Name: The 12 New Countries That Might Exist Soon
Uploaded: 2026-03-17T17:11:59.000Z
Duration: 53 min 18 s
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As history continues evolving with time, new and old countries come in and out of existence pretty much all the time.

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Dozens of new UN recognized countries have come into existence in only the past 30 plus years since the Cold War began coming to a close back in 1990, and

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as a result, the world map has officially changed dozens of times in many of our lifetimes.

East Germany faded out of existence in 1990 when it was legally absorbed by West Germany.

Between 1990 and 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the birth of 15 newly recognized independent states and arguably a 16th in the form of Chechnya, which is a really interesting case study in how countries can be born and die.

Chechnya, an ethnically and religiously distinct territory of Russia, unilaterally declared its independence from the Soviet Union and Russia in 1991 and remained a de facto independent state for nearly a decade until it was forcefully resubjugated by the Russian armed forces in 2000.

During that whole time, though, the only other country that ever formally recognized Chechnya's independence was Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

Chechnya fought two massive and brutal wars of independence against the Russians in the 1990s.

The first from 1994-96 that killed more than 100,000 people and resulted in their de facto independence, and

the second war from 1999 to 2000 when the Russians finally overran Chechnya and reincorporated it back into the Russian state.

Many high ranking Chechen government officials then fled the country and formed a Chechen government in exile in London that has continued existing to this day.

While in October of 2022, in the midst of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government voted to formally recognize Chechnya status as being temporarily occupied by Russia and recognized the Chechen government in exile as the territor sole legitimate government, essentially extending Ukraine's legal recognition of Chechnya as an independent state.

Now, the process of Yugoslavia's collapse after 1991 similarly led to the creation of six or seven new independent countries, depending on your point of view.

Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and

the formerly united Serbia and Montenegro all emerged by the early 2000s, while Montenegro further declared its own independence from Serbia in 2006.

And then Kosovo unilaterally declared their independence from Serbia too in 2008, which remains legally disputed by Serbia and therefore remains controversial.

In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into two new Czechia and Slovakia.

The same year, Eritrea managed to finally declare their own independence from Ethiopia after another decades long independence struggle.

In 1994, Palau a small Pacific island state achieved its sovereignty and effective independence from the United states states in 2002.

East Timor became the first new independent country to emerge in the 21st century after a long independent struggle against Indonesia.

And then in 2011, South Sudan finally achieved its own independence from the rest of Sudan after another decades long independence struggle that resulted in it becoming the world's youngest widely recognized independent state and member of the United nations, at least for now.

Dozens of new countries became independent across the 1990s, but

since the 21st century began, we've only seen the four mostly widely recognized examples of East Timor, Montenegro, Kosovo and South Sudan happened so far, and

no more widely recognized examples that have taken place in the past 13 years now since 2011.

And that begs an interesting what are the most likely new countries that have the possibility to emerge on the world stage next?

There are many, many possibilities out there that I'll cover in this video and many others that I won't.

I'm not going to cover any states here that already exist in a de facto sense but lack wide scale international recognition, such as Kosovo, claimed by Serbia, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, claimed by Moroc, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, claimed by Cyprus Abkhazia and South Ossetia, claimed by Georgia, Transnistria, claimed by Moldova Somaliland, claimed by Somalia or the Republic of China on Taiwan, claimed by the People's Republic of China on the mainland.

I'm only going to cover potential new independent states that don't yet exist in either a legal de jure sense nor in a de facto sense.

And so to start this list off, it seems most likely right now that the next newest country that'll emerge soon, and

that'll probably also be widely recognized, is as the 194th member of the United nations will be Bougainville in the Western Pacific.

Bougainville is geographically the westernmost and largest island in the Solomon Islands archipelago.

But while the rest of the Solomon Islands are an independent nation, Bougainville has long been politically a part of Papua New Guinea.

Instead, the history dates back to the very end of the 19th century in 1899, when the colonial German Empire laid claim to Bougainville and annexed it into their nearby colony of German New Guinea.

Then During World War I, the Australians invaded and occupied the German colony in New guinea, including Bougainville.

And after the war's conclusion in 1920, all of modern day Papua New guinea became an Australian mandate through the League of Nations, which led to a long era of more than 60 years of nearly continuous Australian administration of the territory that was only briefly interrupted by the Japanese invasion of World War II.

After the war, Papua New guinea evolved into a UN mandate under Australian administration.

And then in the 1960s, Australian geologists discovered that Bougainville had massive deposits of copper on the island.

So the Australian authorities did what every other colonial government at the time was doing and set up a huge copper mine on the island in 1972 that at the time was the largest open pit mine operating anywhere in the world.

The copper mine quickly became hugely important to the economy of Papua New Guinea.

It alone produced more than 45% of Papua New Guinea's entire national export revenue, and

the government received 20% of the mine's total profit, of which the indigenous people of Bougainville themselves only received a 0.5% to 1.25% share of the total profit.

Thousands of outside workers from the Papua New guinea mainland and from Australia came to work at the Bougainville mine across the 1970s.

And as more of them came and most of the profits left the island, the indigenous people on Bougainville began growing increasingly resentful.

There are massive cultural and linguistic differences between the Papua New guinea mainland and Bougainville.

Papua New guinea itself is usually classified as being the most linguistically diverse country in the entire world, with no less than 893 separate languages that are known to be spoken in the country.

It's also extremely rural, with only about 13% of the population today living in cities across some of the most challenging mountainous and rainforest terrain on the planet.

Papua New guinea is still such an isolated and remote part of the world that there isn't even an accepted consensus on what the country's actual population is still today.

The government officially reports their population today to be about 9.4 million, but

there are credible studies conducted as recently as December of 2022 that estimate the true population of the country is actually closer to 17 million people, nearly double what the government actually reports.

Compared to the Papua New guinea mainland, Bougainville is much smaller and less populated, with only around 300,000 residents today whose culture and ethnicity is more closely related to the Melanesians of the neighboring Solomon Islands than to the Papua New guinea mainland.

And so, perhaps understandably, conflict began to bubble up to the surface between Bougainville and Papua New guinea after the opening of the massive open pit copper mine in the early 1970s.

Australia granted Papua New guinea its independence in September of 1975.

That included Bougainville but just a few days before the independence was granted, Bougainville unilaterally declared itself as the Independent Republic of the North Solomons instead.

But after it failed to gain any international recognition, Bougainville agreed on a settlement several months later in August of 1976 to become absorbed into Papua New guinea with a degree of political autonomy.

But tensions between Bougainville and the Papua New guinea government over the continued operation of the mine on the island continued growing until they exploded in outright rebellion in 1988 when a separatist faction on the island called the Bougainville Revolutionary army rose up to fight for Bougainville's independence.

This resulted in a truly devastating decade long war for independence that lasted until 1998 and which has been described by leaders as the largest milit military conflict who had been fought in the region of Oceania since the Second World War.

As the Papua New guinea government cracked down on Bougainville hard in order to maintain their access to the island's crucial copper mine, Papua New guinea enforced a total maritime blockade of the island and deployed thousands of their soldiers to the island to enforce Papua New Guinea's authority.

Estimates vary greatly as to how many people were killed in the decade long war, but

it's usually estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 people in Bougainville died during the conflict, While at least 300 Papua New guinea soldiers were killed and thousands more were wounded.

That means that in the decade long war for independence between 1988 and 1998, roughly 10% of Bougainville's entire pre war population died, while tens of thousands more were placed into internally displaced person camps.

The two warring sides agreed on a ceasefire in 1997 and Papua New guinea forces began withdrawing from the island the following year.

In 1998, while Australian peacekeepers came in to take their place, a formal peace agreement was settled between Bougainville and the Papua New guinea government in 2001 that solidified Bougainville's status as a fully autonomous part of the country and which also granted Bougainville the right to hold a non binding referendum on outright independence within 20 years in the future.

That promised referendum was eventually held in Bougainville at the end of 2019, which saw an absolutely overwhelming vote of 98.3% of voters on the island choosing independents, with a huge 87.4% voter turnout showing that the will of the Bougainville people clearly desired independence.

And though the referendum was technically non binding on the part of the Papua New guinea government.

The overwhelming results of it for independence and all of the previous history have made it extremely difficult for the government just to simply ignore it.

And so In July of 2021, Bougainville and the Papua New guinea government came to an agreement that Bougainville will be granted its formal independence from the country no earlier than 2025 and no later than 2027, pending legal ratification by the Papua New Guinea Parliament.

And although to date when this video was made that ratification hasn't been given yet, it seems fairly certain still that Bougainville will become the world's next largely recognized independent country sometime by 2027, and

will likely replace South Sudan as the world's youngest independent country by then.

But what about other, less likely candidates for new countries to emerge?

Relatively nearby to Bougainville is also New Caledonia, which is probably, at least in my opinion, the next most likely place to eventually become a newly independent country.

New Caledonia currently still remains as a legal overseas territory of France, despite the fact that the island is in the Pacific and is located about 17,000 km away from metropolitan France, over on the other side of the world in Europe.

The French annexed New Caledonia back in 1853, and

ever since then successive waves of European, Polynesian and other settlers have come to the island that have made the indigenous ethnic Kanak people on the island a minority, where today they only represent about 41% of New Caledonia's total population of about 270,000 people, with Europeans representing another 24% of the population and various Polynesians and other groups representing most of the rest.

For decades under French colonial rule in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the indigenous Kanak were largely marginalized, excluded from the island's economy, and

eventually confined to a system of reservations like indigenous Americans were in the Western hemisphere.

By the 1970s, a modern independence and sovereignty movement began growing in popularity among the indigenous Khannaq people on the island, who were frustrated with their lower socioeconomic status relative to the European settlers of the island, and

so the movement steadily adopted more violent methods to advance their cause.

The biggest violent incident occurred in 1988, when a group of 30 heavily armed Khannaq independence fighters attacked a French military outpost on the island, killing four French soldiers and taking another 36 people, including some civilians, as hostages.

The group demanded that the hostages would be released in exchange for serious talks with the French government on the independence of New Caledonia.

France refused to negotiate and deployed a crack hostage recovery team made up of dozens of French commandos, paratroopers, and

GIGN counter terror specialists to raid them instead.

In the ensuing raid, The French killed 19 of the Connaught hostage takers and successfully freed all of the hostages, while two of the French soldiers in the assault team were also killed, resulting in the total deaths of 25 people during the bloody incident.

In the aftermath, the French government and the Kanak independence movement agreed on a 10 year truce to secure stability on the island, and

after the decade had passed in 1998, without any other major incidents, the French government and the major pro and anti independence parties on the island all signed the Noumea Accord, which established a 20 year transitional period until 2018 in which certain powers would be transferred to the local government, and

which also guaranteed that after those 20 years, beginning in 2018, New Caledonia would be allowed to host three separate independence referendums that would determine the island's future political status.

And so the first of these independence referendums in New Caledonia was hosted in 2018, which was soundly rejected, with 56.7% of voters choosing to remain with France and only 43.3% of voters choosing independence, with a total voter turnout on the island of 81%.

Then the second independence referendum was hosted a couple years later in 2020 that grew much more narrow, this time with only 53.3% of voters choosing to remain with France and 46.7% of voters choosing to become independent, with an even higher voter turnout this time of 85.7%, the momentum appeared to be rising for the pro independence side, and

with the final referendum on independence scheduled for December 2021, all eyes were fixated on what would happen next.

But in between the second and third referendums, the COVID 19 pandemic hit the island and ravaged it, which resulted in more than 300 deaths that disproportionately affected the indigenous Kana community that was more pro independence.

It quickly became clear that the next referendum would take place during a period of customary mourning within the Kana community for their lost ones.

But the government's health restrictions had made campaigning for the final referendum largely impossible.

So the pro independence parties on the island became worried that this would all contribute to a lower voter turnout than in either of the previous referendums, and

so they began asking the French government to reschedule the final referendum until after the pandemic had settled down more.

But the French government refused to reschedule the referendum and went ahead with it as originally planned in December of 2021, which led to all of the pro independence parties on the island announcing that they would boycott the vote in protest.

As a result, the remain with France choice secured an overwhelming 96.5% of the 2021 vote, while only 3.5% of voters chose independence, and

with a very low voter turnout this time of only 43.9% of the island, since all the pro independence parties had boycotted it.

But none of that stopped France's president, Emmanuel Macron, from visiting New Caledonia himself afterwards, where he proudly proclaimed that the 2021 vote had confirmed the will of Caledonians to stay French, while he further emphasized the New Caledonia had a vital role to play in France's geopolitical strategy for the Indo Pacific region, New Caledonia places sovereign French territory relatively nearby to the South China Sea, Taiwan and China.

While New Caledonia, much like Bougainville, is also rich in specific natural resources, New Caledonia is specifically home to between 10% and 25% of all the world's proven reserves of nickel, a metal that is becoming increasingly important as a major component of batteries and electric vehicles.

France's control over New Caledonia makes it the fourth largest producer of nickel in the entire world, remaining only behind the likes of Russia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

After the controversial 2021 referendum, France has publicly left open the possibility that another referendum on independence could be hosted in New Caledonia again within the timespan of one or two more generations from now.

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The 12 New Countries That Might Exist Soon

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