CDS (II) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 98 of 120

Correct — D, Turkey. On 31 May 2022 the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, wrote to the United Nations and to other international organisations asking that the country be called Türkiye in every language, including English. The UN agreed and made the change effective at once, so by June 2022 the country's entry in UN records read Türkiye — three months before candidates sat this paper. Türkiye is what Turks have called their country since the republic was founded in 1923; the request was to have the world use it too, partly to end the confusion in English between the country and the bird. Note what did and did not happen: the state did not change its name, it asked the UN to change the label the UN uses. Registering that difference is what the question is really testing.

• (a)Algeria — No UN name change. Algeria's official style, the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, has been unchanged since independence in 1962.
• (b)Jordan — No UN name change. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has carried that name since 1949, when the Emirate of Transjordan was renamed after annexing the West Bank.
• (c)Morocco — No UN name change. Morocco is in the news over the Western Sahara dispute and over its return to the African Union in 2017, but its name at the UN has not been altered.

A member state may ask the United Nations to record it under a different name, and the UN Protocol and Liaison Service simply gives effect to the request — no vote, no treaty, no approval by other members. That is why such changes take effect almost overnight. The country's own constitution and its legal identity are untouched; what changes is the name used in UN documents, seating, signage and correspondence, which then spreads through diplomatic and media usage.

This is a current-affairs recall item with a three-month window, and the giveaway is that only one of the four options has been in the news for a naming question at all. If the change itself has slipped your memory, work from the other three: Algeria, Jordan and Morocco each have long-settled names, and no recent event attaches a rename to any of them. As of the September 2022 exam the change was new enough to feel provisional; it has since bedded in. The United States announced in January 2023 that it would use Türkiye in formal diplomatic contexts while keeping Turkey as a conventional name for general public use, which is roughly where usage sits today — Türkiye in official texts, both forms in ordinary English.

• Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu's letters requesting the use of Türkiye were sent on 31 May 2022, and the UN implemented the change immediately.
• Türkiye has been the Turkish-language name of the country since the republic was proclaimed in 1923.
• Turkey joined the United Nations as a founding member in 1945 and NATO in 1952.
• Other states that have asked the UN to record a new name include Czechia (Czech Republic, 2016), Eswatini (Swaziland, 2018) and the Netherlands, which dropped Holland as a promotional name in 2020.
• The US State Department said in January 2023 that it would use Türkiye in formal diplomatic settings while retaining Turkey as a conventional name.

• Treating a change in the name a state asks the UN to use as a change of the state's legal name — the two are not the same thing.
• Confusing this with the North Macedonia case, which did require an agreement with another country (the Prespa Agreement with Greece, 2018).
• Assuming a UN vote was involved; a member state's request of this kind is recorded, not put to the vote.

As a one-line current-affairs recall in the year of the change, and later as a match between a country and its former name.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following countries formally asked the United Nations in 2018 to record it under the name Eswatini?

  • (a)Lesotho
  • (b)Swaziland
  • (c)Botswana
  • (d)Namibia

  Answer(b) Swaziland — King Mswati III announced the change to the Kingdom of Eswatini in April 2018, on the fiftieth anniversary of independence.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 2018 Prespa Agreement, which settled a long-running dispute over a country's name, was signed between Greece and which one of the following?

  • (a)Albania
  • (b)Bulgaria
  • (c)North Macedonia
  • (d)Serbia

  Answer(c) North Macedonia — the agreement ended the dispute over the name Macedonia and opened the way to that country's NATO membership in 2020.