When each country joined – and where applicable left, or was suspended from – each of twenty international groups. The dated counterpart to country_groups_tbl, which is a single current snapshot.
Format
A tibble with 309 rows:
- group
Group name.
- iso3c
ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code.
- country
Country name.
- from
Date the spell took effect.
- to
The first date on which it no longer held (it runs up to the day before), or
NAfor one still in force. The United Kingdom's EUtois therefore 2020-02-01: it left at the end of 31 January 2020.- status
"member"or"suspended". A country can have several spells in a group: Seychelles left SADC in 2004 and rejoined in 2008, and Syria was suspended from the Arab League from 2011 to 2023.country_groups()andin_group()count the member spells only.
Details
A snapshot silently misstates any panel that spans an accession: an EU panel
over 2015-2020 either includes the United Kingdom throughout or excludes it
throughout, and both are wrong. country_groups() and in_group() read this
table when given as_of.
Scope, and what is deliberately absent
Twenty groups are dated: EU, EuroZone, NATO, OECD, ASEAN, EFTA, GCC,
Mercosur, Nordic, Visegrad, BRICS, G7, and since 4.0.0 G20 (its nineteen
member countries), SCO, CPTPP, RCEP, EAC, SADC, APEC (member economies, so
Hong Kong and Taiwan too) and the Arab League ("ArabLeague"). Every date
carries its source in data-raw/country_groups_history.R. Six groups are
not dated, and that is a decision rather than an omission, made again for
each of them in 4.0.0: the Commonwealth's own record of its suspensions
gives months only and the other sources differ from it by days; OPEC dates
its accessions to the year; the African Union's table of joining dates
contradicts itself and its suspensions after coups, like ECOWAS's, are
dated unevenly; CARICOM's suspension of Haiti ends in June or July 2006
depending on the source; and the Pacific Islands Forum dates its
accessions to the year. A fabricated date is worse than an absent one, so
country_groups(as_of =) warns and falls back to the snapshot for those.
RCEP leaves out Myanmar, whose ratification the ASEAN Secretariat
questioned and whose date of entry into force is disputed.
Dates are the treaty, accession or decision date where one exists; where the sources give only the month, the 1st of that month (APEC's accessions). The table is validated at build time against country_groups_tbl: the members current today must reproduce the snapshot exactly, for every group covered.
Examples
# EFTA is the instructive one: most of its founders left, for the EU
subset(country_groups_history, group == "EFTA")
#> # A tibble: 10 × 6
#> group iso3c country from to status
#> <chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <date> <chr>
#> 1 EFTA AUT Austria 1960-05-03 1995-01-01 member
#> 2 EFTA CHE Switzerland 1960-05-03 NA member
#> 3 EFTA DNK Denmark 1960-05-03 1973-01-01 member
#> 4 EFTA GBR United Kingdom 1960-05-03 1973-01-01 member
#> 5 EFTA NOR Norway 1960-05-03 NA member
#> 6 EFTA PRT Portugal 1960-05-03 1986-01-01 member
#> 7 EFTA SWE Sweden 1960-05-03 1995-01-01 member
#> 8 EFTA FIN Finland 1961-06-27 1995-01-01 member
#> 9 EFTA ISL Iceland 1970-03-01 NA member
#> 10 EFTA LIE Liechtenstein 1991-09-01 NA member