Nobody can say exactly how many countries exist in the world
Ask how many countries there are and you will get different answers, because there is no universally agreed definition. Some states are recognised by only a few others, some countries sit inside other countries, and international law itself is split over whether recognition is what makes a state real.
Country can mean a sovereign state, a state with limited recognition, a constituent country or a dependent territory, and one country may hold several nations. Because some entities are recognised by at least one UN member but not by the UN system as a whole, there is no single agreed total. In 2010 The Economist remarked that any search for a clean definition quickly hits a thicket of exceptions. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, looking at Canada, Sri Lanka and Yugoslavia in 1997, concluded the link between country and nation varies too much from place to place to reduce to any simple rule.
Some sovereign states are unions of countries. Denmark proper shares the Danish Realm with Greenland and the Faroes; the Dutch kingdom comprises the Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten; and the United Kingdom is made up of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Many dependent territories with their own administrations are loosely called countries too, and a few, including Hong Kong, Greenland and Macau, are treated as separate countries of origin in international trade.
Lawyers disagree about how states come into being. The declarative theory, set out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention, lists criteria such as the capacity to conduct relations with other states and implies a state can exist even if nobody recognises it; the European Community's Badinter Committee took a similar view. The constitutive theory holds that a state becomes a legal person only once at least one other country recognises it, as L. F. L. Oppenheim argued in 1912. In 1976 the Organisation of African Unity said recognition was a sovereign choice for each member. Actual practice tends to fall somewhere in between.
The word stretches well beyond politics. England's West Country, the American West's big sky country and the mining regions called coal country are all smaller than states, and Indian country in the United States refers to native sovereign land. Welsh scholar Raymond Williams noted in 1975 that country can mean a whole society or just its rural part, and Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko wrote in 2005 of Country as something close to a portable Home carried in people.
Source: Country
