Politics & Geography

A state is an area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government that has control over its internal and foreign affairs. It occupies a defined territory on Earth’s surface and contains a permanent population. Country is a synonym for state. The term state, as used in political geography, does not refer to the 50 regional governments inside the United States. The 50 states of the United States are subdivisions within a single state—the United States of America.

A map of the world shows that virtually all habitable land is organized into states. But for most of history, until recently, this was not so. As recently as the 1940s, the world contained only about 50 countries, compared to approximately 200 today

States of the World

All but a handful of states are members of the United Nations.

Figure 8-1 Full Alternative Text

The land area occupied by the states of the world varies considerably. The largest state is Russia, which encompasses 17.1 million square kilometers (6.6 million square miles), or 11 percent of the world’s entire land area. Other states with more than 5 million square kilometers (2 million square miles) include Canada, the United States, China, Brazil, and Australia.

At the other extreme are about two dozen microstates, which are states with very small land areas. If Russia were the size of this page, a microstate would be the size of a single letter on it. The Vatican is the world’s smallest microstate at 0.44 square kilometers (0.17 square miles). The second-smallest microstate and the smallest that is a member of the United Nations is Monaco (Figure 8-2), which is only 2 square kilometers (0.8 square miles). Nauru is the world’s smallest island state, at 21 square kilometers (8.1 square miles).

A Microstate

Monaco occupies only 2 square kilometers (0.8 square miles). Nearly all of Monaco is visible here. France is in the background.

Other U.N. member states that are smaller than 1,000 square kilometers (400 square miles) include Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, Maldives, Malta, Micronesia, Palau, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, San Marino, São Tomé e Príncipe, the Seychelles, Singapore, Tonga, and Tuvalu. Many of the microstates are islands, which explains both their small size and sovereignty.

Pause & Reflect 8.1.1

With virtually all of Earth’s land now allocated to states, how might the number of states increase in the future?