5 ms·

I don’t see UKs “country” being much different from the US “states.” In some ways US states are even more independent. England doesn’t have its own government

• skissane 4y ago
  I think what’s actually important to the Unicode Consortium is this - “countries” get RGI, non-“countries” don’t. Too many of the latter. But we don’t want to decide what is a “country” - we don’t want to evaluate ourselves factors like those you mention (degree of independence), since that’s politically fraught and largely beyond our expertise. We just want to defer to some existing international standard and let them take all the heat - and such a standard exists, ISO 3166. ISO 3166-1 lists “countries”; it also lists many (but not all) “dependent territories” and one or two “special areas”, but there is a well-established international precedent for treating the latter two as if they were “countries” (see e.g. ccTLDs). However, ISO 3166-2 also labels subdivisions as “countries”, but only in two cases - the UK and the Netherlands. The Netherlands case is irrelevant for flags, because all of its “countries” either have 3166-1 codes too, or else lack flags. But the UK has three “countries” which do have flags, so those flags get RGI. Denmark and France contain “countries” too, but not according to 3166-2; but even if 3166-2 was updated to include them, it still wouldn’t make a difference, since they all either have 3166-1 codes too or lack their own flag. Maybe, someone will convince Hawaii to declare itself a “country within the United States”, and 3166-2 will then be updated to list Hawaii as a “country” - then the Hawaiian flag would get Unicode RGI status. I really doubt all the other 49 would ever do that though.
  • pyuser583 4y ago
    You kind of sent me on a scavenger hunt … I learned that Scotland and France were both founded in the same year: 843. I understand the importance of standards, but I think the importance of the word “country” is a bit overblown. The USSR had countries, some of which had 3166-1 codes, and some of which did not. And ultimately why would the name country be that important?
    • skissane 4y ago
      > The USSR had countries, some of which had 3166-1 codes, and some of which did not. During the negotiations over the UN Charter, the Soviets claimed that the Union Republics which made up the USSR were sovereign states, with the right to secede, and hence should all be allowed to join the UN - along with the Soviet Union. The West refused - the claim of sovereignty was rather unbelievable (as if Stalin would really let anyone secede!), and it would have given the Soviet Union 16 (or more) votes in the General Assembly, which everyone else saw as unfair. Negotiations had reached an impasse, when a diplomatic compromise emerged - two of the Union Republics (Ukraine and Byelorussia) would become UN members, along with the Soviet Union as a whole; the others wouldn’t. Hence, the UN considered them to be “countries”, and since ISO 3166-1 gets its country list from the UN Statistical Division, it did too. It never made much sense from the perspective of reality, it was simply a historical diplomatic fudge. > And ultimately why would the name country be that important? I think it is important because (1) it is an exception to their general rule “countries/dependencies only, but not subdivisions thereof” which is defensible using the text of ISO 3166; (2) it is numerically a very limited exception-it doesn’t threaten to open the floodgates; (3) if someone claims “this is unfair bias in favour of the UK”, they can say “no, it is only because of the text of the standards, we are not engaging in any favouritism”; (4) in spite of all the above, there is a lot of political/popular pressure to give in to the demand, due to Scottish and Welsh nationalism; (5) no comparable political pressure exists for US state flags, because no US state has a mainstream nationalist movement