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Synonym of "sovereign state". It is not. It is sometimes used...

Homelandsecuritas Says...

synonym of "sovereign state".

It is not. It is sometimes used that way, but it actually has a rather broader meaning.

The term really refers (roughly) to a defined territory occupied by a nation.

Nation states are sovereign countries in this sense, and we nowadays tend to think of nation states as prototypical countries because we are perhaps used to the idea that, ideally, countries should be sovereign and independent of each other.

Countries are not always sovereign and independent, however.

The United Kingdom is essentially a sovereign and independent union of four non-sovereign and non-independent countries (though the history of how each country came to be part that union is a little different; this was not generally a matter of freely opting to join the union as equal partners).

The UK can be considered a country too, by the way. It's not contradictory for a country to contain countries within it, although some people don't consider the British people to be a sufficiently coherent nation for the UK to count as a country.

Posted June 19 2024 at 7:56 PM

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