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Malta has less than a million people. Is it not a country?
by ceilingcorner 7y ago
Malta has less than a million people. Is it not a country?
- pmiller2 7y agoWell, that depends on what you mean by "country," I suppose. If your definition is "independent, sovereign state," then, of course it is. But, so is the Vatican, with its population of ~800 and land area of 0.17 square miles. For perspective, San Francisco has a land area of ~47 square miles.
- chinesempire 7y agoThere aren't many definition of a Country. The Vatican is not in fact a country, but a city state (or a sovereign microstate) and it is an exception, not the norm. It is anyway an independent state with sovereignty, it signs treatise with other states (like the Lateran treaty that binds it to Italy) has its own official language (Latin) its own calling code (+379) its own ISO 3166 code (VA) and its own Internet TLD (.va) so it more or less works as any other independent country out there. And even though the actual resident population is very small, they have properties all over the World, they are in fact one of the most powerful countries in the World serving over 1.2 billions catholics (it's even 18th in the World for GDP per capita, even though the Vatican wealth is not really expressed by the GDP). If you look at it that way, Vatican State is more of a country than Kansas will ever be.