Taiwan has a government, a military, a passport, a currency, and 23 million people living under its flag. And yet, according to most of the world, it officially does not exist.
A place with millions of people, with hospitals and highways, with elections and a thriving economy, treated as though it simply is not there. No seat at the United Nations. No formal embassy in most capitals. So what exactly makes a country a country?
The answer, according to international law, was settled over ninety years ago but the world has quietly decided to ignore it.
To survive this legal limbo, Taiwan has become a master of “hybrid diplomacy.” While it maintains formal embassies in only 12 sovereign states that officially recognize it (like Paraguay and the Vatican), it engages the rest of the world through a vast, unofficial network such as the Taipei Trade Office in Nigeria or TECRO in the U.S. which perform all the practical functions of an embassy under a non-provocative name. By using the name of its capital city rather than “Taiwan,” it maintains the capacity to enter relations while allowing other nations to avoid a diplomatic crisis with China.
It is a state that fulfills every legal requirement of statehood, yet must wear a mask just to participate in the global community.
It was December 1933, and Montevideo, Uruguay, was hosting the Seventh International Conference of American States. For decades, smaller Latin American nations had watched the United States march soldiers into their capitals, back coups, and treat sovereign governments like inconveniences to be managed. These interventions had made one thing devastatingly clear: being a country meant nothing if a more powerful country decided otherwise.
What came out of that conference was the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States. Its core idea was simple but radical: statehood is a fact, not a favour. Article 1 laid out four criteria defining a state under international law. A permanent population. A defined territory. An effective government. And the capacity to enter into relations with other states. No permission required. No approval needed from a stronger neighbour. Article 3 made it explicit: the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by other states. You are a state because of what you are, not because someone said you could be.
Even the United States signed it, a significant concession given its history of interference in the very region where the document was written. For a moment, it felt like international law had done something genuinely meaningful.
When the Law Meets the Real World
The uncomfortable truth is that the Convention never quite caught up with reality. Alongside the declaratory theory it established, a competing idea called the constitutive theory has always run quietly beneath the surface of international relations. This view argues the opposite: a state only truly exists when other states say it does. And powerful nations have never stopped using recognition as a political weapon, rewarding allies and punishing rivals regardless of whether the Montevideo criteria are satisfied.
The United Nations Security Council made this worse. Under the UN Charter, a new state cannot join the UN without a Security Council recommendation, and any one of the five permanent members can veto it. This means a single country can, completely alone, prevent a state from being recognised by the international community, no matter how clearly it meets the Montevideo criteria. The question is not whether the Convention is still valid. It is. The question is whether it still matters when power quietly makes its own rules.
Three Countries, One Pattern
Taiwan meets every Montevideo criterion without debate. Twenty-three million people, a defined territory, a functioning democracy, trade deals with countries worldwide. By the Convention’s own logic, Taiwan is a state. Yet it was expelled from the UN in 1971 when Resolution 2758 handed the China seat to the People’s Republic of China. China(PROC) now holds a permanent veto, any attempt by Taiwan to re-enter the UN would be blocked before a single vote takes place. Taiwanese were locked out of the World Health Organization even as Taiwan ran one of the world’s best COVID-19 responses.
Palestine is recognized by over 140 countries and holds observer status at the UN. In April 2024, twelve of fifteen Security Council members voted to grant it full membership. One veto from the United States cancelled all twelve votes. Ordinary Palestinians carry travel documents that many countries will not accept. They have no control over their own borders or trade. Aid flows in, but investment largely stays away, because investors need legal certainty that non-recognition cannot provide.
Somaliland is perhaps the most striking case because almost nobody outside the Horn of Africa has heard of it. Since 1991, it has run its own currency, police force, and peaceful democratic elections. Legal scholars largely agree it meets the Montevideo criteria better than several countries that sit comfortably in the UN. For over three decades, not a single recognised country acknowledged its existence. People survived on remittances sent home by the diaspora and informal trade deals because the international banking system had no place for a country that officially was not there. In December 2025, Israel became the first UN member to formally recognise Somaliland, a crack in a wall that has held for over thirty years.
What This Means for the Citizens
Imagine building a home, raising a family, paying your taxes, voting in elections, contributing to your community your entire life. You exist. Everyone around you knows you exist. However, you are nobody outside your territory. You cannot open a bank account or connect with people in most countries. You cannot seek care through international health systems. If a powerful nation decides your neighbourhood is politically inconvenient, there is no court that will fully hear you.
That is the daily reality for millions of people in states the world has chosen not to recognise. It determines whether they can travel freely, whether their children have economic futures, whether foreign investment arrives or walks away, whether aid reaches them swiftly in a crisis or gets tangled in legal ambiguity at the border. The Montevideo Convention tried to remove human lives from the equation of geopolitical favour, but the veto system and the self-interest of great powers have ensured that geopolitics still wins.
The Montevideo Convention gave the world a clear answer to who deserves to be called a country. It was not complicated. A population, a territory, a government, a capacity to engage with the world. Article 8 went further and said no state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another. Written in 1933, it reads almost like a warning about the world we have today.
Ninety years later, the most powerful nations continue to rewrite those rules through their vetoes, their wallets, and their alliances. They recognise states that serve their interests and ignore those that do not. If a state walks, talks, and governs like a state, what gives another nation the right to say it does not exist? And if international law can be vetoed by the powerful whenever it becomes inconvenient, is it still law? Or has it become, as some have asked, something we recognise on paper but never quite in action?
In a world where the law is written but not enforced, sovereignty was never really a guarantee, it was always a negotiation. And some were never invited to the table.
EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.