Populate country lists carefully

International Space Station crew

Pick a country! Software often includes a list of countries to choose from, such as for a shipping address. While populating that list may sound straightforward, the correct list remains elusive, and you can upset people both by including some countries and omitting others.

Postal Union members

In the unlikely event that you have heard of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), you might look for your list of postal address countries there. However, international postal services’ history (and present) still include some exceptions, making the list of UPU members anything but a coherent country list.

Four United Nations (UN) members do not belong to the UPU, and have their post delivered by another UPU member:

1. Andorra
2. Marshall Islands
3. the Federated States of Micronesia
4. Palau

Meanwhile, two UPU members pre-date the UPU restricting membership to sovereign states:

1. Dutch overseas territories - Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten
2. British overseas territories

Restricting the list to sovereign states sounds like a better idea. After all, it turns out that country doesn’t mean the same thing as state.

Sovereign states

In English, the word country overlaps imperfectly with the concept of a sovereign state. Notably, England and several other countries make up the state (kingdom) The United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland.

In most cases, your countries list should list sovereign states, provided that you can decide which ones qualify. Wikipedia explains:

International law defines sovereign states as having a permanent population, defined territory, one government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states

This roughly means that we need a list of those states that other states (but not necessarily all of them) recognise. This takes us to the United Nations.

United Nations members

The list of United Nations (UN) members gets us closer to a list of countries/states. However, not all sovereign states have United Nations membership: Wikipedia’s divides its list of states with limited recognition into:

• 6 UN member states not recognised by at least one UN member state
• 9 non-UN member states recognised by at least one UN member state
• 2 non-UN member states recognised only by other non-UN member states
• 1 non-UN member state not recognised by any other state

The correct list of countries depends on who you ask.

UN/LOCODE

Aside from the complex issue of UN membership and recognition, one UN organisation defines around 100 thousand location codes for trade and transport, such as NL RTM (Rotterdam). In this list, the first two letters correspond to 249 different ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes.

You’d think that these 249 UN/LOCODE country codes would match the 249 officially assigned codes, but they include the user-assigned code XZ to represent international waters and don’t include BV - Norway’s Bouvet Island (photo, top). You probably don’t need to ship anything to the most remote island in the world - an uninhabited nature reserve 1700 km North of Antarctica.

In practice, you should probably tailor your countries list to your purpose and audience, and select names from the Unicode CLDR explicitly, using ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes, instead of filtering the whole list. And beware of the political issues some international data sets cause.