I feel like humanity would do well to have more definitive understanding and seperation of the terms country, state, and nation. A country is a geographic entity that contains a people. For example, you are not in the county "The United States of America" The name of the country is America, and existed since before the constitution as recognized in Common Sense. A state is a political entity capable of governance. A nation is an independent political entity, that is self governing, that is capable of interacting with other nations on the world stage. You likely live in the nation of "The United States of America" So are European countries actually nations at this point? I would say no. They are not independent, or self governing. They do interact a bit independently on the world stage and have militaries so that's a bit fuzzy, but I would say they are mostly not nations at this point. We would maybe like them to be and want them to head back in that direction but I state things as they are, not how I want them to be. If you think it's weird that I think our country is America and not the USA. The country is China, the nation is The People's Republic of China. Also our country could always reform it's statehood. It would still be America hint, hint. When in history class we talk about how **we** were under the articles of confederation, we don't say those other people, the post-revolutionary confederates, lived under the articles of confederation. We say our country had the articles of confederation. But what country was that? It clearly couldn't be the United States of America. **tl;dr**: It's better to say how many states can a nation contain. Also the country you live in is not the USA. It's America.