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A microstate is a sovereign state having a very small population or very little land area - usually both. Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Vatican City are all microstates.
In terms of population the most extreme example is the Pitcairn Islands, with ca. 47 inhabitants, although as a dependency of the United Kingdom it is not itself a sovereign state. The smallest fully sovereign microstate is Vatican City, with 911 inhabitants as of July 2003 and an area of only 0.44 sq km. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) is an effectively non-territorial sovereign entity that might also be considered to be a microstate. The Dominion of Melchizedek, an ecclesiastical state, claims disputed territories and has been officially recongnized by only one UN member state, yet does not enjoy the good reputation normally associated with other microstates, nor has it yet been assigned a country code.
The term microstate is sometimes confused with the term micronation. The distinction is that the former are recognized as sovereign states whereas the latter are not.
See also
Microstate is also used in thermodynamics to refer to a specific configuration of particles of a material: see microstate (thermodynamics).
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