Three UN member states begin with V — Vanuatu, Venezuela and Vietnam — and a fourth sovereign entity, Vatican City, brings the usual count to four. The Vatican's absence from the UN is a choice rather than a disqualification, which is why lists differ on whether to include it.
Vatican City is sovereign, and stays out of the UN on purpose
Vatican City is about 0.49 km² — smaller than many urban parks — with a population in the hundreds. It is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both measures, by a very wide margin: the next smallest, Monaco, is roughly four times its area.
Its status is genuinely sovereign and rests on the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which created the state to guarantee the independence of the papacy after the Papal States were absorbed into a unified Italy in 1870. It issues its own passports, stamps and euro coins, and it has its own postal service and railway station.
The reason it is not a UN member is deliberate: the Holy See — the governing body, which is the entity that conducts diplomacy — holds permanent observer status instead, on the reasoning that voting membership would compromise its position of neutrality. It could apply; it has chosen not to. That distinction between the Holy See and Vatican City is also why some lists file the entity under H rather than V.
Note too that the Vatican has no natural resources, no agriculture and no meaningful territory, so it imports everything, and that its resident population is largely composed of clergy and Swiss Guards rather than a settled citizenry. Citizenship is generally tied to office and does not pass to children.
Vietnam: a long country on a long coast
- Capital: Hanoi
- Area: about 331,000 km²
- Population: roughly 100 million
- Coastline: around 3,260 km
Vietnam is the most populous V country by a factor of three, and its shape is its defining feature: it runs roughly 1,650 km north to south while narrowing to under 50 km across at its thinnest point near the old demilitarised zone. That geometry gave rise to the standard description of the country as two rice baskets joined by a pole — the Red River delta in the north around Hanoi, the Mekong delta in the south around Ho Chi Minh City, connected by a narrow mountainous middle.
The two deltas are among the most intensively farmed landscapes on Earth and among the most exposed to sea-level rise; large parts of the Mekong delta sit barely above sea level and are already contending with saltwater intrusion, compounded by upstream damming that reduces the sediment load rebuilding the delta. The Annamite range runs down the Laotian and Cambodian border, and the far north rises to over 3,100 metres at Fansipan.
Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel from 1954 until reunification in 1976, which means the letter V briefly held two countries — North and South Vietnam — in the same way K holds two Koreas today. Our Vietnam country guide covers the regions.
Venezuela: oil, and the tallest waterfall on Earth
- Capital: Caracas
- Area: about 916,000 km²
- Population: figures are unreliable following large-scale emigration; estimates are around 28 million
Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world, larger than Saudi Arabia's, though much of it is extra-heavy crude in the Orinoco Belt that is expensive and difficult to process. The economic collapse from the mid-2010s — hyperinflation, a contraction in output extreme by any historical standard, and the emigration of several million people — happened in the country with the most oil on the planet, which is why it is the standard case study in resource dependence going wrong.
Physically it is the most varied of the V countries: Caribbean coast, the Venezuelan Andes reaching about 4,978 metres at Pico Bolívar, the vast Orinoco plains, and in the south-east the tepuis — sheer-sided sandstone table mountains rising abruptly from the forest. Angel Falls drops from one of them, Auyán-Tepui, some 979 metres, making it the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world; the fall is so high that in the dry season much of the water disperses into mist before reaching the bottom. Lake Maracaibo in the north-west is the largest lake in South America and experiences one of the highest lightning-strike frequencies recorded anywhere.
Venezuela also maintains a long-standing claim to the Essequibo region, which makes up roughly two-thirds of neighbouring Guyana — a dispute that has intensified since major oil discoveries off the Guyanese coast.
Vanuatu: eighty islands on the Ring of Fire
- Capital: Port Vila, on Efate
- Area: about 12,200 km²
- Population: roughly 330,000
- Islands: around 80, of which some 65 are inhabited
Vanuatu is a Y-shaped volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific, and it has repeatedly been assessed as the country most exposed to natural hazards anywhere in the world — a combination of cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis and active volcanoes, several of which are permanently erupting. Mount Yasur on Tanna has been in more or less continuous mild eruption for centuries and is one of the most accessible active volcanoes on the planet.
Its cultural statistics are more remarkable still. With a population of around 330,000, Vanuatu has over a hundred distinct indigenous languages — by most measures the highest density of languages per head of population of any country on Earth. Bislama, an English-based creole, serves as the lingua franca alongside English and French.
Land is the other distinctive feature. Vanuatu's constitution vests all land in the indigenous custom owners and their descendants, so land cannot be sold to foreigners outright — only leased. That provision, adopted at independence, was a direct response to the extent of colonial-era alienation of land, and it makes Vanuatu's property system unlike almost any other in the Pacific. Traditional authority, known as kastom, retains formal standing alongside the elected government through a national council of chiefs.
Two of the four were divided countries
An odd coincidence in this letter: half of it has been partitioned in the twentieth century, and in both cases the division was drawn by outside powers.
Vietnam was split at the 17th parallel by the 1954 Geneva Accords, intended as a temporary line pending elections that were never held. For twenty-two years there were two Vietnams — the Democratic Republic in the north and the Republic in the south — and the letter V therefore held two countries where it now holds one. Reunification in 1976 was achieved by war, and the reunified state kept the northern government and the southern city's new name.
Vanuatu was not partitioned territorially but administratively, which produced something arguably stranger. Under the New Hebrides Condominium, Britain and France governed the same islands simultaneously from 1906 to 1980, each with its own courts, police, currency, schools and hospitals, and residents could choose which system to live under. Contemporary observers nicknamed it the Pandemonium. At independence the new state had to merge two entire legal and educational inheritances, which is why Vanuatu today has both English and French as official languages alongside Bislama.
The comparison is instructive because it shows two ways a colonial settlement can leave a permanent mark: Vietnam's line on a map cost a war and millions of lives, while Vanuatu's duplicated bureaucracy left a small country with two of everything and a creole to bridge them.
How four V countries compare
- Area: Venezuela is roughly 1.9 million times the size of Vatican City. Within the letter, that is the widest size ratio of any group in the alphabet.
- Population: Vietnam has around 100 million people; the Vatican has a few hundred.
- Hazard exposure: Vanuatu ranks at or near the top of global risk indices; the Vatican, walled inside Rome, is among the least exposed places anywhere.
- Common ground: three of the four are archipelagic or coastal states with more sea than land under their jurisdiction — and the fourth has no coast at all.
V names that do not qualify
- Vichy France — the 1940–44 regime in unoccupied France, with limited recognition and no successor.
- Victoria — an Australian state, and also the capital of Seychelles.
- Virginia and Vermont — American states.
- Venice — a city, though the Republic of Venice was a sovereign state for roughly a thousand years until Napoleon ended it in 1797, which makes it the most substantial former V country by far.
- Vojvodina — an autonomous province of Serbia.
At three or four members, V sits in the thin half of the alphabet — well short of a crowded letter, but comfortably ahead of the four letters that share two countries between them. The count you give depends on one question: whether a state that has deliberately stayed out of the United Nations still belongs on the list. It does, on any ordinary definition of sovereignty — which is the same reasoning that makes the world total contested, as our guide to how many countries there are in the world explains.