This article was mostly written in August 2024, with minor edits in September 2024, but then went dormant as I focused on various other projects and then went on a 3 month break from working on articles.
But a line I wrote in my latest article (When Terror Isn’t)
ISIS was the “Islamic State” and was indeed a state, although one recognised by no other.
Reminded me of this project and the idea of living under a country no one recognises, and I found it enticing, although I’ve been focused on working on bonus material for the Ukrainian Divide documentary with Massi, he’s currently on a short break, so from 14-15 July 2025 I finished the article by writing the Autonomies, Unrecognised and Conclusion segments.
Like with my Terror Series it’s been a bit difficult to come back to because I’m no longer striking while the iron is hot, but like that series I see the value in the topic enough to finish it instead of trashing or forgetting it.
Intro #
Living in a fairly small, low crime area the state isn’t a constant sight or imposing force for me, in my town it has a few signs of its presence, the local drivers agency building marked with government signage, the occasional sign warning about this or that law, the odd police car driving around the streets or the police station building, these are signs of power, power held by a state recognised across the world, the British state, representing the UK, a country with universal world recognition.
There are 192 other states like it, in the worldwide members club we call the “United Nations”, as well as 2 more states, the Vatican City and Palestine, that are partly in the club, we call them “observers”, these 195 states hold power over the vast majority of the world’s population. There are some disputes between them, some UN members don’t recognise others, some disagree on where their borders should begin and end, but if you take a look at a world map they are the ones you’ll see, their borders etched across our continents.
These maps don’t tell the whole story though, there are many other powers out there that won’t be found there, invisible territories that govern thousands or even millions of people.
Wilson’s Dream #
So the question is, how did it get this way? How do we decide which states are “real” and which ones aren’t?
This is something I touched on before in a previous project, MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide:
The first serious attempt to change this state of affairs happened around a century ago, after the First World War of 1914-1918.
The war had been fought between 2 military coalitions, the “Allies” led by the British Empire, French Empire and Russian Empire, and the “Central Powers”, led by the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The Central Powers achieved victory on the Eastern Front, causing the Russian Empire to collapse, but the Allies claimed victory in the West, causing all 3 of the Central Powers empires to collapse as well.
These empires had controlled vast amounts of the world: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia had ruled over almost all of Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottomans had ruled over most of the Middle East. With these empires now broken the remaining big powers, the British, the French, the United States (who had joined the Allied war effort late in 1917) and the remaining Allied nations suddenly had to work out how to put the pieces back together.
And so the US President Woodrow Wilson came up with what he called his “Fourteen Points” that declared how this would be done, most of the 14 are about addressing specific territorial claims that resulted from the war, but points 1-5 and point 14 describe what the new system for the world should look like.
What Wilson was proposing was an end to “might makes right”, self-determination and territorial integrity would be the new order of the day, a fair world where every population has a say and has the freedom to choose for itself, with an international organisation bringing the countries of the world together to resolve any disputes that emerged between them.
This organisation, “general association of nations” Wilson envisioned, was formed as the “League of Nations” as part of the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that formally ended the war, ironically the US never actually joined, as internal divisions meant that the US never signed the treaty, but the League had 42 countries join as its founding members, with the leading Allied powers of Britain, France, Italy and Japan becoming the leaders of the League as permanent members of a body called the “League Council”, later joined by Germany.
Tragically, these idealistic goals failed to be met, for several reasons.
The first problem was that self-determination and territorial integrity weren’t always ideals that neatly fit together, in the dead empires of the war different populations were mixed together:
Usually the answer was that they would settle their differences through blood, there was a Polish-Ukrainian War, a Polish-Soviet War, the Russian Civil War and so on, Versailles only meant peace for some.
The second problem was that self-determination wasn’t consistently applied, while in a number of cases the League offered “plebiscites” to the people of disputed territories, allowing them to vote on which country they wanted to join, on other occasions they did not, Germany in particular was forced to give up large amounts of territory to the Allies and to several of the new countries created by the imperial collapse, even when those territories contained German populations who wanted to stay German, the Austrians, who were German speakers and wanted to join Germany, were not allowed to do so and were forced to stay as a separate, independent country. The denial of these people of their right to choose was a source of intense anger.
Author: User:52 Pickup Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.5
The same thing happened to the people of the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East, who had their lands carved up between the British and the French, and to the Hungarians, who lost over 70% of their country, including many areas with majority Hungarian populations, leaving ⅓ of Hungarians under foreign rule.
Authors: Qorilla, Fz22, Cool Koon Pickup Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0
And that led to the third problem, when states decided to resolve problems through force the League wasn’t able to stop them.
The League had been able to settle many territorial disputes through agreements in the 2 decades following the World War and for the most part the countries involved agreed to follow the League’s decisions, but when they didn’t the League had no means to force them to, it had no army of its own and had to rely on its member countries to use their armies for it, this didn’t always happen.
In 1922 Fascist leader Benito Mussolini became the leader of Italy, and in 1926 he turned the country into a dictatorship, he proclaimed that there would be a new Italian Empire.
In 1931 the Japanese expanded their own empire by invading the Manchuria region of China, declaring it to be a new state called “Manchukuo”, in practice it was just a Japanese colony, the entire League Assembly except for Japan itself voted against this and demanded Japan return Manchuria to the Chinese, the Japanese said no and left the League instead, the League’s members weren’t willing to use force to hand Manchuria back.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler became the leader of Germany and pulled his country out of the League as well, then in 1934 he claimed absolute power as the country’s dictator just as Mussolini had, and set about rearming Germany in preparation for a war that would recover lost territories of the former German Empire.
In 1935 Italy put Mussolini’s words into practice by invading and colonising Ethiopia, the League again condemned this but Italy ignored them, in 1937 Japan began taking even more Chinese territory and then in 1938 Germany started its own wars of conquest, they took Austria, then the German speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, with Hitler promising that these were his last territorial demands.
He lied, in 1939 more and more was taken, including all of Czechoslovakia and huge parts of Poland, Italy joined in too by conquering Albania.
Germany, Italy and Japan formed a new military coalition called the “Axis”, they were pissing all over Wilson’s idealistic dreams by returning to “might makes right”, leading to the Second World War.
So the British and French got back together and reformed the Allies, joined by the United States, the Soviet Union and China as its leading members, and they and the rest of the Allies thrashed the Axis in 1945, once again leaving the question of what to do in the aftermath.
The answer was, basically repeat what happened the first time, Germany lost a large amount of territory and was punished even more harshly this time, with the entire country being occupied by the Allies and later being divided into 2 states, East and West Germany, while the Italian and Japanese Empires collapsed and all their colonies were lost.
Authors: User:52 Pickup, Fry1989 Licences: CC-BY-SA 2.5 (left), CC-BY-SA 3.0 (right)
Saarland (beige territory next to French occupation zone) was later returned to West Germany, and eventually the reunified Germany, Königsberg (beige territory marked with Soviet flag) was annexed into the USSR as Kaliningrad, later becoming part of Russia
Since the League had completely failed in its goals, it was replaced by the United Nations, but the UN worked in nearly the exact same way, the League Assembly became the UN General Assembly with 50 countries as founding members, the League Council became the UN Security Council, with the 5 leading Allies of the UK, US, France, the Soviet Union and China becoming its permanent members.
And because everything worked the same way, all the same problems continued, more territorial wars, more denials of self-determination and more inability by the UN to enforce its own rules, as its leading members were breaking them and finding themselves divided by competing alliances.
Just as the League Council became split between the UK and France on one side and Germany, Italy and Japan on the other, the UN became split between the USSR on one side and the UK, France, US and China on the other, and they each started meddling in other countries affairs through violent proxy wars and other dirty tricks, because of this even more countries were divided against the will of their people, Korea, Vietnam, Yemen, to name a few.
Authors: Sgef1211 (top left), DrRandomFactor (top right), B1mbo, Fry1989, Alkari, Dbenbenn, Jarke Mnmazur (bottom) Licences: CC-BY-SA 3.0 (top left, bottom), CC-BY-SA 4.0 (top right)
A few things did change, China collapsed into a civil war between its government, the “Republic of China”, and a Communist rebel movement, the government forces were steadily pushed back and in 1949 the Communists declared their own Chinese government the “People’s Republic of China”, by 1950 the PRC had conquered all of the Chinese mainland and the ROC had fled to a few small islands on the Chinese coast and the larger island of Taiwan, the Communists planned to attack these islands too and defeat the ROC once and for all but they were stopped by a US intervention, leaving a divided China split between 2 states. The ROC kept China’s UN seat until 1971, when it was given to the PRC instead.
Authors: Sreejithk2000, Nat Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Unlike the League, the UN also didn’t ignore the issue of colonialism, the remaining colonial empires, even of the victorious Allied nations, were slowly dismantled, because of this and all those other wars many new countries were created and were able to join the UN; Then in the late 1980s the network of Soviet-aligned European states, the “Eastern Bloc”, completely collapsed, allowing Germany to finally be reunified when East Germany joined together with West Germany in 1990, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, with the newly formed Russian Federation taking its place.
Since then a few more countries have gained independence and joined the club too, leaving us with our final 195, it’s progress, but incomplete progress.
So, why did this UN system remain even though it failed to solve the world’s problems? Well, that’s a simple one, there wasn’t another world war, not because of the UN actually being any better at peacekeeping than the League but mostly because of a little invention called the atomic bomb, which made the costs of a war between the big superpowers that hold it too high.
So rather than quitting the UN and going on a land grabbing world tour the big powers decided to just stay instead, sticking to the proxy wars rather than fighting each other directly, instead of an explosive crescendo we got a perpetual limbo, the fact that the UNSC is split between 2 factions that don’t agree with each other has made it just as useless as the League was.
What does all this backstory have to do with our invisible lands? Well, the failure to uphold Wilson’s Dream of self-determination, because of hypocrisy and lacking willpower, is why the conflicts that create these invisible places are still ongoing.
An international treaty called Montevideo Convention defines statehood in this way:
The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications:
(a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.
This is called the “declarative theory” of statehood, which says that if a state exists and it meets those criteria, it’s a state, that’s all you need to be a “real country”.
These invisible powers are, by that definition, states, but they’re not on our maps because no country, at least legally, follows this approach, they instead follow what’s called the “constitutive theory of statehood”, this theory says that becoming a “real country” involves recognition from other countries, if a country doesn’t have recognition then it might as well not exist.
Getting UN recognition is extremely difficult, for a state to be recognised by the UN it needs to be approved by the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council and 9 out of the 10 non-permanent members (membership changes every year), if it gets over that hurdle it then needs to pass a 2/3rds vote from the entire UN General Assembly, that’s 129 out of 193 countries you need to win over.
With this very strict criteria it’s basically impossible to be recognised by the UN without near universal world approval, and if another UN-state claims your land there’s almost no chance you’ll get a seat at the table, because their friends will block your recognition.
And that’s why you usually can’t find these breakaway states on the map, if a country declares independence as an unrecognised state it’s because they weren’t able to convince the state they’re breaking away from to allow them to separate, all of these states are separatists, that means they’re trying to break away from the countries they used to be ruled by and those countries still claim their land.
Existing separatist states #
There are in fact some mapping projects that try to show the world as it truly is, one I’ve found to be the most detailed is the “Apolitical World Map” from Wayback History, it aims to draw the border lines based on actual territorial control, labelling the states by their official names, although it says it will be updated every 6 months the project has been put on hold by the creator since early 2024, so the latest copy of the map is from December 2023.
I decided to embed this explainer video instead of an image of the map since the map would be very difficult to read at a good resolution for the site, so instead I'd encourage you to view the map directly via the link.Keep in mind some areas in both the video and the map are out of date (especially Afghanistan and Yemen in the video and Syria on the website), some areas like Myanmar and Palestine are also underdetailed.
Looking at this map many countries stand out from how they would appear on a normal map, Ukraine’s borders are much smaller, with its eastern areas cut off, Libya is cut into 2 territories, Syria is cut into 5, these are the products of wars, national wars between 2 nations and civil wars between multiple states fighting for control of the same nation.
But look closer and you’ll find more unfamiliar names, next to UN-recogised Georgia you can find Abkhazia and South Ossetia, next to UN-recognised Serbia you can find Kosovo, next to UN-recognised Mali you can find Azawad, in UN-recognised Cameroon you can find an enclave called Ambazonia, next to the south of UN-recognised Morocco is the Sahrawi Republic, to the north of the UN-recognised Central African Republic you find Dar al-Kuti, in half of the island of Cyprus you can find Northern Cyprus.
Then if you look to the southeast of China you can see the “Republic of China” still going strong, at first this seems like a civil war type scenario and originally it was, recently things have changed, the Chinese Nationalists that once ruled the ROC have lost power and the “Republic of China” is now only the formal name of this state, its current leaders think of the region as an independent “Taiwan” rather than a part of China and its people generally prefer this idea over reunification, considering themselves to be Taiwanese rather than Chinese.
These are what are called the “de facto states” or “unrecognised states”, “de facto” meaning “in reality”, meaning what the situation is like in the real world as opposed to what the law might say, while “de jure” is what the law says as opposed to the real world situation. So, “de jure” Azawad doesn’t exist, it’s part of Mali, but “de facto” it does, and Mali doesn’t have any power over it.
Some of these de facto states have some level of recognition from de jure states, for example Abkhazia and South Ossetia are recognised by Russia and 4 other UN countries (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nauru, and Syria), Kosovo is recognised by 104 UN countries, mostly across the Western world and its sphere of alliances, the Saharawi Republic is recognised by 46 while Northern Cyprus is recognised by just 1, Turkey, while others are simply ignored by the international community, nobody recognises Azawad, Ambazonia or Dar al-Kuti and most people don’t even know they exist, that included me until I looked at the Apolitical Map for the first time, even though I went out of my way to find and include unrecognised states when I was writing my first article on democracy.
So why do some of these separatist states have recognition while others don’t? Why is Kosovo recognised by most of the world while Ambazonia is ignored by everyone? Well, it’s totally arbitrary, states can choose to recognise or not recognise states and governments however they like, regardless of the facts on the ground.
You see this a lot with civil wars and political disputes, even though the “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” no longer exists and has been replaced by the Taliban-run “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”, most governments around the world still recognise the Republic instead, a number of other countries recognise Edmundo González Urrutia as the President of Venezuela even though his rival Nicolas Maduro actually controls the Presidency.
And just as they can “recognise” political fictions they can deny political realities too, if Bhutan wants to ignore its neighbour, China, they can do that, if South Korea wants to play pretend and say North Korea doesn’t exist, they can do that, if every country in the world except Turkey wants to pretend Northern Cyprus doesn’t exist, guess what? They can do that.
And states don’t make these kinds of decisions based on morals or some sort of clear logic. They might have those, but they have to balance them with the power game, what they think is in their national interests, the potential benefits of recognising that separatist state with the consequences of angering the state they’re trying to separate from, as well as their international allies.
For example, China threatens to break off relations with any country that recognises Taiwan, and has threatened to invade Taiwan if they ever formally declare independence, this is why Taiwan actually still formally calls itself the “Republic of China”, changing the name would potentially lead to invasion, bizarrely the Chinese are happier with the Taiwanese claiming that they’re the “real China” than claiming that they’re their own country, because at least if they still claim to be the government of China they accept that they’re Chinese, keeping the dream of Chinese unification alive.
And so while most Taiwanese would prefer to be an independent Taiwan rather than rejoin China, they ultimately prefer this weird status quo of being independent from China but still officially calling themselves Chinese, because that’s the outcome where they don’t become part of a country they don’t like and they don’t have bombs dropped on their heads.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia are still claimed by Georgia, Kosovo is claimed by Serbia, the Sahrawi Republic is claimed by Morocco, Northern Cyprus is claimed by its neighbouring Republic of Cyprus, Cameroon wants Ambazonia back, Mali wants Azawad, the CAR wants Dar al-Kuti, all of these countries are either trying to enforce their claims through war or have tried to in the past.
This is also why Palestine is only an “observer” state rather than a full UN member, Palestine enjoys broad recognition from the world, with 157 UN countries recognising it as a state, but of the 36 that don’t you can find the US, which has consistently blocked any attempts to give Palestine full recognition due to its close alliance with Israel, which has been at war with the Palestinians on varying levels ever since the 1940s and occupies a large amount of Palestinian territory.
So while Palestine would comfortably pass the second hurdle of recognition at the General Assembly it would fail at the first, the Security Council, a majority of 157 countries overruled by a minority of just 1.
Now there’s another obvious reason why most maps don’t look like the Apolitical Map, given how wars see territory change hands weekly or even daily a map based on territorial control becomes out of date almost immediately, on top of that while a “de facto” map might tell us more about the way the world is right now than a “de jure” map, neither of them tell us how the world should be.
If you want an example of that, look closely at the map and you’ll find small pockets of the “Islamic State”, though it has mostly disappeared from the news cycles and its former heartlands in Iraq and Syria, “IS” still holds territory elsewhere. And while much of the media treated it as nothing more than a terrorist organisation, focusing on the suicide bombings and shootings it carried out abroad, it was also a state, alongside those terror attacks they were running PR campaigns, collecting taxes, enforcing trading standards, regulating traffic, organising welfare programs and resolving petty disputes in small claims courts, the day to day minituie of life.
Now obviously there’s a reason why we focus more on the severed heads in dustbins and the jumpsuited hostages shot on camera, just like there’s a reason why when we talk about Nazi Germany you’re more likely to hear about the Holocaust than its approach to, say, the bureaucracy of traffic safety policy, “IS” was a state run under barbaric medieval style rules and was dedicated to warmongering expansionism, but it’s worth acknowledging that it was a state nonetheless.
Its claim to represent Islam is far less credible however, given that most of the armies that were resisting (and in some cases are still resisting) it were mostly made up of Muslims, and the vast majority of Muslims did not heed the “IS” call for them to migrate to the state and live among them, or fight in its armies.
Although “IS” maintained some credibility among its population by cutting down borders and providing governance to regions ravaged by warlordism, most of its power came through intense force rather than public support, the fact that it was on the map, and in a few areas still is, doesn’t make it a legitimate state that deserves legal recognition.
National identity doesn’t live or die based on how many countries recognise it or how many kilometres of territory are held by soldiers and tanks, its lifeblood is popular consciousness.
Potential separatists #
Dependencies #
Beyond the unrecognised states, there are some other could-be-countries worth talking about.
Wikipedia has a full list of them, some of them are uninhabited but of the ones that have actual populations there are 15 dependencies belonging to the UK, 5 belonging to the US and 3 belonging to New Zealand.
These dependencies are often treated very differently than the provinces of the countries they belong to, the citizens of British dependencies have different passports to the UK, in 3 of these dependencies (the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey) those passports still come with British citizenship, but the others have “British Overseas Territory citizenship” and if you try to enter the UK on one of those passports you’ll be treated like a foreigner, the dependencies also don’t have any MPs in the UK parliament.
4 of the US dependencies have US citizenship and passports while 1 of them, American Samoa, has its own passport which comes with less rights, with the people who carry it being labelled “non-citizen nationals”, they all have representatives in the US Congress ( called “House Delegates” in 4 of the dependencies, in one of them, Puerto Rico, they’re called the “Resident Commissioner”) but unlike other representatives they don’t get a vote, the people of the dependencies also don’t get to vote in the US Presidential elections.
That doesn’t mean they’re powerless though, these dependencies have their own legislative institutions to make decisions locally, for example the Isle of Man has a parliament with 2 branches, the Legislative Council and the House of Keys, Puerto Rico has a “Legislative Assembly” that works the same way, so their people do have politicians to represent them, chosen by their communities, but ultimate power over their territories is held by countries they can’t influence, it’s a kind of half-way house between being a province and being independent.
2 of the New Zealand dependencies, Niue and the Cook Islands, are the closest to being fully independent, having almost all the institutions and powers needed to be their own countries, and some countries already recognise them as independent, but they are still technically part of the “Realm of New Zealand” alongside NZ itself and its third dependency, Tokelau, and their citizens are citizens of New Zealand. The other dependencies have less power and no independent international recognition, being much closer to the “province” end of the spectrum.
So the specific relationships and rights dependencies have with their parent countries varies, but the key thing is that they are ultimately controlled by those countries without being part of them.
Near-dependencies #
Wikipedia also lists 24 “similar entities”, areas that are technically part of the countries that control them but are in practice treated like dependencies, of the inhabited ones 6 of them belong to France, 3 to Australia, 3 to the Netherlands, 2 to China, 2 to Denmark, 1 to Finland and 1 to Norway.
An example of how these work: One of the most well known of these territories is Hong Kong, officially labelled as a “Special Administrative Region” Hong Kong is politically and recognised internationally as part of China but has its own legal system, political institutions, currency, and migration rules, there’s a border between Hong Kong and the rest of China that can’t be freely crossed, like the citizens of dependencies Hong Kongers have their own passport and can’t use it to freely enter mainland China, they have to apply for a permit, and it works the same way in reverse, if a Chinese citizen wants to visit Hong Kong they have to go through an application process.
So although Hong Kong is part of China, it’s very different to an ordinary Chinese region or province, the Chinese government calls this “one country, two systems” and it works the same way in the other Chinese territory on the list, the SAR of Macau.
But like the dependencies the relations between these territories and the countries they belong to can vary, for an example of something very different from Hong Kong we could look at the French territories, which are called “overseas departments and regions”.
These areas tend to be much more integrated with France compared to China and its SARs, French citizens can freely migrate to the region, their people have French citizenship and while they have their own legislatures they also elect MPs to the French Parliament, and these MPs can actually vote too, they also vote for France’s MEPs in the European Parliament elections.
But “Overseas France” is still different from the rest of France (known as “Metropolitan France”) in other ways, some its territories have their own currency called the CFP Franc while the rest of France uses the Euro, and some of them are even outside the European Union, which means that EU citizens who thanks to EU membership can live, travel and work in the rest of France with no regulation are subjected to migration restrictions and border controls in the overseas regions.
Again it’s all very complex, but the key here is the territory is controlled by a country, part of that country, but still “outside” that country’s normal boundaries, legally and physically, the big difference between Overseas France and Metropolitan France for example is that Metro France is all inside Europe, Overseas France is all outside it.
The other key thing both of these types of territory have in common is the c word - colonialism, the British Overseas Territories used to be the Crown Colonies, Hong Kong used to be a British Colony, Macau used to be Portuguese, and “one country, two systems” was designed to ease the transition back to Chinese rule, the “CFP” in CFP Franc stands for “Collectivités françaises du Pacifique” - French Communities of the Pacific, but it used to stand for “colonies françaises du Pacifique”, I don’t think I need to translate that one.
Since the US was a country born from revolution against a colonial empire it has always pretended not to be one, so it has always used its euphemistic terms to describe its dependencies, calling them “unincorporated territories”, but they were also colonies in all but name.
The changes over the years haven’t just been cosmetic though, the relationships are still unequal but they’re no longer as bad as master vs slave, but most of these territories are essentially the “unfinished business” of decolonisation, with their former colonisers so far being unwilling or unable to either cut them loose or fully integrate them.
That makes them potential candidates for being the world’s next countries, many places already became countries in this way and independence is one of the 2 main ways out of the halfway house.
“Dependent territories and their sovereign states. All territories are labeled according to ISO 3166-1 or with numbers. Coloured areas without labels are integral parts of their respective countries."
Autonomies #
If dependencies and territories are regions with a degree of freedom, controlled by a country but outside of it, autonomies are regions with a similar level of freedom from their controlling countries, but they’re legally inside them, not in any kind of halfway house.
Some well known ones, in China alongside Hong Kong and Macau there’s Xinjiang and Tibet, in Spain there’s Catalonia and the Basque Country, divided between India and Pakistan is the region of Kashmir. Iraq has the region of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Although legally part of their home nations these autonomous areas have many distinctions from them, whether that’s culturally, linguistically, ethnically or historically, and have each had their own nationalist movements.
There’s a whole range of autonomous areas around the world and they can range wildly in their size, names, structure, the level of autonomy they actually get and the reasons they have that autonomy, but many of them are potential candidates for nationhood.
For most countries autonomy is the exception rather than the rule and power is usually much more central, these are called “unitary states”, but others, called “federations” have it the other way around, with most or all of their regions holding autonomy, the US is probably the most well known example, then there’s Russia, Australia, Brazil to name some prominent ones, although federations are a minority in just the sheer number of countries, almost half the world population live in one, with federations being used as a way to hold big countries together with relative comfort. In most cases these regions will have a strong sense of self, but they still see themselves as part of the whole, you wouldn’t really imagine someone in Hessen in Germany seeing themselves as staunchly Hessian not German, but in some cases things are quite different.
Author: Lokal_Profil Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.5
Bosnia and Herzegovina is a federation holding on by the skin of its teeth, struggling to build a sense of nationalism especially given that it was basically a manufactured country to begin with, created by outside powers to stop its warring factions of Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats from exterminating each other, although Belgium isn’t as bloody in its recent history its main divide between its 2 regions, Flanders and Wallonia, is incredibly strong, to the point where just a decade ago the country was at serious risk of breaking up after a political crisis that saw its parties (mostly drawn on ethnic/linguistic lines) being unable to cooperate and form a government for over a year, mulling over either creating independent separatist states or unifying with their neighbours, the mixed German and French speaking Wallonia joining either Germany, France or Luxembourg and the Flemish speaking Flanders (Flemish either being seen as a derivative of Dutch or a dialect of Dutch depending on who you ask) going to the Netherlands.
Bosnian Key: Blue - Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Grey - Republika Srpska Mixed Blue/Grey - Brčko District
Belgian Key: Orange - Flemish Community/Flanders Region, Red - French Community (Wallonia Region), Green - German Community (Wallonia Region), Mixed Orange/Red - Brussels Region
Authors: SRofSerbia (left), Ssolbergj (right) Licence: CC-BY-SA 4.0 (left) CC-BY-SA 3.0 (right)
This ultimately didn’t happen thanks to the ability of some of the parties to do a deal, the complexity of what a divorce would look like, and the question of what to do with the capital region of Brussels, a melting point of the different communities, but the fact that it was seriously possible even though the country is the heart of the EU and a key centre of Western institutions like NATO shows how flexible and fickle nations can be.
Unrecognised people #
And lastly there are some groups that have a sense of national identity but have no institutional recognition at all, rather than invisible places these are the invisible people.
Take for example Cornwall, legally Cornwall is a region of England, which makes up one of the 4 nations of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), but in practice it’s much more than a normal region, although it’s been part of England for hundreds of years its national identity still exists today, something that was recognised by the UK government, but apart from some funding for Cornish language development this hasn’t led to any recognition of Cornwall as its own nation. Mainstream Cornish nationalists tend to want Cornwall to become a 5th UK nation of its own, while some have called for a fully independent Cornish state.
Although recognised with autonomy in Iraq, the Kurdish population is mostly spread across 4 countries, as I mentioned in my Terror War series:
For the last decade Syrian Kurds have had a degree of autonomy as part of the so-called “Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria” or “Rojava” for short, formed by a union of Kurdish nationalists and other groups (although now that the war is mostly over its future is uncertain) but in Turkey and Iran Kurdish regions have been split between dozens of provinces with no recognition of them being a unified nation, Iran has been more willing to accommodate Kurdish culture while Turkey has been much more suppressive, calling its Kurdish population “Eastern Turks” (previously “Mountain Turks”) rather than Kurds.
These invisible populations are treated as just another part of the countries they’re ruled by, with any differences with the rest of the population being either treated as regional quirks or denied entirely, and so many people might not know they exist at all.
One organisation that seeks to change that is the UNPO - the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation, the UNPO includes some unrecognised states and autonomous regions, but it also includes some populations that are totally unrecognised, its groups sometimes push for independence but others push for smaller goals, these populations are represented at the UNPO by activist groups or political parties, sometimes based in the regions they claim to speak for and sometimes from places of exile in other countries.
While that claim might be very questionable a lot of the time, the UNPO is an interesting organisation in that it offers a voice to voices that otherwise might be silenced or distorted.
Conclusion #
So why haven’t these could-be-countries become actually-are-countries?
Sometimes it’s because there’s a lot to lose, Niue and the Cook Islands have been told by New Zealand that if they want recognition as independent countries they’ll have to give up New Zealand citizenship and the rights that come with it, given that more Cook Islanders live in New Zealand than the Cook Islands themselves that’s a very unhappy prospect.
And sometimes it’s because parent countries don’t even leave the door open for independence, the Chinese government has very clearly said that independence is off the table for its region s and in response to opposition protests and riots in Hong Kong it published the Hong Kong National Security law in 2020, which criminalises attempts to undermine the Chinese system or separate Hong Kong from it.
Several hundred activists and journalists have been arrested and prosecuted for secessionism under the law, which also formed a unit called the “Committee for Safeguarding National Security” that in 2021 was given the power to disqualify Hong Kong political candidates from office, effectively blocking any pro-independence politicians from gaining power or representation.
The Catalonians face similar conditions under the Spanish, although secessionist parties are allowed to organise and expressing secessionist views is legal in Spain, making secessionism a reality is not.
Catalan nationalists were able to form the government in the region throughout most of the 2010s and spent their time repeatedly trying to achieve independence, the Catalan government organised an independence referendum in 2014 and another one in 2017, both saw voters overwhelmingly support independence but with a turnout of only around 40% each time, and both saw the Spanish react by rejecting the results and prosecuting the Catalan Presidents responsible for organising them, Artur Mas and Carles Puigedemont, Mas was arrested but avoided jail in the end, getting off with a fine and a ban from running for office for 10 years, while Puigedemont escaped and became a wanted fugitive.
This is how most countries around the world treat secessionism, the number of countries that recognise a legal right to secede is in the single digits, the rest either actively ban secessionism or don’t offer any legal means for it to happen, which means any secessionist movement has to play by the rules of the government they want to break off from, asking them very nicely if they can do so, and if that government says no there’s nowhere else to go.
Cases like these leave these territories in the same bind as the unrecognised states, if they want to be able to choose they have to fight for it, that often is a price too much to pay.
And sometimes it’s because the people simply don’t want it.
In some cases this is because they prefer full integration, for example in Puerto Rico a referendum was held in 2020 where 52% of voters voted to become a US State (answering Yes on a Yes/No question), and another in 2024 where statehood was supported by 58%, compared to a dismal 11% for independence and 29% for the status quo (although they both suffered from low turnout, only 54% turned out for the vote in 2020 and 63% in 2024).
While sometimes they actually prefer the half-way house, enjoying the freedom that comes with near-independence alongside the political benefits that come with being under the wing of a larger state. In 2013 people in the British Overseas Territory of the Falkland Islands voted to stay as a BOT with an overwhelming majority and their politicians have openly spoken against the idea of having an MP in the UK Parliament, so maybe the half-way house isn’t always “unfinished business” after all.
Autonomy deals are also sometimes used as a way of resolving separatist conflicts when central governments aren’t willing to accept secession:
- The Bangsamoro region of the Philippines was given this status in 2014 to end a long running war between the Philippine government and Muslim separatists in the region
- Chechnya was given autonomy back in the late 1990s to resolve a war between Chechen separatists and Russia
- In Bosnia the separatist state of Republika Srpska became an autonomous part of Bosnia to end the long running war there
These sorts of solutions are often used to break the stalemate between a powerful central government that can’t be overthrown and a persistent rebel movement that can’t be stamped out, sometimes the central government offers it when they’re victorious as an olive branch, to discourage minority groups from rebelling in the future.
There’s of course a massive number of more examples I could bring up, in some cases I didn’t go further because I don’t know enough and didn’t want to go on too much of a deep dive to avoid making the work on this article even longer, others I’ve considered bringing up and know enough to mention but decided not to for time, to avoid bloating the gaps between my points with too many examples, 2 of those that come to mind include:
- The nations of Myanmar
Myanmar is internationally recognised as one country but in practice isn’t at all, Myanmar (aka Burma) has never actually controlled all the land it claims since independence in 1948, with various rebel groups resisting Burmese rule and claiming independence for themselves.
The latest phase of the conflict began in 2021 when the Myanmar military overthrew the government in a coup, taking over as the “State Administration Council”, the SAC now controls only around half (or potentially even less than half) of the country, with the rest being held by the ethnic rebels and the People’s Defence Force, a militia loyal to remnants of the overthrown government (who now call themselves the “National Unity Government”).
The “People’s Defence Force” is the army of the National Unity Government
Some of these rebels call for autonomy from Myanmar, while others call for independence, but because of the war their territories are practically independent already, the Apolitical World Map only shows one of these, the Wa State, but there are around 19 different national alliances, some supporting the SAC, some supporting the NUG and others staying out of the wider civil war. People in these areas aren’t subject to any kind of Burmese rule and instead have the rebel groups beginning or consolidating their own statebuilding efforts.
- Native tribes
The US is mostly known for its 50 states, but it’s actually much more complicated than that, as well as its dependencies the US states also contain hundreds of Native American lands called “Indian Reservations”, although technically still part of the states they’re located in they have their own institutions (governments, laws, police forces, etc etc) and are often exempt from large amounts of state laws as a representation of “Tribal Sovereignty”, Canada has a similar system called the “Indian Reserves”, which number in the thousands.
These are only systems that exist for government recognised tribes though, and there are other tribes that have petitioned for recognition but not received it, either because of lacking attention or disputes over their ancestry.
They’re also often poor representations of sovereignty as many of the Reservations aren’t based on the lands their tribes were from, these tribes were historically subject to displacement through acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide (led by either settler groups or the US government itself) and the survivors were often given lands far away from home.
Beyond that, there’s a complex question of identity overall, lots of Native Americans have accepted a US-American identity, either because of integration with mainstream US society, growing up in that culture, those communities and seeing them as their own or a grudging kind of “what’s done is done” acceptance that history and its consequences can’t be undone.
But others give no acceptance at all: Their communities, systems, languages, identities predated the US and continued to independently exist in many areas even as the colonists that built it spread across the continent, only centuries later being able to truly monopolise it not through winning hearts and minds but by force. So why would these indigenous communities feel a need to recognise and accept an invader nation and its principles, when theirs came before?
And these sorts of debates continue in many other countries too, Canada, Australia and New Zealand just to name a few.
The point of this article is to say that although the world presented to us by governments its complex enough already (with strange borders, competing histories and myths, reams of bureaucracy and complicated political systems), the real world is even more so, just shy of 200 nations recognised, hundreds more in different hearts and minds.
And those nations of dreams may not become nations of soil for a long time, if ever, because we’re still very far away from Wilson’s dream, although no longer a world purely of might makes right, that often still is how things go, we have long lists of rules, treaties and principles but they’re either not used or used hypocritically.
Wilson himself ironically had that same hypocrisy, which is why his dream never had a chance, he didn’t fully believe in it himself, but I do.
As I said in Ukrainian Divide:
Now generally I’d actually rather we don’t have more countries, because that means more schisms, more borders drawn up and dividing communities, more complexity tossed in, greater unification can help avoid those problems, for example although it’s not quite a country a lot of Europe’s border problems have been calmed by the togetherness of the EU, the breakup of the USSR has reopened all sorts of wounds: Destructive conflicts some of which continue to this day, and others that have mostly gone quiet but haven’t resolved, all coming at an intense cost.
But at the same time, tying communities to a government they feel out of tune with, not just in terms of certain policies but in a deeper identity level, having them be a minority that can be overruled because they’re stitched to that wider whole, can be very painful too, so states that can be that reflection deserve to live, and states that can’t deserve to die.
Changelog #
- Edit 1 - 19/08/25 - Added federal vs unity section to autonomies segment
- Edit 2 - 27/08/25 - Added links for Divide quote
- Edit 3 - 28/08/25 - Added Divide link for intro
- Edit 4 - 14/10/25 - Updated Palestine recognition stats (was 147 recognise, 46 don’t, now 157/36, UK and France now recognise while US still doesn’t)
- Edit 5 - 15/10/25 - Updated Palestine recognition map
- Edit 6 - 16/10/25 - Hyperlinked Divide repo in nationalism quote, typo fix, extra images
- Edit 7 - 19/10/25 - Added missing Divide hyperlink in Wilson’s Dream start, added hyperlink for Wilson points, moved overall Divide repo link to first mention of the doc, formatting changes