MostlyHuman on Nostr: "Independence dates for widely recognized states earlier than 1919 should be treated ...

"Independence dates for widely recognized states earlier than 1919 should be treated with caution, since prior to the founding of the League of Nations, there was no international body to recognize nationhood, and independence had no meaning beyond mutual recognition of de facto sovereigns (the role of the League of Nations was effectively taken over by the United Nations after the Second World War). See also: disputed territories.

Many countries have some remote (or fantastically remote) symbolic foundation date as part of their national mythology, sometimes artificially inflating a country's "age" for reasons of nationalism, sometimes merely gesturing at a long and gradual process of the formalizing national identity. Such dates reflect not the formation of a state (an independent political entity), but of a nation (an ethnic or cultural grouping), terms that are often conflated in the context of nation states."