; last revised on 29 May 2008.