Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 September 9

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 9

Countries sorted by number of bilateral foreign relations

I am hoping to find a table that can help me to answer this question: What UN member state maintains diplomatic relations with the lowest number of other UN member states? For example, according to foreign relations of Bhutan, "Bhutan has diplomatic relations with 54 of 193 member states of the United Nations". Is there a country with fewer? A lot of "foreign relations of X" articles give a number I can directly compare, but not all of them do. (E.g., I couldn't find a number for Yemen.) It would be nice to have a consistent data source.

The closest I've been able to find is List of countries by number of diplomatic missions, based on work by the Lowy Institute. This is a really interesting table.

The Lowy Institute's index only includes data for 70 countries for some unclear reason. Furthermore, none of the columns it's measuring seem to be quite what I'm looking for anyway. Number of total posts counts duplicate consulates within the same country, so a lot of the numbers are significantly over 200. Number of embassies sounds like it would be what I want, but it turns out to be a different number (e.g., the US has relations with 188 countries but only 167 embassies/high commissions, and the difference is drastically starker for Bhutan with 54 vs. 5). 98.170.164.88 (talk) 06:41, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "has relations with". For A and B to have relations, does this mean that A sends formally accredited diplomatic representatives to B, and B does the same to A, or would an asymmetrical one-way relationship be acceptable? During much of the 19th and 20th centuries, many smaller countries had only honorary consuls (i.e. not formally accredited diplomats) stationed in many other countries... AnonMoos (talk) 07:43, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but Wikipedia seems to have a definition that it consistently applies across the "foreign relations of X" articles. The article must be applying some specific definition from IR studies but I just don't know exactly.

As for whether one-way relationships count, I don't know, but I'd again defer to whatever definition Wikipedia uses. Do one-way relationships exist in practice? I'm curious. I'm tempted to strike "bilateral" from the section title, because of my possibly false assumption of symmetry. It would be cool to see a full graph of diplomatic relations, which may have to be a directed graph if one-way relationships exist.

If there are slightly different definitions for "has relations with", I'm okay with that, I'm mostly interested in the rough ranking and not the exact numbers as long as they are using a consistent definition. And to be honest I'm just trying to find the most isolated few countries because that's what I find the most curious at the moment. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 08:33, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

The answer is Cook Islands at 52. Foreign relations of the Cook Islands lists 55 entities; minus the 3 non-UN member states and you have 52.

The last three places are: Cook Islands, Bhutan, and Tonga.

I can't give you an WP:RS unfortunately because I compiled this list myself. Helian James (talk) 08:13, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

I checked the Cook Islands article and the count of 55 already excludes the non-UN entries (Niue, Kosovo, and the Holy See do not increment the counter). With those there are 58. So I guess Bhutan still has the fewest with 54, but it's very close.

Did you actually check the number for every country though? For some of them I couldn't find one. I only looked at a dozen articles or so. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 08:33, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

My apologies. I mis-read the table. Helian James (talk) 09:12, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

Btw, I forgot to say this before, thanks very much for your research! I'm still curious how many countries you checked. (All that had the data readily available, or maybe just some select small countries that you suspected would have few?) The more you checked the more confident I can be in the bottom ranking. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 09:21, 9 September 2023 (UTC)