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Originally Posted by edale
Sicily is less than 2 miles from mainland Italy at its closest point. Northern Ireland is ~15 miles from Scotland and the primary island of the UK. Surely you can understand how different those situations are than France and Guadeloupe (4,200 miles), Mayotte (4,900 miles), and Martinique (4,200 miles). You're comparing places that are very close to each other to distant land holdings in different continents.
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In this day an age of WhatsApp and videoconferences, whether you're 15 miles away or 4000 miles away makes far less difference than it used to.
Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
I have a hard time saying some island off the coast of Southern Africa or in the Carribean is France. It might be true that these places function as extensions of France, but they are across the globe from actual France! When talking about the population of France vs other European countries, I don't think it makes sense to include places in Africa and North America.
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The population of Spain includes the Canary Islands, Ceuta, and Melilla. And that's in Africa last time I checked. So should we also subtract these when comparing Spain with other European countries?
Again, the fact that the Canary Islands are closer to continental Spain is irrelevant. A WhatsApp call to the Canary Islands or to Réunion is not very different.
People here also tend to disregard (of be unaware of) how intertwined the overseas departments and Metropolitan France are from a human point of view. At the 2022 census, 227,800 people born in Metropolitan France lived in the 4 old overseas departments (1.9 million people), where they made up 11.9% of the population. In comparison, only 181,900 people born in the European part of Spain lived in the Canary Islands (2.2 million people) at the 2022 census, where they made up 8.3% of the population. And this despite the fact that the overseas departments are considerably more distant from Metropolitan France than the Canary Islands from continental Spain.
Also, at the 2022 census there lived in Metropolitan France 472,400 people who were born in these 4 old overseas departments, whereas there lived in the European part of Spain only 69,800 people who were born in the Canary Islands.
From a human point of view the overseas departments of France are more integrated with Metropolitan France than the Canary Islands with the European part of Spain, with more exchanges and migrations between Metropolitan France and the overseas departments than is the case for Spain and the Canary Islands, so it's absurd not to include the population of the overseas departments in the population of France while including the population of the Canary Islands in the population of Spain. Not to mention that by removing the overseas departments of France we're also removing nearly 230,000 Metropolitan Frenchmen from the French statistics. How absurd is that?
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