The Countries With The Strangest Internal States

hello I'm so I can't pokin backs in the second channel geography video this is M series brights about geography and the world and stuff and today I wanted to talk of a particular interesting part of more geopolitics than geographer yes because it is the concept of States within countries or Republic's or Canton's basically subdivisions of countries but they kind of have countries within them my first exposure to this and maybe yours too is the United States of America literally it's in the name of the United States that they are made up of state and when you live in a map you can see all of the states very clearly with their names their divisions the soft stuff or the very least their divisions basically the United States is a country which the name relies on States the very concept relies on States people identify as being from their state first in some cases basically the United States is a very interesting country because it raises the idea of States to people from unitary States like myself here is a map by the way of all of the Federation's in the world which are green versus all the unitary States which is basically the simple explanation is that green countries are made up of states where the power comes from those individual states or Republic's which give them to the central government whereas blue is countries which give powers to those central you know to those local governments from the central government so the central government has all apparent blue whereas the Federation's give the central government some power anyway the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of Federation's around the world and some of these Federation's do some very bizarre things with their states and I wanted to talk about the most bizarre invitation of statesmen countries into David Young because there's just some pretty wacky stuff that I realized as I've been researching the world and going around the world that I wanted to share with you in today's video so hopefully you all do enjoy let's get strained to mentioning by the way the fact that if you look at the Europe and Africa there's just like pretty much a sea of blue there's a tan explodes of green here and there but it's just blue otherwise all over there so interesting that kind of Continental difference here but let's talk about your so belly you notice how like most of Europe and even most of the EU is blue and I thought that was interesting because the EU is arguably a federation but let's get talking straight about you know not the EU because that phrase is just firing everyone's heart let's instead talk about Switzerland which is notably not in the EU and also notably made up of a bunch of Canton's so if you don't know the Swiss cantons you can barely see them on a map again unlike the United States it's not shown quite so well but the this whistlin is actually very very fervently made up of different Canton's again it's got the same kind of system where like people are from their Kent on first then from the country and here are the 26 Canton's of Switzerland so it's simple enough to look up at first but then you realize like whoa well those slices they're just very strange and some of that's to do with the fact that of course Switzerland is a very mountainous country so that land area it's not just one big flat field it's very very from it but it also gets weirder when you realize that these 26 Canton's of Switzerland again look at the size difference there it's there's no uniformity to it there's no anything like that but then also you realize that there's different languages spoken over in the west of the country they speak French in the south the country they speak Italian there's a little bit of romance over here and then the majority speaks Swiss German which isn't even German it's like a variation of German basically there's a big you know divergence thing language there's the version in size there's divergence population so in Zurich there's about 1.5 million people in this council but there's about 15,000 in Appenzell in Houlton basically my point of all of this is that there's just diverse nests all over the place but they come together and they make a country except this way the country of Switzerland is in some sense is barely a country I feel like you know they only reluctantly have a capital as I've gone over before they only reluctantly have a leader if you've never seen this before it's one of the crazier kind of things you can see but this is this right here is the leaders of Switzerland so as you can see this is you know there's eight people there's seven but basically the Swiss the Swiss people elect a Council of leaders seven separate people and then one axis the president internationally but they don't really have a prayer you know president they have seven presidents like what what is going on with that that's just Switzerland look how nice they all look they're all happy in this one no I'm gonna suck in the other picture my point being is there Switzerland in a lot of ways is barely a country because they are you know they're kind of chem Hans first they kind of come together to have the defense of having a huge country and that's something fascinating you know also if we look at the map break up right here here are all the flags in case you're curious they're all flags all the separate places of course suruc is the one where most of the you know it's literally a six of the population lives in Zurich so you can know if you like well that's all the stuff going down but Geneva all the way in the French portion is a pretty big city there is some stuff going down the Italian parts and other Romansh isn't quite as important basically there is just like everything is going crazy in Switzerland and that's something fascinating enough by itself but the thing that makes this really crazy it's not just the fact that like oh yes whistlin it's crazy we could talk about that forever but instead it's the fact that Switzerland is made up of 26 states right I don't know that before Campins is what they're called but we'll call them states to make things easy so there's 26 states and they have a kind of like in the United States or like in Canada - if I'm not mistaken like in any other country which is made up of states where these states come together and they have representatives so that each of the individual places can be represented equally so they have one of these however the interesting thing about them maybe you know where is the fact that they have 40 60 s and you might like 26 Canton's 46 seats 26 Canton's 46 seats so yeah you might you might be working in the maps on that one like oh they just elect one point like nine councilors per see first state sorry and the simple explanation for this one is no that's not how they actually do it what they do instead is they elect 20 so there's two councillors or two again people on this board that every single state in Switzerland but interesting they have to me the crazy thing in my opinion is the fact that some of these you know Canton's of Switzerland count as half Canton's that's right unlike to America where even if you live in a state like with you know half a million people you know not not looking at you I mean or anything oh if you live snake with like you know 30 million you get the same - in Switzerland they're actually half Canton's and there are genuine differences in how these half Canton's accounted such as on the counts of states when they both get half a huge story they get one rep sensitive or half be normal that's right there are some states in Switzerland which are literally worth less than others also when there is a popular referendum sometimes referendums happy one by majority population as well as a majority of states and in the majority of states contest you can actually count half Canton's for half so you can win in like I think it's 12 of the 26 Canton's but as long as they're all full Canton's and the ones you lose at the half Canton's you can still win overall which is crazy to me but that's genuinely how they do the whole system basically I guess it would be yeah it would be 12 right if you wanted to get bet my moving with this is it's really really crazy silly the way this which since system works but it's something that makes sense to them in case curious by the way why are there half Canton's at SRI on the map right here apples and you know hold you know showing a map right here because I think it looks it looks way more fascinating we see in a map so this right here the Canton with a smaller population it's a half cancel you might think the population reasons but it's actually because they split from eopns on outer roads again it's Swiss names obviously the when the Canton's split they actually only keep half of the if they split and they're kind of the same so this is like the inner it's leaving a city but you know this is like the inner area than the outer area which by the way there's like exclaves in these candles it's weird stuff that when they split sometimes they agree to just be half Canton's the same happened with Basel when Basel split Institue Basel became Basel City and then bay door lansche left so there's two separate half Canton's even though Basel has a much higher population than some non half Canton's such as zhuge for instance so Zook I really like as I I really like zhuge as a as a place because it's one of these smaller states within Switzerland sort of smaller Canton's they were published about 40,000 people they're also the smallest by area if I'm not mistaken so fun little fact the canton of Zook oh this is the city of Zuk Zuk Kent's on this is the smallest you know but yeah the fun fact about there is that you can actually pay your taxes using bitcoins so isn't that a crazy fun fact you can pay your taxes in Bitcoin if you live here and you'll be one of the 40,000 people who can vote and stuff oh also fun little fact about the just just to go back to Athens alone in Holden they really lost one of the last places in the world really to introduce female voting even though women voting was allowed official in Switzerland like many decades before it was 1990 where they finally allowed women the right to vote and you might think like wow that oppressive placed like knowing they're women the right to vote but a lot of women didn't want the right to vote they're like you know my husband makes that decision for me and I didn't know that just that just goes to show how old-fashioned a place can be while still living in a very modern country because of how different Switzerland can be from Zurich which is such a modern futuristic city to the place where women don't want the right to vote you know I'm just saying it's fascinating to me but that moves us nicely into the second example of a federation or a federal state again it's tight it's arguable whether different slides but let's talk about Belgium because Belgium has three separate main you know federal federal parts there is the north part which is Flanders there is the South part which is bolonia so okay here is Flanders as you can see this is a part Belgium which beats Dutch again I always think it's fascinating when countries can come together multiple languages but it happened right here then there is the south language the Walloon region or valonia but this is the arrow right here they used to speak Walloon but then they eventually ended up speaking French long story but they basically speak French but no quite regular French same the Flanders and the Dutch it's Dutch but no quite perfectly Dutch and then there's also the final city you might have noticed if you look at Flanders that actually has a gap for Brussels because Brussels is a separate capital region as a fun fact the reason Brussels is the capital of Europe is partially still the fact that Belgium being one of the first Federation's in Europe Brussels has a lot of powers to itself to keep the basically because Belgium is a federation like the rest of Belgium doesn't put pressure on the e being there and it it kind of works out for everyone Brussels is like this neutral zone in the middle of Europe and that is why it's the EU capital so there's no fun thing but yeah there's three parts of the three parts of Belgium that's you know it's not like a heavily federalized place like it's not like oh 50 states or 26 states like you might expect but it's actually made up of just three separate parts there's also a german-speaking PNC we won't get us that now although it's fascinating that there's free languages although arguably in you know Brussels they speak English instead to some extent not always I know big Asterix isn't everything let's talk they speak French a lot too again French kind of wins over Dutch even though it's in the Dutch part Belgium but let's not talk about that let's instead talk about the French underside actually because again interesting Lee the Walloon region of Belgium is the less populated part it's only by light you know a few percent but it means that whenever a government is formed for the whole country there's this huge divide between the two parts they're really like aggressive towards each other and that wasn't a government for I think it was like 16 months the building just didn't have a government because again you need both sides to operate and that same both sides being needed to operate actually runs into an issue when you get to something like this so this is Wallonia this is low article while only adamantly blocking the EU straight deal with Canada that's right the the region of Wallonia this place right here where three and a half million people live roughly healthy it's about half a billion people living in the EU so this tiny region off a Belgian because of the Belgium Constitution in the wait Belgium laws work they were blocking a trade deal with Canada and that is that's crazy right they're tiny low region of Belgium because of the way it's a federation and the power comes from the you know the states up to the you know the government meant that this region of Belgium could block a trade deal with the entirety of the you know EU in Canada until they got some concessions to their liking and I know Evan that's kind of nuts like all of the other 27 countries we're on board UK included but but you know Bologna was like now we we need some farming sessions whatever they're gonna destroy out good something like that and I think that's crazy and it's evil you know like this is this is where it raises the conversation is that a good thing that there is that much local government that a huge international treaty that was gonna bring prosperity in some form to all these other places can be blocked by a place like that is that a good thing is that a bad thing I don't know I guess that's the sole thing you have picked yourself but I just find it fascinating but yeah also there's a german-speaking partner here with open being their rough capital they have a little Parliament where they make laws themselves so isn't that cute and that's what Ben will onea too so I guess it was the French path Belgium with a little bit of some Germans I don't imagine they were going a little bit but yeah sometime it would also by the way the reason this is even crazier is like so to block the entirety off the EU you don't even have to just be that like one region you have to be the majority in that region which makes you the minority in the country which makes you the minority in the EU and I know it raises questions like it's one of those like big like I guess political debates where there's no right answer that's just like debate and I think it's fascinating and it's something worth considering like if you really love the idea of like down to level local government that sometimes you get local governments that just like yeah whatever we let's not play ball and that's why stuff gets centralized in the way that some people don't like the first thing fact let's move to another Federation which is the Russian Federation so you might not be aware of it but Russia's full name is actually the Russian Federation and yeah it's only been around since 1990 or at least in its current state when the u-s-s are dissolved so the USSR was this crazy multi-level Federation was the union of social Soviet Socialist Republics so you know there were Republic's were in the same you know it was mostly just like Russia but Russia and friends but the crazy thing about the Union of Russia you know the USSR is the fact that they were you know countries Linnet so there was like oh yeah the Ukrainian SSR and the Russian SSR but then there was also within those countries such as the Moldovan SSR there were countries within them so there was a Transnistrian SSR which is now like its own low country and then those countries within those countries within that country kind of had their own subdivisions too so basically Russia goes crazy crazy dance to levels but let's talk about monolith Monday Russia because even modern-day post Soviet Union 2017 Russia is a pretty it's it's kind of a bull so let me show you a map of it this is all of the sanyasins down below with you this is a map of all of modern day Russia on all their Russian states or Oblast as the what they use here so again they use they use Canton's in Switzerland they use Oblast in the Slavic speaking well for most part so in Ukraine it's still applause and a lot of countries that used to be Oblast it's kind of just a Russian thing but also Ukrainian and Belarusian but one being is yeah basically they have applause which is they put the states and you can see them if you look around right here so there's a lot of things that make these wacky the first of all being the facts that if you look on a map right here this is a map of all of the Oblast Krays federal tommix W lots of different worlds in Russia and you might look at it and say oh yeah the reason it's in different colors is like how if you look at a regular map they have different colors so you can see the countries distinguish where one ends and where one begins no that's not a reason for this every one of these colors on this map you know the the yellow the green the blue the orange the purple the red they all represent a different tier status from the Russian government so remember how I was like kind of mind blown that like oh yes Switzerland they have half Canton's you know as a post like the kind of egalitarian across the board like a States estate in America in Russia it's very very very much the opposite so yellow I'm gonna go for a few of these in all of these yellow represents and applause so that's just the generic like state level thing they have local government they have stuff like that a red represents a federal a city of federal importance so there's just free if those by the way were mentioning Crimea here cuz Russian claims it says this is like Russian claimed not internationally verified blue we've got three cities we've got you know Moscow we've got that was a weird noise we've got st. Petersburg and we've got the brand-new city that you picked up Sebastopol so there are free cities of federal importance their cities with a lot of powers devolve like you get in other countries then you have the the orange ones which are crazed if I'm not mistaken they have a lot of similarities to a republic which is green but they were once the like frontier of Russia so they had like they have retroactive laws and things from back when they used to be the edge of the country because interestingly enough to me is the fact that Russia used to just be European Russia kind of just stopped it kind of here again it's depending on how I go back but then they kind of did the in the same way America had to expand to the west Russia expanded to the east and they just kept on expanding and they kept on expanding and interesting enough like even the parallel between Russia and America where they both wrote the u.s. expanded Western America Russia expanded East and then they like kind of meet at that point it's kind of beautiful if you ask me yeah let's go back to the map and let's talk about the fact that there's also the one purple place right there so that purple place you're not gonna believe its name if you've never heard of it but it's the Jewish autonomous Oblast it looks like this on a map right here so this is it as published of about 160,000 and they have their autonomous oblast status they're the only one but look Tran plain purple on this map you can't because basically autonomous Oblast used to be a thing in the Soviet unit most of them are phased out but the Jewish autonomous Oblast has been kept ever since even though so you know it's it's a one-off thing in Russia where they're autonomous entirely basically and the crazy thing about it the the thing that's like the catch and the the crazy selling point is the fact that the Jewish autonomous Oblast in Russia is not Jewish at one point they wanted it to be Jewish but it never had a majority Jew population they just wanted to be like well Jews are now officially a thing because they have an area and they gave it to them a very tiny place it's mostly just farmers 1% of which actually are Jewish so I guess that counts for something but 97% count themselves as ethnic Russian basically this is an area where Jews claim to live so that Jews can have some rights but Jews don't live here because I mean you go to Israel or something right instead especially the end of the Soviet Union so instead the Jewish autonomous Oblast it's just kind of this area of Russia which has this weird special status where there's no particular interest in removing it and which just remains to this day with again a small enough population that it's just not bothering anyone so there's the Jewish autonomous Oblast also what we're talking about crazy things I spoke about you Cuccia a bit recently but just in case you want to see that again so here's your Cuccia this is a Republican Russia Republic's are essentially like they have autonomous constitutions Parliament's leaders in some cases Chechnya is pretty famous for having like a very anti-gay one right like there are no gays in Kushina might have heard that if you follow the world if you haven't then guy from other Republic's just claimed those no gays in this place but anyway the reason I bring these up is because there are no loves that's us and then finally we have cities of federal importance so this is quite interesting because the way these federal districts work so if we go to the city of mop as you will just click on Moscow if we go to the city of Moscow as you can see right here this is the this is the applause which has all of their thing but unlike what they do in a lot of other where they give like the surrounding area to that old lost or state or whatever - or district or even cooler so create a London for instance you know any four metropolitan area belongings that same place in Russia they actually have a Moscow applause which again kind of fascinating that like the area around it governs itself separately to the way Moscow is done and then also they have one of these around sit Petersburg so it's in Pittsburgh the city exists as st. Petersburg and then if you go around it this is the crazy bit seems Pittsburgh usually called Leningrad and the applause around it is still called Leningrad and it's huge separately like look at look at the sights this but yeah basically this is just a bizarre thing to me that like they didn't rename the Oblast around it so the surrounding areas off st. Petersburg are still code Leningrad and yeah again like given the history at the Soviet Union of all of this all things it should kind of crazy that they they left it that way in in my opinion maybe it's not maybe you're a big Lenin Fannie like what there we go and bring Lenin back bring back the Soviet Union but just wacky enough to meet in my opinion so there you go that is the craziest kind of thing rushers divided into six separate tiers you might be like oh that's not too many tears right no that's six that's red that's yellow that's green that's orange that's blue that purple that is a lot of separate levels and districts and I didn't even explain often properly but basically that's because they're all very similar you just get more rights as you go down the like oh yeah we enslaved your population have some more autonomy you Cuccia for instances or a public has a lot of stuff the most or ugly the least depending on your definition goes to the autonomous oblast but that's its own thing again the jewish era but basically russia is just a complex place unlike the US where they have equal states they have six level of states in russia and you don't hear very much about them because again I guess maybe most the internet just doesn't care about Russian states but they are they are there there are Russian people as I'm gonna before there's like very weird ethnic groups in not weird but there's very unique ethnic groups in Russia and that's female no I get the Chechnya thing always comes to mind and basically let's move on next from this to talk about the final one which is the Canada so Canada a lot people assume it has States because you live in a map and you can see again unlike most of the countries it's really just like Canada and United States and I think Mexico to where you can see the states very clearly before you zoom in too far like Adel Mexico's not true I don't know whether is maybe it's a Google Maps being eccentric but Canada actually has its state names very clearly enabled on the state but the fun fact about it is the fact that all all of these things appear so there's actually there's word for it but they have States essentially they're not called that they're called I actually forgot the exact name of it but they're the provinces if there are you know state essentially and they're our territory when they're not a state they look like a state on a map but they fought the three separate provinces on the top or the three separate territories are not actually states that control by the federal government and that's because in the entirety of these three top states Yukon Territory Northwest Territories and Nunavut about sixty thousand people live in each one of those so basically all three of them combined have less population than a whole state and it really leads to this weird situation where most of Canada's land air so I mean it's not when you look at locator but looking on the it's right when you're looking at a globe when you look at the Mackay projection most of Canada's land is actually in these uninhabited territories in fact Canada does just have the states down here and again little people perhaps not aware of that one also kind of crazy back because you know that should go show just how like small can directly is but Canada is even smaller than the top of these states because the top of these states is already so rural most of Canada exists so close to the border like you get some weird exceptions like Edmonton is all the way up here but like all the way up here is like still only halfway into our berta basically all of Canada exists in this one kind of like stretch along the border of America which because again it's really cold and really untamable wouldn't read basically the terrain doesn't like you when you go too far north and again if I could be lovely but no and this means that the way to connect Canada it's only you know you might think like really well-connected country like America but no there is actually only one bridge connecting all of them you know that Candice together and during one point because it's called the trans-canada highway phenoms taken at one point that trans-canada highway actually was broken the trans-canada highway near Nipigon reopens to one lane over there was a huge bridge and it's the one bridge connecting the whole country when that bridge was down Canada was officially you know West Canada is Canada we were officially cut off from each other and that in my opinion is as you might say bananas so there you go thank about watching sister you I want to talk about States a little bit Candice system where they have like states and then not really States but we'll pretend they're States we've got the Swiss system where we've got Canton's and ha Kenton's we've got Belgium where the whole basically the EU is set up there because they have States and while the states blocked an EU deal so oh isn't that crazy and then we have Russia where you're not we can categorize things how we want because we're Russia and notable that's fascinating and maybe you agree to me so thank you much watching this video I hope you all enjoyed it second channel don't care goodbye

Channel: ibx2cat

Views: 243,529

Keywords: countries, geography, states, cantons, republics, oblasts, russia, switzerland, strangest

Id: uKhcS0Ri9PY

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2017