![]() ![]() Maybe our notion of current countries may start to fade," Enriquez said. We'll get better at living with other people. As we do that, I think we'll get better at tolerating other countries. In the last hundred years or so we've moved from being a species that lives mostly in the countryside to being a species that's living about 80% in cities. "The history of humanity has been learning to tolerate, how to learn to live together in larger and larger groups in peace. He wrote a book called the Untied States of America. But Juan Enriquez has thought a lot about it. The idea that borders are in constant change is not something we think about a lot in the United States. But in the end, the Scots decided to stay in the UK. Scotland was thinking about leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all have their own governments and varying degrees of sovereignty, or independence, but they're part of the United Kingdom. The UK is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. ![]() In 2014, people living in Scotland thought very hard about separating from the United Kingdom. In Antarctica there are seven countries that all claim overlapping territories.Īnd in other places, voters have thought about becoming a new country and then decided not to. In some places it's still not clear who gets to claim the land. That country declared independence from Sudan in 2011, just five and a half years ago, after a very violent civil war. The newest country in the world is South Sudan, in East Africa. Why can't we all just live as one big group? - Sophia, 8, Apopka, FLīorders are always changing. "Why is the world made up of so many countries. Powerful governments have historically wanted to take over land that's valuable, and that's been more important to them than the wishes of the native people who live there. And the decision makers don't always have the best interests of the people who live there in mind. It's often the people who are living in a disputed territory who suffer the most, because these decisions about border disputes are often a struggle, not something that people decide with a handshake. But the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, fought to keep those states as part of the Union, the existing U.S. The Confederate States of America, as they were called, even elected a president, Jefferson Davis. That was back in the 1860s, when the southern half of the United States wanted to secede from, or leave, the United States. Civil War in your history classes, if you're in school. People have been killed over border disputes. Wars have been fought over where one country's borders start and another's end. It's not always easy to come up with a border that everyone can agree on. But sometimes they're straight lines that cut through all kinds of natural lines and are more of a political boundary. Sometimes borders can be defined by a natural feature, like a river, mountain or ocean. And its basic function is to say, within these lines a specific government is in charge and specific rules are in place that people who live here have to follow. The kind of border we're talking about is a boundary set up by a government. To understand countries you first have to know what a border is. ![]()
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