Phaseolus wrote:
And one last point : I was very surprised to see Kosovo amongst the countries, especially since there is also a special card dedicated to the hits with Kosovo.
Kosovo was added before we decided to list only the UN members States.
It's a reminder of the early times of EBT...
Anonymous wrote:Aruba has it's onw currency, government and olympic team. No including Aruba is like not including Canada because their head of state is the british queen..
It's not a question of monarchy. Canada is an independant state, has got its own seat at the United Nations, its money, its capital... Like Australia, New Zealand...
Aruba is not considered as an independant State. It just has a great autonomy.
Very originally, the list was designed to represent only the countries where the Euro is official (or unofficial, but predominantly used) currency. This idea has been silently relaxed in the mean time. If it been planned to use a list of all countries the list would surely have been designed differently. It is quite obvious that the list is quite messy already and gets messier with every new entry on it -- it would be hard to retrieve even the genuine 12 Euro countries on it (if they were still mixed in with all the others and not moved to the top of the list).
Hence with the current design it is unlikely to add all remaining 91 countries in one batch. The projected policy is to eventually have a list of the 191 UN member states, plus Taiwan and Vatican City, whose independence is largely undisputed. ISO 3166 includes a number of entities with uncertain status, and we are not going to address geopolitical issues with the selection of countries offered. The restriction essentially to UN members is an unabiguous definition.
For administrative purposes (as of now) it is desirable to have a minimal number of countries in the list.
My friend from Armenia finally joined when we got Armenia added to the list, and entered his €uros (the first ones from his country!) to the system today I'm glad.