2015-05-18 23:38 GMT+02:00 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote: > > > So country codes cannot be reassigned (and we can expect many more > > merges/splits or changes of regimes in the many troubled areas of the > > world. > > Changes of regimes don't usually result in new 3166 code elements. The > same is true for merges (look at DE/DD or YE/YD). New and changed > country names usually do.
I just included merges only to be complete because they frequently occur a little time after a split (and not with the former part). But of course merges are much less frequent than splits. An in today's globalized world, splits are even easier than they were in the past (where merges were the results of invasions/wars/conquests). The rate of splits is in fact accelerating in history, even in countries living in peace, this does not mean that they terminate all their partnerships, just that they take the right to create their own alliances. There are reasons for them: cultural (language), national taxes, economic difficulties in some regions, unemployment, management of resources (water, constructible or cultivable soils) but the most important reasons is political (defiance between political parties, or brutality against minorities and mutual misunderstanding)... In the last 50 years the most important changes came from decolonialisation and its independances (that was completed at end the the 1970's). But now we are seeing splits for much smaller entities, and this can occur in many more places. With ISO 3166-2 the situation within countries is much more complex and more frequent (in Europe most countries are undergoing large changes in their administrative divisions, the changes that will occur next year in French regions is still not taken into account in ISO 3166-2, as well as the change that is already effective within one department, splitted in two parts with only one which remains as a department, the other one being a group of communes erected into a new territorial collectivity taking all powers of its former department, for local adminsitration only, but with the national power still not divided in what is now a "circonscription départementale" with the same departmental prefecture as before the split. The hierarchical model of subdivisions has in fact lots of exceptions (look into Spain, UK, Germany, it was already true for France and US, but now it is also occuring even in the Metropolitan area). In fact we can see several parallel layers of subdivisions, but for different legal roles/missions. The ISO 3166-1 also assumes that everything is a country, but it is already wrong with some dependant territories (not all) of France, UK, US, the Netherlands, Spain and possibly some islands of China. And these codes also don't map correctly to effective national divisions (the encoding for claims in Antartica remains ambiguous, depending on who uses the data). There are also reserves for things that are not countries but groups of countries (EU, WIPO areas...), and there could exist new codes for other international alliances (these look like "merges" except that they are not full merges and the entities continue to coexist separately).
