If You're Looking To Start Your Own Country

With the Euro soccer tournament on now, and the Olympics around the corner, we're getting a refresher course in the symbols of nationhood.  To prove I'll criticise anything, here are some of my national pet peeves.

Names

There are about two-hundred countries around the world, with different customs and cultures, but nearly all of them have one thing in common: they have names.  The Czech Republic doesn't; it has an adjective.  That would be like if we didn't call ourselves Canada, we just called it, "The Canadian Country."  Come on Czechs, it's not that hard, let's run through some possibilities: Czechland, Czechia, Czechistan.  Get back to us on it.

The same goes for the Dominican Republic, but it gets a pass because there's already a Dominica, and they seem to be alright with "The Dominican."  Though that brings up the next problem:

"The"

It's really pretentious if you're not just Placeland, you want to be called The Placeland.  I understand The Ukraine now just wants to be Ukraine, Sudan dropped "the" years ago.  I'll give the United States, United Kingdom and other countries with descriptive names a pass.  But The Phillipines and The Gambia, you just sound self-important.

Flags

There are so many flag cliches (three stripes, red-white-and-blue) and flags that look too similar (Poland/Indonesia/Monaco.)  Lets see some originality.  This is especially frustrating for countries that use different colours for their national teams.  For instance, take (the - damn-it!) Netherlands.  Their flag commits the two biggest cliches, and it's the same as Luxembourg.  Yet their athletes wear orange.  Now wouldn't an orange flag be refreshing?  Come on guys, surely this isn't asking too much of a radical country like you.  

And how about New Zealand.  Your flag is almost identical to Australia's.  I know you hate getting mistaken for Australians, so why not get a new flag.  You wear black in athletics, and use that fern thing as a logo. I've seen some people wave a flag with the fern on a black background.  Would that not be the coolest flag in the world? 

A Better New Zealand Flag (graphic by Bamse, used by creative commons)

You could have a big ceremony where you adopt it as your flag and give Henry Rollins honourary citizenship at the same time.  And of course we in Canada would feel much more confident if we weren't the only people on Earth with a leaf on our flag.