Who Gets to Have Their Own Country?

The Inquiry

• Episode: Who Gets to Have Their Own Country?
• Website: The Inquiry
• Feed URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p029399x/episodes/downloads.rss
• Duration: 00:23:33
• Published: 2017-08-03 04:30

You might think simple rules decide the creation of nation states. You'd be wrong.

There are plenty of people out there who want their own state - like in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia, which both have independence referendums coming up. Yet the national governments in Baghdad and Madrid say the votes - whatever their outcome - won't result in new countries. So how do you start a new country? Making sense of an atlas dotted with exceptions, special cases and lands in limbo, we ask: who gets to have their own country?

(Photo: Young boy holds a pro-Independence Catalan flag (Senyera) during Catalonia National Day. Credit: Quique Garcia/Getty Images)