How Old Is the Average Country? 375
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a snippet from his piece at Vice: "I did some calculations in Excel, using independence dates provided on About.com, and found the average age of a country is about 158.78 years old. Now, before anyone throws a tizzy about what makes a country a country, about nations, tribes, civilizations, ethnic categories, or about my makeshift methodology, keep in mind, I simply assessed 195 countries based on their political sovereignty. That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?"
Re:If it makes you sleep well at night.... (Score:2, Informative)
The author gives the UK age as 306 in his map. (He did use about.com as a "source")
Re: If it makes you sleep well at night.... (Score:2, Informative)
The UK is a new fangled invention at 306 years old but England is 1086 years old, happy birthday America.
Incredible mistakes in Europe... (Score:3, Informative)
Poland 95 years old? Germany 142 years? Italy 152? Greece 184? Come on, you can do better than that. Nice try. Next try.
Re:Incredible mistakes in Europe... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what you don't get:
He's not talking about existence as a culture, he's talking about being recognized as an independent nation-state.
Germany, for example, did not actually exist as a nation-state prior to the Prussian defeat of the Hapsburgs in the Austro-Prussian War, and the defeat of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War a few years after that. What existed were hundreds of feuding statelets that all spoke German.
The Greeks existed as a culture, but the last independent Greek state had been conquered by the Ottomans in the 15th century.
The Italians were in exactly the same boat as the Germans. There were the Kings of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont, the Pope, a Grand Duke of Tuscony, Hapsburgs in Venice, and several smaller states that were absorbed by Piedmont prior to unification.
Poland was divided between three Empires at the end of the 18th. Officially the Czar was Polish Head of State, but he didn't give the Poles any autonomy, and ran his bit of Poland as if it was merely another Oblast of Russia, so the Poles don;t count that as independence.
Re:Terrible Methodology (Score:4, Informative)
He's using political dates for all countries.
If you ask a Pole when his country became independent he will tell that it was when the last King of Congress Poland (aka: the Czar) fell in 1918. If you ask a Swede when his country became independent he'll give you 1523, when the Danes were thrown out. The Chinese, Japanese, and French all claim direct lineage to states founded a long time before that.
You can argue that the French and Chinese are full of shit, or that the "age of a country" like Poland can't accurately be calculated by it's independence day. You cannot argue that the author used a double-standard.
Re:If it makes you sleep well at night.... (Score:4, Informative)
You may call it Independence Day, but over here it's just the anniversary of when we finally got shot of those troublesome colonies started by religious fanatics.
Rationalize all you want - we beat you. As for those religious fanatics, you should have known better than to go up against them They were the same variety that beheaded your king in 1649.
Re:If it makes you sleep well at night.... (Score:5, Informative)
A thousand years ago England was French so ooh la la rosbif.
Actually it was Norman, which isn't quite the same thing. The Normans spoke French but were Norsemen who'd settled in Normandy only a century or two before the Norman Conquest. Even the name "Norman" derives from "Norse".
Re:So much for "New Republic" (Score:4, Informative)
That's an incredibly restrictive definition of "Republic." It's also very odd. The 17th says we directly vote for Senators, instead of having them appointed by the states. I have never heard of a definition of Republic which hinged on whether a single House of the Legislature was appointed or elected.
The general definition of republic is any state that has a non-hereditary Head-of-State. That's why France, Ireland, India, Nigeria, Iraq, Communist China, Iran etc. are Republics despite vastly different forms of government.
Re:Completely incorrect! (Score:5, Informative)
This is (almost definitely) a completely incorrect method to calculate "the average age of a country". The statistic provided here is the average age of (a sample of) countries existing at present, not the average age of countries that have existed. The difference might seem pedantic, but it has an immense effect on the computed statistic, because it excludes countries which existed briefly, no matter how recently. Some geographical locations have been through many, many sovereignties during the 158.78 years quoted. (This could be called left-censored data, because everything is excluded if it is not current at the moment of observation).
A better statistic might be the mean duration of countries that have existed over the last few centuries, which will slightly underestimate due to countries that will continue to exist (which could be called right-censored data).
A further improvement would be to take the median, because country life-spans are likely to have a strongly skewed distribution, perhaps approximating Pareto distribution, with a long, thin tail of a small number of very long lifespans.
The definition of a when a country was created is also hard to pin down.
Looking at what should be a simple answer is the United States. The easy answer is to count from July 4th 1776 when the political entity 'The United States of America' declared itself independent. But there are any number of problems with this approach:
1. The majority of the land that currently comprises USA was not part of it in 1776.
2. The revolutionaries originally considered themselves 13 independent entities, loosely related by a group of common interests.
3. The original government (The Articles of Confederation) was superseded by The Constitution.
4. You could make some noise about the US Civil War, but the North never acknowledged the South's independence, and the rest of the objections would probably be covered by #1
5. OTOH, if you find #3 compelling, you could possibly argue that amendments to the constitution are a new governing document. The problem there is that it's hard to argue that, say, the passage of the 27th amendment represents a fundamental change in the governance of the US, but you could definitely make a case for the Reconstruction Era amendments (13-15) being a fundamental change. So if you accept this, then you need to have some kind of test to determine whether or not an amendment represent enough change to be considered a new government.
And those are just some of the issues at hand for ONE country on the list. Multiply that by 200, and you've got a real mess.
Re:If it makes you sleep well at night.... (Score:1, Informative)
Re: If it makes you sleep well at night.... (Score:5, Informative)
You consider it the same country even after the Normans trounced you, completely changed the government and aristocracy, and even started to change the language almost beyond recognition. Yeah, right.
Technically, yes, historians do consider it to be the same country. William, Duke of Normandy was persuing a claim to the English throne as a relative of Edward the Confessor.
Re:Incredible mistakes in Europe... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's what you don't get: He's not talking about existence as a culture, he's talking about being recognized as an independent nation-state. (...)
Poland was divided between three Empires at the end of the 18th. Officially the Czar was Polish Head of State, but he didn't give the Poles any autonomy, and ran his bit of Poland as if it was merely another Oblast of Russia, so the Poles don;t count that as independence.
No, but they count the time before the partitions as independence. Poland existed as an independent and recognised state with the same name and in substantially the same geographical location with the same captial city for hundreds of years prior. What happened in 1918 was not 'gaining independence' and creating a new state as in the US in 1776, but re-gaining independence. The current Polish state considers itself a continuation of that earlier one, and no Pole would say that their country is 95 years old.
Re:Incredible mistakes in Europe... (Score:4, Informative)
I'll give you the same capital. But the borders are completely different.
Most of what is now Poland has as strong historical ties to Germany as it does to Poland. Silesia, Prussia, and Pomerania alone are damn near 50% of the current Republic's territory and none of them was firmly in Poland's control at any time between 1400 and the Versailles treaty.
You're lumping various smaller duchies and principalities in the those territories together, when at various times (even after 1400) they owed allegiance variously and variably to Poland or various German states. For example the Duchy of Oswiecim was unambiguously and legally Polish from 1457. Trying to fit those regions into modern notions of nationalism doesn't work.
... if the Belarussians or Ukraineans decided to pick up the mantle of the old Republic it would be very hard for us poor foreigners to tell who was full of shit. Belurussian ethnicity was as much a core of that old Republic as Poles, and they ended up with more of old Poland's territory then new Poland did.
In terms of area only, not in terms of population or major cities (except Lviv and Vilnius). As for ethnicity, yes, Belorussian or Ukrainian or Lithuanian ethnicity was very much part of the Commonwealth, but so was Polish (as in, the Greater Poland, Lesser Poland, Mazovia etc) ethnicity, and Polish was the dominant language in all those areas for many years.
Keep in mind that the rules of this are clear: independence is your birthday. If we let anybody change it we have to let everybody change it. ....
In other words polish history gave them a choice. They could choose to interpret Congress Poland as a legitimate Polish government co-equal to the Czars and therefore a constant continuation of the prior government, or they could look really young in country-age lists compiled by Americans who haven't really put in the effort to understand their history. They chose the latter.
Sorry, but the "rules" are being applied arbitrarily. After WW2 the Provisional Government declared the Vichy governemnt unconstitutional and illegal, meaning there was no continuation of prior government from 1940 until 1944. Why is the "birthday" of France not counted as 1944? Or Or if you prefer 1789, when the Ancien Regime was toppled? Celebrated to this day. Or Austria, also brought into being as an independent state in 1918 from what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire - and if the United Kingdom is to be counted as different from England and not a continuation of it, then logically the Austro-Hungarian Empire is also not the same as pre-Empire Austria and not the same as post-Empire (post 1918) Austria. Or if, instead, you go by "Independence Day" Austria would "date" from 1955:
Treaty for the re-establishment of an independent and democratic Austria, signed in Vienna on the 15 May 1955 [wikipedia.org]
And similar arguments can be made (in both directions) for Russia, China, Japan ....
Re:If it makes you sleep well at night.... (Score:4, Informative)
Honestly, France beat the British. Not America.
You know how the Korean War, although ostensibly a war between North and South Korea, was basically a war between the US and China? Yeah. The American Revolution was that, with Britain and France. Of course, our "AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!" school system and remnants of Manifest Destiny keep most people from thinking of it in those terms, but yeah, that's how it was. A small American rebellion persisted long enough to sap the British strength until some heavy aid from France was enough to shove them out of a war they no longer really cared for.