Microstate
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Microstate".

The world's five smallest sovereign states: Vatican City, Monaco, Nauru, Tuvalu and San Marino, shown in the same scale for size comparison

A microstate or ministate is a sovereign state having a very small population or very small land area, but usually both. Perhaps the best known examples of microstates include Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Vatican City. Microstates have a disproportionately-large influence in the United Nations General Assembly due to the one state, one vote power structure.

The smallest fully sovereign microstate is Vatican City, with 911 citizens as of July 2003 and an area of only 0.44 km²^[1]. In Rome, Italy, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) (not to be confused with Malta, an island microstate in the Mediterranean) is an effectively non-territorial sovereign entity that might also be considered to be a microstate; its sovereignty is recognized by 105 states, 100 of which have entered into full diplomatic relations,^[2] but unlike the Vatican City state it has no substantive territorial base (the SMOM's only property, its headquarters buildings, holds extraterritorial status, similar to an embassy building). Neither the Vatican nor SMOM are members of the United Nations, although both have permanent observer status at the UN, Vatican City as "non-member state", SMOM as "other entity".

Microstates should not be confused with micronations, which are not recognized as sovereign states. Special territories like the Channel Islands without full sovereignty are also not considered as microstates.

List of microstates

Sovereign states with an area less than 1000 km² and fewer than a million people.^[3][4]

Rank	Country / Territory	Area (km²)	Location
1	Vatican City	0.44	Southern Europe
2	Monaco	1.95	Southern Europe
3	Nauru	21	Oceania - Micronesia
4	Tuvalu	26	Oceania - Polynesia
5	San Marino	61	Southern Europe
6	Liechtenstein	164	Central Europe
7	Marshall Islands	181	Oceania - Micronesia
8	Saint Kitts and Nevis	261	Caribbean
9	Maldives	298	Southern Asia - Indian Ocean
10	Malta	316	Southern Europe - Mediterranean Sea
11	Grenada	344	Caribbean
12	Saint Vincent and the Grenadines	388	Caribbean
13	Barbados	430	Caribbean
14	Antigua and Barbuda	442	Caribbean
15	Seychelles	455	Indian Ocean/Africa
16	Palau	459	Oceania - Micronesia
17	Andorra	468	Southern Europe
18	Saint Lucia	539	Caribbean
19	Bahrain	694	Asia - Persian Gulf
20	Federated States of Micronesia	702	Oceania - Micronesia
21	Kiribati	726	Oceania - Micronesia
22	Tonga	747	Oceania - Polynesia
23	Dominica	751	Caribbean
24	São Tomé and Príncipe	964	Central Africa

See also

• European microstates
• List of countries by population
• List of countries and outlying territories by total area
• Micronation

References