How Shall We Speak of Countries?
Karl Muth explores why we must carefully attend to what we say to avoid controversial and costly distractions from the thrust of our messages.
The question of what makes a country, in Occidental law, traces its history to the Takings in Germania and the quasi-independence of Roman Britannia (for an exhaustive explanation of the legal entanglements that followed for hundreds of years, see Berman’s excellent Law and Revolution). But today uncertainty remains as to what (or who?) is a country.
Perhaps the obvious place to start is Israel. Like Iraq, Kenya, and other Twentieth Century statehoods invented and blessed by the British, Israel sprang into being with no modern lineage of Western legal construct. This led to a series of agreements and treaties (roughly 200) to be signed in the first days of Israel’s existence. However, Israel remained unrecognised by a substantial number of countries (though this number has lessened over time). My favourite example of a country’s “accidental” recognition of Israel’s statehood is the cover of the contemporaneous Sudanese passport, which reads “valid for travel to all countries except Israel,” thereby unintentionally recognising that Israel is a country.
But new countries did not end with the boom in nationhood of the mid-Twentieth-Century. South Sudan was almost immediately recognised when it was created, in part because existing oil agreements with Sudan needed to be extended to the new territory and companies like ExxonMobil and BP needed to be able to set up subsidiaries in the new nation. For different reasons, the independence of Curacao from the Netherlands was similar, since such an enormous portion of the Internet’s gambling traffic is routed through Curacao for its unique treatment of casino companies (though Macao SAR hopes to get a slice of this business with regulatory changes in 2015).
I struggled with this very basic question as I crafted my comments to be delivered in a TED Talk next week. I was to be discussing economic progress and development and this included, in my view, the important discussion of the nine or seven or six (yes, there are only nine, or seven, or six, depending upon how you count them) countries outside Europe that went from being low-income countries to being high income countries after World War II. The problem is that two of the “countries” involved are Hong Kong (now Hong Kong SAR) and Taipei (Taiwan). While most attendees might not notice, these are both contested classifications (some Chinese and non-Chinese audiencemembers might object to Hong Kong and Taipei being discussed as peers of sovereign nations).
Obviously, some lists include these places as countries at various points in history, while some omit them entirely. After much puzzling over this, as I was using World Bank figures, I decided to use the World Bank’s classifications of countries, which include the two places. I then very carefully revised my comments to not be conclusory as to whether or not these places were countries. Given its inclusion in the World Bank's figures and the wide diplomatic and other acceptance of Israel’s claim to statehood, I included it among the countries I would discuss. Should I have adopted my own list of countries, or used some other list of countries, or explained that I was using the World Bank's figures but not its list of countries? Is an avoidance of controversy important? Is it worthwhile for us to have these internal debates as to how these things are presented and phrased?
I would say that it is important and worthwhile to recognise and entertain these questions and to attempt to gracefully resolve conflicts in what we say (and how we say it), as these controversies distract from the thrust of our messages. Unless one is specifically discussing statehood or sovereignty, raising the issue simply gives the audience one additional thing to account (discount?) for. Spending three of the talk’s twelve minutes on the fascinating legal history of Hong Kong as a Chinese trading post, then a British colony, then a transitional post-handover government, then a Special Administrative Region, might be interesting to some of us, but it isn’t a good use of anyone’s time when the topic of the lecture is global economic issues and development questions – 99% of which involve places outside Hong Kong (now Hong Kong SAR).
My speaking and writing will never resolve – or bring unanimity – to the question of statehood in Hong Kong or Israel or Taipei. That is not my goal. Hence, it is not my place to offer my opinion, if I have any, as to the statehood of any of the three. And this is why international classificatory systems are important.
Statehood can be resolved any number of ways (treaty status, UN member status, regional bilateral agreements, ability to issue sovereign notes, etc.). But there will always be further nuance. What is a currency? What is a bond? What is a negotiable instrument? To make these difficult decisions we must resort to a legal and regulatory taxonomy. While it is not pretty, it gives us all certainty that we are speaking the same language and being similarly inclusive (and exclusive) when we use words like “country” or “currency” with colleagues. Some more liberal linguists may claim this restricts our use of metaphor and category, but I disagree; to paraphrase composer Bob James, the thing must exist concretely before the improvisation upon it is possible.
