“Nation” — a group of people who share cultural or genetic ancestry and share certain societal characteristics, such as language, regardless of their geographic distribution.
“Country” —a geographic region that has a cohesive history, including a history of common governance
“State” —an independent, sovereign political entity with a common government
“Nation-state” — a sovereign political entity encompassing a nation, that is, an ethnic or cultural group
These and other definitions apply variously in these circumstances. They have essentially become arbitrary.
States are countries, except when they’re not. Typically, a sovereign state is a country, except in the United States of America (a sovereign state which is a country), where sovereign states are not countries. For example, Texas, a sovereign state, is not a country: It is, rather, a sovereign state with a republican form of government called Texas, and has been since the sovereign state with a republican form of government called Texas ceased to exist in 1846.
A country controls its own laws regarding treason without interference from any other country, which means Scotland is a country, its laws on treason being controlled from England, another country. Scotland skipped becoming a sovereign state when it voted down the referendum on secession, which was not about becoming a sovereign state (like Texas) in the slightest.
Now, ask me about the American Civil War, when a number of sovereign states attempted to become sovereign states and lost, resulting in them becoming, instead, sovereign states.
No, this isn’t right. The Queen is sovereign, but Parliament is supreme. The Commons and the Lords both have power independently of the Queen, not as her delegates. Together the Queen and the two Houses make up Parliament, which is the supreme body in the UK. That’s why it’s called supremacy of Parliament.
Another exception is Australia, where the six states in the federation have their own sovereignty, and their own sovereigns (even though the queen of each state is the same person as the Queen of Australia – and the Queen of the UK, and of Canada, etc.).
For the Olympics, there are British curling team (which are always the Scottish national teams), while for the annual world championships, Scotland curls as a country and there could, in principle (but never in practice) be an English or Welsh or Irish team.
Nope. There are 50 states. Four of the states have “commonwealth” in their official names, but in terms of what kind of political entity they are, they are states. Their use of the word “commonwealth” has zero legal implication.
Congress never formally admitted Ohio until 1953. At the point they made Ohio a state retroactive to 1803 when most people think they were admitted. ( And I bet someone comes along and tells me that this is silly)
which is really dumb because even if you exclude Ohio, enough states ratified the income tax amendment. They only needed 36 states and they got 41 excluding Ohio.
There is nothing in the constitution that requires Congress to pass this kind of resolution when admitting a state, but it was done largely to settle whether the official date of admission was in February or March 1803. There was never a question as to whether Ohio had been properly admitted in 1803.
Britain is a very centralized country. Even if in theory the union of 4 countries/nations, for a long time till recently those weren’t actually subdivisions in a meaningful sense in terms of governance for most purposes. There were always exceptions to that statement, like Scotland retaining its own legal system all along, but not Wales for example, and it’s only recently that there’s real decentralized governmental power outside London. In the model of British governance prior to devolution, the subdivisions were really the counties more than the semi-theoretical component four nations. And the other three were really a local empire of England’s. As we saw even in Brexit, England still dominates: they voted to leave by a relatively moderate margin but that was enough to make Scotland’s clear dissent moot.
That’s quite different than the US, or Canada or Australia, or a number of other countries which are more federal than the UK has been up to very recently, and much less dominated by any one particular sub-entity.
As to the word ‘state’, words can have more than one meaning. State as in US state is one of those meanings. It’s no more a misnomer to call the US states ‘states’ because they aren’t independent countries than it is to call independent countries ‘states’, in some contexts, because they aren’t US states. It’s two somewhat different meanings of the same English word. And China for example doesn’t have states in the US sense, but the US states are referred to in Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) by a particular character, 州, (zhou). That character can also mean province or nation and often appears as the second syllable in city names (Guangzhou, Wenzhou in China, Gwangju in the ROK, etc) but as a standalone it is usually refers to US states, not other countries’ provinces, not independent countries.
