I’d say arbitrary but still interesting to think about. You could take 1,000 slices in time and get lost in the data, but it’s interesting just to look at a few I don’t think it claims to be EVERY country that no longer exists
Maybe this is a beginning of someone's mapping journey, so I wouldn't be too harsh on it. If you're interested in how the borders have changed throughout the history, you could also watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Wu0Q7x5D0
I used to work with a guy who was very insistent that he was Czechoslovak.
Not Czech nor Slovak but Czechoslovak !
Seemingly his Mother was one and his Father the other and he took great pride in his hybrid identity and allegiance to a country which no longer exists.
Probably loads of folk like that in the former Yugoslavia and USSR as well.
TBF if you're going to include all the countries that no longer exist on this map, it'd be unreadable.
Off the top of my head (and in no particular order): all the small states in the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire, Dacia, Poland-Lithuania, Scotland, England, the Kingdom of Ireland, Wales, Burgundy, Al-Andalus, Czechoslovakia, the DDR, Yugoslavia, Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungaria, the Irish Kingdoms, etc.
Yeah, that's my point. They included a few random ones, that existed hundred of years ago. When recently, a bunch of countries stopped existing, which makes them more rellevant today, yet are not on the map
Also, it absolutely was. Sure it was nominally a union of federal republics, but they had very little autonomy from Moscow. If you're going to argue that made the republics independent states, you might as well argue that present day states in Germany or the US are independent countries. They have more autonomy than the Soviet republics had.
Always fascinating that one of the longest existing countries was venice (and a republic at that, I think it's the longest existing republic) ... Over a thousand years! That's longer than the Roman empire (stfu no one thinks that the eastern Roman empire is the Roman empire :D) . And certainly longer that the 1000 year Reich