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5.1 — Countries, Borders and Flags
There is no agreed number of countries in the world, and the reason why is the most interesting fact in political geography.
What a country is
How many countries are there?
The most common answer is 195 — the 193 member states of the United Nations, plus two permanent observer states, the Holy See and Palestine.
But it depends on who is counting. The Olympics recognises 206 teams, FIFA 211, and a list of places that call themselves countries and are recognised by at least one UN member runs longer still: Kosovo, Taiwan, Western Sahara, Abkhazia, Northern Cyprus and others, each recognised by some states and not others.
The underlying reason there is no clean number is that statehood is not a fact you can verify, it is a status other states grant you. The standard legal test, from the Montevideo Convention of 1933, lists four criteria: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter relations with other states. Taiwan comfortably satisfies all four and is recognised by around a dozen countries, because recognising it means not being recognised by China.
The number of countries has more than tripled since 1945, from about 50 UN founding members, mostly through decolonisation and then the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The newest widely recognised state is South Sudan, in 2011.
Why are so many African borders straight lines?
Because they were drawn in Europe by people who had never been there.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 gathered fourteen European powers to agree rules for claiming African territory and to avoid war among themselves over it. No African was present. Boundaries were set by lines of latitude and longitude, by rivers on incomplete maps, and by bargaining between capitals.
The consequences are permanent. Around 177 ethnic groups were split by a border. The Somali people were divided among five territories. Others were forced together inside one state despite having no shared institutions, language or history — which is the origin of a great deal of subsequent conflict.
What is often missed is that African states chose to keep those borders. The Organisation of African Unity in 1964 adopted a resolution affirming existing frontiers, on the deliberate judgement that redrawing them would produce endless war. It was a decision to accept an unjust map rather than fight over a better one, and it has largely held.
What is an enclave, and where is the strangest border?
An enclave is territory of one country completely surrounded by another. An exclave is a piece of a country separated from its main body.
The most complicated case on Earth was the India-Bangladesh border around Cooch Behar, where a legacy of pre-independence princely arrangements left 106 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh and 92 Bangladeshi enclaves inside India — and, remarkably, an enclave within an enclave within an enclave: a piece of India inside Bangladesh inside India inside Bangladesh, a jute field about 7,000 square metres in size called Dahala Khagrabari.
Tens of thousands of people lived in these fragments with essentially no access to their own country's schools, police or hospitals, and no legal way to reach them. The situation was resolved in 2015 by a land boundary agreement that swapped almost all the enclaves and let residents choose their citizenship — one of the cleanest resolutions of a territorial tangle anywhere.
The Belgian-Dutch town of Baarle is the surviving European equivalent: the border runs through houses, and the front door decides which country you live in. Restaurants straddling the line have had to move tables at closing time when the two countries had different rules.
Which countries are landlocked, and does it matter?
Forty-four countries have no coastline, and two — Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan — are doubly landlocked, meaning every neighbour is landlocked too.
It matters economically and it is measurable. Landlocked developing countries have consistently lower trade volumes and higher transport costs, because every import and export must cross at least one other country's territory, subject to that country's infrastructure, customs and politics. The UN treats landlocked developing countries as a distinct category for this reason.
Bolivia is the standing example. It lost its coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific in 1879, has never accepted the loss, still maintains a navy that operates on Lake Titicaca and the rivers, and marks a Day of the Sea every year.
Switzerland and Austria demonstrate that the handicap is not destiny — but both are wealthy countries surrounded by wealthy countries with excellent infrastructure and no interest in obstructing them, which is precisely the condition most landlocked states lack.
Flags
Which flag is not a rectangle?
Nepal's, and it is the only one. It is two stacked triangular pennants, derived from two separate flags of rival branches of the ruling house that were combined in the nineteenth century.
The remarkable part is the specification. Schedule 1 of the Nepali constitution defines the flag not by giving dimensions but by giving a geometric construction — a numbered sequence of instructions for drawing lines and arcs to produce the exact shape, in the manner of a Euclidean proof. It is the only national flag defined that way.
The sun and moon originally represented the royal house and the ruling family; they are now generally read as a wish that the nation last as long as those bodies.
Switzerland and Vatican City have square flags, which is unusual but still rectangular.
Why do so many flags look alike?
Because most of them descend from a small number of ancestors, and the resemblances are family relationships rather than coincidence.
The tricolour comes from the French Revolution, and the vertical three-band form was copied by countries wanting to signal a republic — Italy, Ireland, Belgium, Romania, and dozens more. Horizontal tricolours mostly descend from the Dutch, and specifically from the flag Peter the Great adopted for Russia, which is why so many Slavic countries use red, white and blue in some order. Those are called the Pan-Slavic colours.
The Pan-Arab colours — black, white, green and red — come from a line of Arabic poetry and were used in the Arab Revolt flag of 1916, which is why Jordan, Palestine, Sudan, Kuwait, the UAE, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Yemen share a palette.
The Pan-African colours — red, gold and green — come from Ethiopia, the one African state that was never colonised, and were adopted by newly independent countries as a deliberate statement.
And the Nordic cross, offset towards the hoist, comes from Denmark's Dannebrog, which is the oldest continuously used national flag, in use since at least the fourteenth century.
The near-identical pairs cause real trouble. Indonesia and Monaco differ only in proportion; Chad and Romania are essentially identical and have argued about it at the UN.
What is in the Indian flag, and what was there before?
Three horizontal bands — saffron, white and green — with the Ashoka Chakra, a 24-spoke navy blue wheel, in the centre.
The design was adopted on 22 July 1947, weeks before independence, and it is a modification of an earlier Congress flag designed by Pingali Venkayya, which had a spinning wheel — the charkha — in the centre as Gandhi's symbol of self-reliance. The Constituent Assembly replaced the charkha with the wheel from Ashoka's Lion Capital at Sarnath, described in 2.1.
The official position on the colours is deliberately non-religious. Radhakrishnan, later President, explained them to the Assembly as courage and sacrifice, truth and peace, and faith and prosperity, and this framing was chosen specifically to avoid the widespread popular reading of saffron as Hindu and green as Muslim.
The flag code originally required khadi — hand-spun, handwoven cloth — and restricted private display, which was relaxed in 2002 after a long legal campaign by the industrialist Naveen Jindal, and further relaxed since.
Why is the Union Jack asymmetric?
Because it is three crosses overlaid, and one of them is off-centre on purpose.
It combines the cross of St George for England (red on white), the saltire of St Andrew for Scotland (white diagonal on blue), and the saltire of St Patrick for Ireland (red diagonal on white). The two diagonals cannot both be centred, so the red Irish diagonal is offset — counterchanged, in the technical language — so that the white Scottish saltire shows on one side of it and not the other.
The practical result is that the flag can be flown upside down, and doing so has historically been a distress signal. The wide white diagonal should be uppermost next to the flagpole.
Wales is not represented at all, because Wales was legally part of the Kingdom of England when the flag was first assembled.
Names and numbers
Which countries have more than one capital?
Several, and the reasons are usually about balancing power.
South Africa has three. Pretoria is the executive capital, Cape Town the legislative, and Bloemfontein the judicial — a compromise from the 1910 union of formerly separate colonies, none of which would accept another's city.
Bolivia has two: Sucre is the constitutional capital and holds the judiciary, while La Paz has the government and legislature.
Several countries have moved their capital deliberately away from their largest city, usually to develop the interior or to place government on neutral ground: Brazil built Brasília in the middle of nowhere in 1960; Nigeria moved from Lagos to Abuja; Myanmar moved to Naypyidaw; Kazakhstan moved to what is now Astana; Indonesia is currently moving from Jakarta, partly because Jakarta is sinking.
Which is the largest and smallest country?
Russia is the largest by area, at over 17 million square kilometres — roughly 11 per cent of the world's land, spanning eleven time zones, and larger than Pluto's surface area.
Vatican City is the smallest, at 0.49 square kilometres and a population of a few hundred. It became a state only in 1929, by treaty with Italy, ending a fifty-nine-year standoff in which the Pope refused to leave the Vatican after Italy annexed the Papal States.
By population, India passed China in 2023 to become the most populous country, with both above 1.4 billion. The smallest by population, apart from the Vatican, are Pacific island states — Tuvalu and Nauru each have around ten to twelve thousand people.
Canada has the longest coastline by a very large margin, over 200,000 kilometres, because of its enormous count of Arctic islands and inlets. That figure depends heavily on the measuring scale, which is a genuine mathematical problem called the coastline paradox: the finer your ruler, the longer the coast becomes, without limit, because a coastline is fractal.
Why do countries have different names in different languages?
Because the name that stuck came from whoever the neighbours were.
The distinction is between an endonym, the name a people use for themselves, and an exonym, the name outsiders use. Deutschland is the endonym; Germany, Allemagne, Alemania, Niemcy and Tyskland are exonyms, each derived from a different Germanic tribe that a particular neighbour happened to meet first. Allemagne comes from the Alemanni, whom the French bordered. The Slavic Niemcy means, roughly, "the ones who cannot speak" — those who do not speak our language.
Several countries have formally requested the world use their endonym: Türkiye rather than Turkey since 2022, Czechia alongside Czech Republic, Eswatini rather than Swaziland since 2018, and Myanmar rather than Burma — the last of which remains politically contested because the change was made by a military government.
India's constitution names the country twice, in Article 1: "India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States." Bharat comes from the legendary emperor Bharata; India comes through Greek and Persian from the river Sindhu, which is the Indus. Hindustan has the same Persian root.
What comes next
The next page is the superlatives — the highest, deepest, longest and driest, and in several cases the surprising answer that the famous holder is not the record holder at all.