Why Do Europes Dumbest Countries Exist At All?

hello i'm toy cat and welcome back so the second channel video this is episode series we'll talk about geography and the world and stuff and today i wanted to talk about europe which is a continent that people understand because it's filled with countries that people also understand i mean sweden is a place filled with swedish people france is a place filled with french people and ireland is a place filled with irish people these are all countries that people don't really question they understand why they exist they understand why they've existed and they understand why they kind of need to exist in the future however uh when you start to dive into the weirder countries of europe for example the micro countries obviously liechtenstein you're like how did that even get there how is there a city-sized country just in the middle of some mountains over here um it's a good question to ask what about the bigger countries though of like belgium how does belgium exist surrounded by so many other major powers in europe and not get taken over by one of them and although belgian people ask this question too why does belgium need to exist um it is a very valid question about why is this even here and this dives uh this goes into for so many other countries across europe like portugal why has it not been invaded by spain and so i figured in this uh you know video because if you ask normal people why does portugal exist they'll give you some nonsense arts or they'll make you feel dumb like of course portuguese people are different to spanish people and the nation's states imply they can't be joined together but you know the question isn't why uh you know they exist at to some extent as much as it is like why have they not stopped existing how does it continue to exist which feels rude but given that if you search why does and then country name the most common thing about some countries is like why does ireland have no snakes why does sweden hate norway but for belgium it is genuinely why does belgium exist why does luxembourg exist why does andorra exist for example or why does moldova exist why does belarus exist and finally of course there's why does portugal exist which is where we're going to start this video because i guess europe goes west to east in terms of recognizability and so many people just like me have probably had the question at some point uh when you look at a map when i was a child i was like huh it's weird spain controls basically all of the iberian peninsula besides this little bit right here and portugal the much smaller country that surely could be militarily dominated by spain um you know is entirely bordered by it how has spain not just gobbled up portugal by now and uh yeah it's a very important question i understand why you're asking it however when you dive into um when you look into spain and portugal's history it actually becomes more apparent that it's weirder that uh you know spain is the weirder country for existing rather than portugal because although spain has existed in some form for hundreds of years it's been lots of different divided kingdoms and even if you look at a map of it now in terms of language you'll see that like spanish is the widespread language but there's a whole catalan region oh yeah you remember catalonia there's the basque count got a country there's gallus galactian i don't even know how you say that galician there's so many different languages and so many other groups that have uh you know historically made up spain uh valencian et cetera et cetera et cetera that actually spain is the weird hodgepodge of loads of different places together whereas portugal you know while spain was lots of divided places portugal is relatively consistent again if we look back at the map you can see there's some interesting subdivisions of the language but by and large uh portugal is a place that speaks portuguese and has been historically well centered together and again has this lovely coast around europe whereas spain has been the lots of places coming together and so why does portugal exist is a valid question but i think the weirder question is why does spain exist as for why uh has spain not taking over portugal given that spain has existed a long time and portugal could have been taken over the simple answer is military alliances portugal has had a lot of alliances famously the portuguese british alliance is the oldest continuing one in the world uh since like 1491 they haven't fought each other but otherwise even if spain wanted to take portugal which they could probably do given enough time it wouldn't be an easy fight because although portugal and spain look like they just border each other the reality is if you look it's a lot of rivers and well-fortified natural borders for the most part and so for spain to take portugal it's not as easy as it was for let's just name a random example if germany wanted to take say uh the netherlands or belgium or france it would be perhaps easier for that to happen i don't know if we have historical examples of that um but it would be easier in most places i mean obviously it would be hard for germany to go over the border here but thankfully there's no way for germany to get to france that doesn't involve their shared border anyway you're not history memes not right now uh let's talk about other countries because by the way just in case you're curious because this map about why does i i got curious too and i was like so why does country name and i did decide to google it and when you type why does apparently the top result is why does sex hurt and then most of these is like why does it hurt my husband or my wife when we make love it's kind of nice that people are searching this so much or maybe it's not nice that it's happening so much that people have to search for it but if you if you search why does belgium um as you can see oh i spelt belgium wrong as you can see why does belgium exist is in here in so many places but it's not the top the top one is why does belgium speak french which is why i feel like we have to start with that one to some extent so here you go here's google maps again uh here is the map of spain again over here no over here here is the map of spain and its languages spain uh i i had to speak to my girlfriend recently and she was shocked that spain spoke multiple languages and so if you look at switzerland it's the same thing wow german is the majority language but it's not everywhere and there's italian and there's some french and there's romance and switzerland is an example of a strong country is it strong because it gets over those things or magically is it just true that like actually speaking lots of languages is good it's almost certainly the first not the second but then interestingly enough if you look at belgium you'll see they speak dutch in the north they speak french in the south there's a tiny bit of german in the east and then brussels or brazil's is uh bilingual french flemish and so it's very interesting that like okay so it's a country belgium which speaks very loosely fifty percent it's not quite fifty uh very loosely fifty percent french and fifty percent dutch why is that the case why do they not speak belgium how does a country exist when it doesn't have a language given that if you look at most countries one of the core things that ties countries in together um is the language they have in common i mean for example polish people speak polish danish people speak danish why do belgiums but how do belgian people exist as a concept without a language to unify them together and the simple answers to why belgium exists is that they used to be part of the netherlands and they uh you know and then they split from the netherlands because of religion here is a map of religion in the former netherlands as you can see belgium's catholic the netherlands is you know one of those other weird sects and that's the simple explanation as to why belgium and indeed also luxembourg split from the formerly kingdom of benevolence in fact these countries were so close together um that they uh and they still kind of are it's just religion that divided them to some extent that they have their own union inside the european union called benelux where they do have their own representatives their own uh inter cooperation it's very easy to go between these three countries there's a lot of fun things going on even the flags i mean i'm just saying there's lots of similarities isn't isn't this fun wow look how close friends the benelux countries are but my point here is that um but basically religion is the simple explanation as to why belgium exists but then like why if they split away and they speak two separate languages how is it not divided again into two countries and uh if you look at the current belgium political climate it does look like that's going to happen at some point maybe i wouldn't actually count on it but it looks very tense between the two languages because yeah this is a country which is made of people that basically can't speak to each other literally can't speak to each other in many cases and so yeah why does belgium exist um the simple answer as to how they have any identity at all is that the netherlands hasn't existed as a country in its own right for very long in fact the netherlands was mostly owned uh by like hasberg rulers across europe and the south of the netherlands was the spanish netherlands because yeah spain doesn't didn't own portugal but it did control belgium and it's very complex when you dive into europe too far it makes no sense and belgium therefore has a very loose identity why has it not been invaded and taken over it has literally been invaded and taken over many times it's just people keep setting it back because the the key goal for most of the last couple hundred years in europe has been balance of power if any country if france had belgium they would be more powerful if germany had belgium they'd be more powerful and so belgium is set up very deliberately as a neutral country neutral and european affairs at least i mean uh i you i i would ask uh about you know the bad things uh they've done in other continents like i i wish i could ask like a belgian person to give me a hand in asking what atrocities they've committed but you know maybe that'll be off topic for this video so why does luxembourg exist so um short answer it shouldn't long answer ah that works for me so um yeah with that said um next up here we've got liechtenstein should we go back to luxembourg you know can i tell you one of my favorite facts luxembourg um as the uh is like a historic uh principality uh there's a prince behind luxembourg and uh so if you search luxembourg though the bigger luxembourg is the luxembourg that was in belgium when luxembourg went free from belgium they took a larger part of it to keep as their own and so luxembourg the country is smaller than luxembourg province of the off of belgium which fun fact also speaks uh french or it speaks balloon well loon is actually different to french it's just kind of close to french and like dialects versus languages it's all very confusing and you know what else is confusing uh luxembourg yeah it's a very small country very rich country um very conveniently located as being like kind of neutral center of the eu it's been invaded a few times um but again it's recent enough that that's fine but then so how about lichtenstein liechtenstein is a incredibly historic country and it's not only uh you know it's this super historic country but it's also um a country which continues to have like some great influence and which still to this day is robert king and so how does a kingdom exist this small and not just get one day absorbed by switzerland or austria and so this is another history lesson but long story short germany has not always been germany it used to be loosely the holy roman empire a whole bunch of individual kingdoms which just loosely work together to not be invaded by outsiders and so one of those kingdoms was liechtenstein over here kind of separated but again was normal countries be separated as you can tell by the spanish netherlands um and whatever else and so if you look at liechtenstein liechtenstein is a country um of lichtenstein was one of those principalities that was ruled by a prince who was just very good at getting along and staying on the right side of all european conflicts it really is a kind of weird example of that and then within the last hundred years sure switzerland could have taken it but switzerland is a very formal by the books country they they offered you know they they i think they offered politely and lichtenstein said no and they said well that's good enough for us we tried and uh i i think in reality these days they could merge together but they have a close enough relationship liechtenstein and switzerland they're both in the uh schengen area and if you want to go from one country to the other it's very very easy it's so easy in fact that um switzerland accidentally invaded liechtenstein because their soldiers went a bit too far across the border without permission was very embarrassing they had to apologize and i think that's hilarious so um therefore the next uh country we should talk about because micro countries as a whole we have to do a rapid fire round uh why does the vatican city exist um because religious reasons and mussolini sounds like a joke but it's genuinely real why does san marino exist very old historic country it's mountainous it's too hard to take compared to the just asking them to do what you want anyway same kind of goes with monaco however monaco is a um everyone's favorite country with a formula one track in it um so uh monaco and gambling as well monaco is a very rich principality and in general um again it used to be ruled by different people to the rest of france france didn't take it over although charles de gaulle basically threatened uh by saying yeah if you let too many french people move there and avoid our high taxes because france is france um then that's uh that's a thing we'll be mad with and they said sure we won't and monaco has has maintained their independence since andorra is a funny example though so andorra is straddling the line between micro-country and not in my opinion why doesn't dora exist right between two powers and why doesn't spain just take it one day because they do speak mostly catalan-ish language um and so uh given that they speak catalan which puts them perfectly within catalonia why is andorra not a part of spain um simple answer is that they andorra was very close so andorra used to be a small principality surrounded by slightly bigger principalities and they had a war and in the war it was like disputed who should get andorra and the simple solution was what if we give it to both of you you have to share it and so um what eventually became france um had to share andorra with uh catalonia and so catalan's um i think it's like their bishop or something shares the power with the president of france the president of france is also one of the princes of andorra and so by being effectively a joint sovereignty country a condominium would be the modern day solution by being a joint sovereignty country uh there's no reason for either country to invade and but there is reason for each country to be mad if they have one doesn't bait if spain takes andorra then france has lost something not that they probably care but i mean it's it's a it's not enough to start an instant over and if spain and france invades uh andorra then i hear geese um then uh then obviously uh spain has lost something and so andorra exists by being perfectly sandwiched between big powers this is basically the small country survival guide if you want to be a small country be a country that multiple countries don't want someone else having and you'll be fine life pro tip i think this is uh the simple solution as to how like taiwan manages to exist despite having a very hostile power in it but this video is not about taiwan it's about moldova why does moldova exist um honestly anytime so now we've done all the western european countries that people probably have questions about anything east of the iron curtain why does it exist somewhere in the explanation you can simplify down to the soviet union and stalin like playing games so why does um moldova exist um well when stalin was rolling across western europe to uh liberate in big air quotes those people um so uh when he was doing that he decided he would have some moldova it was actually a province of romania besser arabia you know i said that totally correctly don't question me uh he was rolling crosstalk he wanted best arabia and so he just took it made it part of the soviet union the moldovan ssr uh why has moldova since independence in 1991 not rejoined romania the simple answer is that separate histories for a very long time separate economic systems separate people um has slowly started to diverge however um since i last told this story in 2020 actually there has been a new president elected off uh moldova and yeah this 24th of december 2020 very recently and the new president is quite quite european almost every eastern european country is like pro europe or pro russia and uh so moldova just switched from having a pro russia president to a pro europe president by the way as far as european you know like central figures go given that she's also 48 is that this is impressively attractive just just need to throw that out there um so the comments don't mention it and so if you read into her opinions about covered 19 she thinks that's bad um she thinks uh that other things are good and if you read into this uh far enough you'll read that actually um if furthermore when asked how she would vote in case there was a referendum on the unification of romania moldova sandy replied that she would vote yes and so uh for the first time we've got a president in moldova that actively would once or would ideally prefer uh being a part of romania is a big step for them one day joining as far as every country on this list goes moldova is the one that is least likely to exist in 50 years but it's still not a sure thing a lot although you could also argue that like with the eu going the way it is maybe every country only becomes like country and name only who knows for sure what would you call that like a kinda that sounds offensive you know house is offensive though the very uh people question montenegro's existence this is like the one country where you can't really blame the ussr and i'll admit if you uh if you look at this map right here people don't ask why montenegro exists they ask why it has a spanish name so i figured i'd just go why is it called montenegro which if i'm not mistaken would be mountain and then black mountain black in spanish it doesn't have a spanish name it used to be ruled by venetians nowadays we'll just say italians be simple but it is venetian and so montenegro is actually the english english version of the venetian for what they called the country which is loosely mount black in montenegrin it looks like this i can't say that and i'll believe that you can't but it's just uh the country is called black mountain mount black whatever where you want to say that uh because that's that's what they call a big mountain range in their country and why is montenegro separate serbia they had a referendum on it why do they have a referendum why do they consider themselves to be a separate group to serbia uh principalities old stuff they have a separate language but a language is just a dialect with an army and a flag so why why why did they uh you know like why did they used to be separate kingdoms and why they have a separate language it's because um yeah they they're they're very slightly different people slightly different history so on and so forth serbia was on the the downfall anyway they figured let's get out and again serbia montenegro will be joining the eu so it's all kind of uh balanced out by that anyway speaking of things that are balanced out the final country today why does belarus exist if you look at belarus which everyone in the area again like ukrainians russians um it seems to be uh called like blast yeah is i like like my ev every time i've spoken in english they explain every country in english and they're like yes bill of russia and so belarus is one of those few countries where even in english non-english speakers in english will refer to it as something else just like how um spanish and portuguese people call all of this america even though in english this is colloquially america it's one of those weird things and so belarusia why does it exist um simple answer as to why people question that is if we go back to these maps of uh various uh languages you'll see interestingly enough even though belarusian is the uh mother tongue they speak a lot of russian and belarusian is very similar to russian so why is there a country the closest by the way the last dictatorship in europe is what people call this as well um the last dictatorship in europe that is really friendly with russia has so much ethnic similar man look at the size of russia like the the country name goes in the middle of the country and so belarus goes here russia goes over there because there's so much russia to the east and west of that label whatever um so belarus is very um is very unquestionable as a country why does it exist um there are separate people who are belarusian they're the most similar probably of all the former soviet states to um russia and they've only existed since 1991 so people question like they probably could and should be absorbed by russia and again given uh russian history they've been part of russia many many times however unlike most of the rest of russia or the kievian russo or the history that goes back there belarus often has more shared history with the poland the polish lithuanian commonwealth they've had a lot of time outside of russia that influences development obviously white russians which is what belarus actually translates to i just realized it's also a cocktail name i wonder if the cocktail is named after the people but um white russians um are obviously a um is obviously a group and so like whatever there's an ethnic group and uh so the simple answer why does belarus exist boils down to something along the lines of like well they were separated out as an administrative unit during the uh soviet union days they even got themselves a unc this is one of my favorite fun facts that stalin only that the reason belarus and ukraine even before they were independent countries had un seats which i think is one of the very few examples of that in the world is because uh stalin wouldn't join the un unless they got independent seats so he could have free votes instead of one which is hilarious separate point um but you know what else is hilarious and there's a separate point uh belarus feels like it shouldn't exist to some people but in reality it's just like yeah there's a slightly different ethnic group these days although they have a lot of policy aligned with russia they do also have some things where they go slightly different ways and um although it's the most likely country country to just rejoin russia i also don't think it's very likely that they do that on their own at behalf so um the place i want to finish this video with because i think it's interesting um should we go by the way this is a map of the world if i i found this and i couldn't help but share it this is a map of the world if you show a country size relative to the number of bella russian speakers that live right there and so as you can see this is this is the future uh you know people who live in belarussia uh dream of and i think that is fun maybe you think that's fun too australia is actually like surprisingly big given this map new zealand too right maybe they're just not distorted correctly speaking of things that aren't distorted correctly my opinions so let's let's let's finish off with saying the belarus exists as a country because uh very different i feel like we're not rounding out the reasons to like why why did russia let it go independent because they let all their former soviet uh republican pendant why did russia make it as a separate republic because there are some belarusian people who are very different and you know like again the whole area they live on is different the temperatures the this is this is that and um then the final place the enes is like okay belarus is currently a dictatorship roughly is how you call it they have elections but like are they free and fair different questions for a different time but if you look into a fun fact belarus has had one president uh leshentico and uh if you therefore look at this fun fact prime ministers of israel by place of birth you'll actually find out that um i think it's fun at least uh you'll actually find out that there is uh in here there is uh oh god i've lost it so there is uh multiple uh presidents who have been born in present day belarus ruse in fact there are two that have been born there plus three in ukraine one in poland there have been more um there have been more israeli prime ministers born in ukraine than in uh you know like israel itself but more interesting than that to me is the fact that uh there have been more uh prime ministers of israel born in belarus then there have been presidents of belarus and is that a fun fact when a video on it's probably not but my food arrived a few minutes ago so thank you for watching second channel don't care if you want to give me money for no reason these videos qualities not going to improve in the slightest you can go to patreon.comtoycat it's linked down below um i wouldn't 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Channel: ibx2cat

Views: 204,348

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Id: -Q4uPsuRXoc

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 11 2021