15 countries that no longer exist and what replaced them

Borders drawn on a map imply a permanence they have never earned. In the past century alone, dozens of sovereign states vanished — countries with their own currencies, passports, armies and seats at the United Nations or the League of Nations. Some ended in a single night, when a capital fell. Others dissolved slowly, their ministries and central banks absorbed piece by piece until the old name survived only on stamps and in atlases.

Countries that no longer exist matter well beyond map trivia. Whatever replaced them inherited the debts, treaties, minority populations and unsettled claims left behind, and those inheritances still shape the news. The breakup of Yugoslavia explains why Serbia and Kosovo remain locked in a dispute over recognition. The Soviet collapse explains the contested borders at the center of the war in Ukraine. Mandate lines drawn in the 1920s, for empires that have since disappeared, explain a great deal about Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Countries end in a handful of distinct ways. A federation can fragment into many successor states, as the Soviet Union did into 15 and Yugoslavia did into seven. Two neighbors can merge into one, as North Yemen and South Yemen did in 1990 and as Tanganyika and Zanzibar did in 1964. A smaller state can be swallowed by a larger one, through invasion, referendum or negotiated accession. And a government can rename the country it governs, which is how Burma became Myanmar in 1989 — a change some governments and news organizations still decline to adopt.

None of this is distant history. Czechoslovakia divided into Czechia and Slovakia on January 1, 1993. The Soviet Union formally dissolved just over a year earlier. Newfoundland was a self-governing British dominion before it voted to join Canada in 1949. The 15 entries that follow cover how each state ended and exactly what took its place, from empires that collapsed after World War I to unions that failed in under four years. The pace of border change has slowed since 1945. It has not stopped.

Illustration: Quartz

The Soviet Union formally dissolved on December 26, 1991, and 15 independent countries took its place: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Each had been a constituent republic of the union.

The USSR was founded in 1922 on territory inherited from the Russian Empire, after the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War. By the mid-1980s its command economy had stalled. The reforms Mikhail Gorbachev introduced under the banners of glasnost and perestroika loosened central control without reviving growth. National movements in the republics, strongest in the Baltics and the Caucasus, used the opening to press for sovereignty.

A hardline coup attempt against Gorbachev in August 1991 collapsed within three days and left the central government with little authority. In December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus met at Belovezhskaya Pushcha and declared that the union had ceased to exist. The Alma-Ata Protocol, signed December 21, brought most of the remaining republics into the agreement. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, and the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin that evening.

Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, was recognized as the continuing state for legal purposes. It took the Soviet seat on the UN Security Council, assumed the union's foreign debt and absorbed the bulk of its nuclear arsenal. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan transferred the warheads on their territory to Russia, a process tied to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on security assurances.

The successor states then diverged. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which treat the Soviet period as an occupation rather than a legitimate union, joined NATO and the European Union in 2004. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan developed as resource exporters with concentrated executive power. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, a war whose roots lie in borders and populations the 1991 breakup left unresolved.

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Yugoslavia disappeared in stages between 1991 and 2008, replaced by seven states: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia held six republics with different languages, faiths and histories inside one federation, led until his death in 1980 by Josip Broz Tito.

Slovenia and Croatia both declared independence on June 25, 1991. Slovenia broke away after roughly 10 days of fighting with the Yugoslav People's Army. Croatia needed four years, as Serb-held districts proclaimed their own breakaway state before Croatian forces retook most of that territory in 1995.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's declaration in 1992 brought the worst of the violence. Fighting there lasted until late 1995 and included the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. The Dayton Agreement, negotiated at an air base in Ohio and signed in Paris that December, ended the war and gave Bosnia the two-entity structure it still uses. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague, tried cases from these conflicts from 1993 until it closed in 2017.

Macedonia left the federation in 1991 without a war, then spent 28 years in a dispute with Greece over its name. The Prespa Agreement settled the argument, and the country became North Macedonia in February 2019.

Serbia and Montenegro remained joined, first as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and from 2003 as a looser state union, until Montenegrin voters chose independence in a May 2006 referendum. Kosovo, administered by the United Nations after the 1999 NATO air campaign against Serbia, declared independence in February 2008. Serbia, Russia, China and five EU member states still refuse to recognize it, which keeps Kosovo out of the UN.

European Union membership has come unevenly. Slovenia joined in 2004 and Croatia in 2013. The others remain candidates or potential candidates, their progress tied to disputes the federation never settled.

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Czechoslovakia ceased to exist at midnight on January 1, 1993, dividing into two sovereign states: the Czech Republic, now officially Czechia, and Slovakia. The separation, known as the Velvet Divorce, was negotiated between politicians over a matter of months and completed without fighting or a contested border.

The country had been assembled in 1918 from the Czech and Slovak lands of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nazi Germany dismembered it in 1938 and 1939. It was restored after World War II and ruled by the Communist Party from 1948 until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 carried Václav Havel into the presidency.

Free elections in June 1992 produced two incompatible mandates. Václav Klaus and his Civic Democratic Party won the Czech lands on a program of rapid market liberalization. Vladimír Mečiar and the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia won on a promise of greater Slovak autonomy and a slower economic transition. The two men met repeatedly that summer and concluded that a looser federation would not hold. No referendum was ever held, so neither electorate voted directly on breaking up the state. Havel resigned in July 1992 rather than preside over the dissolution, then returned in early 1993 as the first president of independent Czechia.

Federal assets were divided roughly two to one, matching a population of about 10 million Czechs and 5 million Slovaks. The shared currency lasted weeks before each country issued its own koruna in February 1993.

Their economies diverged, then converged. Czechia drew early foreign investment through Škoda Auto at Mladá Boleslav and an established industrial base. Slovakia lagged through the 1990s before building a car industry that turns out more vehicles per person than any other country, with plants run by Volkswagen in Bratislava, Kia near Žilina, Stellantis $STLA in Trnava and Jaguar Land Rover in Nitra.

Czechia entered NATO in 1999, Slovakia in 2004. Both joined the European Union on May 1, 2004. Slovakia adopted the euro in 2009 while Czechia kept its koruna.

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East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic, stopped existing on October 3, 1990, when its five reconstituted states and East Berlin acceded to the Federal Republic of Germany. No new country was created and no new constitution written — the east joined the west's existing legal and economic order.

The GDR was founded on October 7, 1949, in the Soviet occupation zone, and spent four decades as a one-party state inside the Warsaw Pact. The Berlin Wall, begun on August 13, 1961, halted the flow of workers and professionals leaving for the west and became the most recognizable symbol of Europe's Cold War division. It opened on the night of November 9, 1989, after weeks of mass demonstrations in Leipzig and a press conference at which the party official Günter Schabowski read out new travel rules without clear instructions on when they took effect.

What followed moved quickly. A currency union took effect on July 1, 1990, retiring the East German mark in favor of the deutsche mark. The Two Plus Four Treaty, signed in Moscow on September 12, 1990, by both German governments and the four occupying powers — the U.S., U.K., France and the Soviet Union — settled the sovereignty questions left open since 1945 and cleared the way for the merger weeks later.

The economic transition was punishing for the east. A federal agency, the Treuhandanstalt, took over thousands of state-owned companies with a mandate to privatize, restructure or close them, and much of eastern industry could not survive exposure to western competition and a hard currency. Unemployment rose sharply, and younger workers left for Hamburg, Munich and Stuttgart.

Berlin became the capital of the unified state. The Bundestag voted in 1991 to move the government back from Bonn, a relocation completed in 1999. More than three decades later, the eastern states still report lower average wages and weaker population growth than the west, and their voting patterns in federal elections diverge — evidence that the legal end of a state and the end of its divisions do not arrive together.

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The Ottoman Empire ended when its sultanate was abolished in November 1922, and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in its place on October 29, 1923, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Its former Arab provinces became the mandates and states that are now Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.

Ottoman authority had reached for more than 600 years across southeastern Europe, Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula and much of North Africa. That reach shrank long before the empire formally died. Greece, Serbia and Romania won independence during the 19th century, Bulgaria followed in 1908, and the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 stripped away nearly all remaining European territory.

Defeat in World War I, fought alongside Germany and Austria-Hungary, ended what was left. Britain and France had already sketched their intentions in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, a secret wartime understanding that divided Ottoman Arab lands into British and French spheres. The League of Nations later turned those spheres into formal mandates. Britain administered Iraq and Palestine, with Transjordan carved out of the latter, while France held Syria and Lebanon.

The mandate borders followed imperial convenience rather than the communities living inside them. Iraq placed Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shiite Arab populations under a single administration. France detached Lebanon from Syria along lines weighted toward its Maronite Christian allies. Both decisions still shape politics across the region.

Inside Anatolia, the Turkish War of Independence drove out Greek, French and Italian occupation forces and overturned the punitive 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which would have carved up the Turkish heartland. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne recognized the new republic's borders and set a compulsory population exchange between Turkey and Greece that uprooted well over a million people. Atatürk abolished the caliphate in 1924, ending the Ottoman sultan's claim to spiritual leadership over Sunni Muslims. His government replaced Arabic script with a Latin alphabet in 1928, closed religious courts and built a secular state on the empire's Turkish-speaking core.

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Austria-Hungary ceased to exist in late 1918, during the final weeks of World War I. Its core became the Republic of Austria, the Kingdom of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Large stretches of the empire also went to Poland, Romania, Italy and the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia.

The state had operated as a dual monarchy since the Compromise of 1867. That deal joined the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary under a single Habsburg ruler. Each half kept its own parliament, prime minister and domestic administration, while foreign policy, defense and shared finances were handled jointly. The population included Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Romanians and Italians, most of them governed in a language other than their own.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, in Sarajevo in June 1914 started the war that destroyed the empire he expected to rule. Four years of fighting, food shortages and the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916 hollowed out the central government. By October 1918, national councils in Prague, Zagreb and elsewhere were proclaiming independent states before any armistice had been signed. Emperor Karl renounced participation in state affairs that November, and the monarchy dissolved rather than surrendered.

Two treaties fixed the new map. The Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, signed in 1919, left Austria a small landlocked republic and barred it from uniting with Germany. The Treaty of Trianon of 1920 cost Hungary roughly two-thirds of its prewar territory. Transylvania went to Romania, Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia to Czechoslovakia, and Croatia and the Vojvodina to the new South Slav kingdom. Galicia became part of a reconstituted Poland, and Italy took South Tyrol.

The successor states were multiethnic themselves, leaving sizable Hungarian minorities inside Romania, Slovakia and Serbia. Trianon remains a live reference point in Hungarian politics a century later, and the status of those communities still surfaces in regional diplomacy.

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British India ended at midnight on August 14-15, 1947, when the subcontinent was divided into two independent states, India and Pakistan. Pakistan later split in two, and its eastern wing became the separate country of Bangladesh in 1971.

The division was drawn mainly along religious lines, leaving India a Hindu-majority republic and Pakistan a Muslim-majority state. A boundary commission chaired by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never set foot in India, settled the frontier in roughly five weeks. The Radcliffe Line ran through Punjab and Bengal, cutting apart provinces, villages, canal systems and rail links that had functioned as single units.

Pakistan emerged in two pieces separated by about 1,000 miles of Indian territory — West Pakistan, centered on Punjab and Sindh, and East Pakistan, the eastern half of Bengal. The wings shared a majority religion and little else. Bengali dominated the east, while Urdu and Punjabi prevailed in the west.

The handover set off one of the largest forced migrations on record. An estimated 10 million to 15 million people crossed the new borders in both directions, often passing columns of refugees moving the opposite way. Communal killings among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs during that movement produced death-toll estimates ranging from several hundred thousand to about one million.

Kashmir became the partition's longest-running dispute. The princely state had a Muslim majority and a Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, who acceded to India in October 1947 as fighting spread across the territory. India and Pakistan have gone to war over Kashmir, and the Line of Control still splits it between them.

East Pakistan held more people than the west but less political power, and Bengali demands for autonomy hardened through the 1960s. A crackdown by the Pakistani army in 1971 triggered a war that ended with Indian military intervention and the creation of Bangladesh. The three successor states now hold more than 1.7 billion people between them, and both India and Pakistan possess nuclear weapons.

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South Vietnam, officially the Republic of Vietnam, ended on April 30, 1975, when North Vietnamese forces took its capital, Saigon. The two halves were formally joined in July 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, with Hanoi serving as the capital of the single state that replaced both.

The split dated to the 1954 Geneva Accords, signed after France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu closed out the First Indochina War. That agreement set a provisional military demarcation line near the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh's communist government administered the territory above it, an anti-communist government the territory below. Nationwide elections to reunify the country were meant to follow in 1956 and never took place.

Two decades of separate statehood followed, each half propped up by a different patron. The Republic of Vietnam leaned on American military and financial support, which grew through the 1960s into a deployment of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. North Vietnam and the southern Viet Cong insurgency drew weapons, fuel and advisers from the Soviet Union and China. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 let American combat forces withdraw and left Saigon's army holding the line alone. It could not.

Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after unification, though the older name is still widely used. The new government pushed northern economic policy across the south, nationalizing private businesses and sending former officials, officers and civil servants of the defeated republic to reeducation camps. Hundreds of thousands of people left by sea over the following years, the refugee exodus known as the boat people.

Vietnam changed course again in 1986, when the Communist Party adopted the Doi Moi reforms. Those measures opened the economy to private enterprise and foreign investment while leaving one-party rule intact. The country normalized diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 1995. The Republic of Vietnam's yellow flag with three red stripes is still flown at Vietnamese diaspora gatherings in California, Texas and Australia.

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North Yemen and South Yemen ceased to exist as separate states on May 22, 1990, when they merged into the Republic of Yemen. The union bound a Soviet-aligned Marxist government in Aden to a conservative republic in Sanaa, two systems with little in common beyond language and geography.

North Yemen, officially the Yemen Arab Republic, was governed from Sanaa. It emerged from Ottoman rule and then from an imamate overthrown by army officers in 1962. South Yemen, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, was run from Aden, the port Britain had held since 1839 and left in 1967. The state that followed the British withdrawal took Moscow's side and became the Arab world's only Marxist government. The two neighbors fought border wars in 1972 and 1979, and signed agreements promising eventual unity in the aftermath of each.

Soviet subsidies to Aden dried up as the USSR entered its final years, and oil discoveries near the frontier gave both capitals a practical reason to settle where the line ran. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the northern president, took charge of the unified republic. Ali Salim al-Beidh, the southern leader, became vice president.

The arrangement held for four years. In 1994, al-Beidh and other southern figures declared secession and the revival of a separate state in the south. Northern forces captured Aden within weeks, and the union survived by force rather than consent.

Southern complaints about land seizures, military pensions and exclusion from power never faded. A broader collapse overtook the country after Houthi fighters took Sanaa in September 2014, prompting a Saudi-led military intervention the following March. The internationally recognized government moved its base to Aden, where the Southern Transitional Council, a group openly committed to southern independence, built its own power center from 2017.

Yemen remains one country on paper and several in practice, split among Houthi-held territory in the northwest, government-aligned areas and southern zones where secession is an active demand rather than a closed chapter.

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Tibet governed itself as a de facto independent state from 1912 until 1950, when troops of the People's Liberation Army entered the region and brought it under the control of the People's Republic of China. The territory exists today as the Tibet Autonomous Region, a provincial-level unit of China, and no country recognizes it as a separate state.

Tibetan independence was practical rather than internationally certified. After the Qing dynasty fell in 1912, Chinese authority in Lhasa collapsed, and the 13th Dalai Lama expelled the remaining Qing officials. For the next four decades Tibet ran its own government, issued its own currency and postage stamps, maintained a small army and conducted limited diplomacy, chiefly with British India. No major power formally recognized it as sovereign, and successive Chinese governments never dropped their claim to it.

Chinese forces moved into eastern Tibet in October 1950 and defeated the Tibetan army at Chamdo. Beijing described the operation as a peaceful liberation. With no military capacity to resist and no diplomatic backing, Tibetan representatives signed the Seventeen Point Agreement in Beijing in May 1951. The document affirmed Chinese sovereignty while promising that the existing Tibetan political system and the position of the Dalai Lama would not be altered.

Those guarantees eroded as the Chinese administrative and military presence expanded through the decade. Land reform in Tibetan-populated areas of Sichuan and Qinghai provoked armed revolt. An uprising in Lhasa in March 1959 was suppressed, and the 14th Dalai Lama fled across the Himalayas to India. He established an exile administration at Dharamshala, where it still operates.

China dissolved the remaining Tibetan local government and formally established the Tibet Autonomous Region in 1965. Beijing maintains that Tibet has been Chinese territory for centuries. The exile government calls the events of 1950 and 1951 an occupation. That dispute over how Tibet ended as a self-governing entity still shapes how foreign governments handle official meetings with the Dalai Lama.

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Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom ruled by the Chogyal of the Namgyal dynasty until 1975, when a referendum abolished the monarchy and the territory joined India as its 22nd state. The vote ended more than three centuries of hereditary rule and removed a buffer kingdom from the map between India, China, Nepal and Bhutan.

Sikkim had been a British protectorate through the colonial period. In December 1950 it signed a treaty with India that made it an Indian protectorate instead. The Chogyal kept his throne and authority over internal matters while Delhi handled defense, foreign relations and communications. Sikkim flew its own flag and ran its own administration, but it had no independent voice abroad.

Demography complicated the palace's position. The population combined Bhutia, Lepcha and ethnic Nepali communities, and by the 1970s ethnic Nepalis formed the majority while political power stayed concentrated in the Bhutia-Lepcha elite around the court. Pro-democracy parties pushed for representative government and closer integration with India. The Chogyal, Palden Thondup Namgyal, resisted both.

Unrest in April 1975 brought Indian troops into the capital, Gangtok, where they disarmed the palace guard. The referendum held that month returned a lopsided result in favor of ending the monarchy and merging with India, and Sikkim was admitted as a state the following month. Because the vote took place with Indian forces on the ground, its legitimacy has been contested ever since.

China withheld recognition of the merger for decades, treating Sikkim as disputed ground and acknowledging Indian sovereignty there only in 2003, as part of a wider trade and border understanding. The delay reflected the strategic weight of the territory, which sits beside the Chumbi Valley and the Nathu La pass, a crossing into Tibet that reopened to trade in 2006.

Sikkim now has its own legislative assembly and sends members to India's parliament. The former royal palace stands in Gangtok, and the Namgyal line holds no governing power.

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Zanzibar lasted barely four months as a sovereign state. The Indian Ocean archipelago won independence from Britain on December 10, 1963, under its sultan, lost the monarchy to a revolution the following January, and joined mainland Tanganyika on April 26, 1964, to form the country now called Tanzania.

Long before it became a British protectorate in 1890, Zanzibar was an Omani-ruled trading center and a hub of the East African slave and clove trades. Independence left an Arab-led government in charge, and it was toppled within weeks by an uprising whose fighters came largely from the African majority. Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah fled into exile. Abeid Karume took power as president of the People's Republic of Zanzibar and Pemba. Reprisal killings hit the islands' Arab and South Asian communities, and death estimates range from the hundreds into the thousands, with no reliable count ever established.

Tanganyika had a longer run on its own. A German colony until World War I, it passed to Britain as a League of Nations mandate and then a UN trust territory, and became independent in December 1961 under Julius Nyerere. Nyerere and Karume negotiated the union quickly. Nyerere's pan-African convictions drove part of it, and so did Western alarm about a Cold War foothold taking shape off the East African coast.

The merged state first carried the name United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar. In October 1964 it was renamed Tanzania, splicing together the opening syllables of both names.

Zanzibar kept far more than a share of the name. The islands have their own president, legislature and courts, and they still run their internal affairs, while defense, foreign policy and currency sit with the union government. The arrangement generates recurring friction. Zanzibari elections have been disputed repeatedly, and politicians on the islands periodically press for a looser federation or for separation outright.

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Newfoundland was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, holding the same constitutional rank as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Debt from the Great Depression forced it to give up that self-government in 1934, and it joined Canada as the 10th province on March 31, 1949, after two referendums.

The dominion ran its own treasury and customs regime, negotiated its own trade, and raised a regiment for World War I. That war left heavy borrowing behind. Building a railway across the island added more. Fish prices collapsed in the early 1930s, revenue fell far below what debt payments required, and the government came close to default in 1933.

Britain preferred restructuring to a dominion bankruptcy. A royal commission under Lord Amulree recommended suspending the elected legislature, and an appointed Commission of Government replaced it in February 1934. Three of its six commissioners were Newfoundlanders and three were British officials answering to London. It governed for 15 years without an election.

World War II changed the accounts. American and Canadian military construction, including the U.S. naval base at Argentia, brought wages and outside money into an economy that had been flat for a decade. By 1945 the treasury was running a surplus. Permanent political status became impossible to postpone.

Voters went to the polls twice in 1948. The June ballot offered three options: a return to responsible government, continuation of the commission, or confederation with Canada. No option cleared half the vote, and the commission was dropped from the runoff. In July, confederation won with about 52% against 48%. Support was concentrated in outport fishing communities, and opposition was strongest in St. John's.

Joey Smallwood led the confederation campaign and became the province's first premier, holding the office until 1972. The province was renamed Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001. Oil was found at the Hibernia field on the Grand Banks in 1979, and the terms of the 1949 union still shape provincial arguments about offshore revenue.

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The United Arab Republic was a political union of Egypt and Syria that lasted from February 1958 until September 1961, when Syrian army officers staged a coup and pulled their country out. Egypt kept the name for another decade, then reverted to the Arab Republic of Egypt in 1971.

The union came at the peak of pan-Arab nationalism. That movement treated the Arab world's division into separate states as a product of European imperialism rather than a natural arrangement. Gamal Abdel Nasser was its central figure. He had nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and emerged from the subsequent military intervention by Britain, France and Israel with his regional standing enlarged.

The push for union came from Damascus, not Cairo. Syrian officers and politicians worried about communist influence and the chronic instability of their own governments. They pressed Nasser to merge the two countries. He agreed on terms that favored Egypt heavily. Syrian political parties were dissolved, the Syrian army was placed under Egyptian command, and Cairo became the capital of the combined state, with Nasser as its president.

The partnership frayed within two years. Egyptian officials were installed across the Syrian administration. Nasser extended his land redistribution and nationalization programs to Syria, which alienated the landowners, merchants and officers who had lobbied for the merger in the first place. Syrians found themselves governed as a province rather than as an equal partner.

A group of Syrian officers seized Damascus on September 28, 1961, and declared the country independent again. Nasser weighed a military response before accepting the separation.

Yemen's monarchy had been loosely tied to the republic through a separate federation, the United Arab States, which also came apart in 1961. No Arab political union since has matched the degree of formal integration the United Arab Republic achieved. Egypt and Syria have remained separate states ever since.

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Burma did not split, merge or get conquered — it was renamed. In June 1989, the ruling military junta declared the country's official English name to be Myanmar, and more than three decades later governments and news organizations still disagree about which word to use.

The country won independence from British rule in January 1948 and was governed as a parliamentary democracy until a 1962 coup led by General Ne Win installed decades of army rule and an isolationist economic program. Mass protests against that system erupted in 1988, driven by students and Buddhist monks, and security forces put them down with lethal force. A new junta calling itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council seized power that September and announced the name change the following year.

The same decree redrew the map's labels. Rangoon became Yangon, the Irrawaddy River became the Ayeyarwady, and dozens of other place names were respelled to match Burmese pronunciation rather than colonial-era English transliteration. The generals argued that Burma referred to the majority Bamar ethnic group while Myanmar covered the country's many minorities, among them the Shan, Karen, Kachin and Chin. Opponents countered that an unelected government had no mandate to rename a nation, and that the change was cosmetic rather than inclusive.

That disagreement hardened into diplomatic practice. The United Nations adopted Myanmar. The U.S. and U.K. governments kept saying Burma for years. Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy long used Burma as a way of withholding recognition from the junta. After the party won the November 2015 election and took office the following year, she used both names in public rather than pressing the point.

A February 2021 coup removed that elected government, jailed Aung San Suu Kyi and returned the army to direct control, reopening the naming question. Burma survives in official U.S. usage and in the vocabulary of exile communities. Myanmar appears on the country's passports and at the UN. Both names point to the same territory and the same unsettled argument about who gets to name it.