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How Old Is the Average Country?
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a snippet from his piece at Vice: "I did some calculations in Excel, using independence dates provided on About.com, and found the average age of a country is about 158.78 years old. Now, before anyone throws a tizzy about what makes a country a country, about nations, tribes, civilizations, ethnic categories, or about my makeshift methodology, keep in mind, I simply assessed 195 countries based on their political sovereignty. That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?"
Here's what you don't get:
He's not talking about existence as a culture, he's talking about being recognized as an independent nation-state.
Germany, for example, did not actually exist as a nation-state prior to the Prussian defeat of the Hapsburgs in the Austro-Prussian War, and the defeat of Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War a few years after that. What existed were hundreds of feuding statelets that all spoke German.
The Greeks existed as a culture, but the last independent Greek state had been conquered by the Ottomans in the 15th century.
The Italians were in exactly the same boat as the Germans. There were the Kings of the Two Sicilies and Piedmont, the Pope, a Grand Duke of Tuscony, Hapsburgs in Venice, and several smaller states that were absorbed by Piedmont prior to unification.
Poland was divided between three Empires at the end of the 18th. Officially the Czar was Polish Head of State, but he didn't give the Poles any autonomy, and ran his bit of Poland as if it was merely another Oblast of Russia, so the Poles don;t count that as independence.
A thousand years ago England was French so ooh la la rosbif.
Actually it was Norman, which isn't quite the same thing. The Normans spoke French but were Norsemen who'd settled in Normandy only a century or two before the Norman Conquest. Even the name "Norman" derives from "Norse".
You consider it the same country even after the Normans trounced you, completely changed the government and aristocracy, and even started to change the language almost beyond recognition. Yeah, right.
Technically, yes, historians do consider it to be the same country. William, Duke of Normandy was persuing a claim to the English throne as a relative of Edward the Confessor.