The Only Country That Deleted Its Own Army. Costa Rica Incredible Facts!

Name a country with no army. Most people say Switzerland, or Austria, or Ireland — and all three of those answers are wrong, because every one of them maintains armed forces. Costa Rica dissolved its army in 1948, wrote the ban into its constitution the following year, and has not rebuilt one since. I wanted to know how unusual that actually is, so I counted. Twenty three countries on Earth have no standing army. Together they hold 12 060 000 people — about 0.15% of everybody alive, on 274 000 square kilometres, which is less land than Ecuador. Only three of those countries contain more than a million people, and Costa Rica is the largest of them: five million Costa Ricans are 42% of every human being living without an army. That is the part the usual telling of this story leaves out. Monaco has no army because Monaco is two square kilometres with France wrapped around it. Liechtenstein disbanded its own in 1868 because it cost too much. Those are not decisions about the nature of the state — they are arithmetic. Costa Rica is the only country of ordinary size that looked at a working army it already owned and chose to get rid of it. This video is about how that decision was made, why it held for 77 years, and what the geography and the neighbours had to do with it — including the uncomfortable parts. ⏱ CHAPTERS 0:00 Name a country with no army 0:41 Twenty three countries, counted 1:16 Who actually lives without one 1:52 Monaco is not making a statement 2:26 The question worth asking 2:43 The civil war of 1948 3:14 The sledgehammer 3:40 What an army was actually for 4:09 Seventy seven years of elections 4:38 Article 12 5:13 Where the money went 5:50 The geography nobody mentions 6:20 Costa Rica is not Poland 6:49 Who was holding the umbrella 7:27 Panama did not choose 8:01 What it did not solve 8:40 Why the list stays short HOW THE COUNTING WAS DONE Population and area of every country on the list were computed from the GHS-POP population grid (European Commission Joint Research Centre, 2020 epoch, 30 arc-second resolution) intersected with Natural Earth country polygons. The same grid sums to 7.841 billion against a world population of 7.84 billion in 2020, so it is not missing anybody. https://human-settlement.emergency.co... https://www.naturalearthdata.com/ One honest limit: a grid cell is about 11 km across, so states smaller than that — Monaco, San Marino, Nauru, Tuvalu and a few others — do not register in it at all. For those eight, published population figures were used instead, and they are flagged separately in the project data. The list itself is a judgement call, not a fact, so it is split three ways in the video rather than lumped together: countries that disbanded an army they had, microstates whose defence is handled by a neighbour under treaty, and countries with no army but a real coast guard or paramilitary police. WHERE THE REST OF THE FACTS COME FROM Which countries have no armed forces: CIA World Factbook, Military and Security Forces entries — https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/ The 1948 civil war, José Figueres and the abolition of the army: Encyclopaedia Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/place/Cost... Article 12 and the 1949 constitution: the text of the Constitución Política de la República de Costa Rica. The 1955 incursion from Nicaragua and the OAS response: Organization of American States records — https://www.oas.org/ Panama 1989–1994: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Literacy, life expectancy and income: World Bank Open Data — https://data.worldbank.org/ Homicide trends: UNODC — https://dataunodc.un.org/ MEDIA Video footage: Pexels. Maps and diagrams: original. #costarica #geography #history #noarmy #panama #latinamerica #documentary #maps #geopolitics #data #geovault