Netherlands Antilles dissolved as per 10-10-10, how to change Country dropdowns?

Question

See also Dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles.

In a nutshell: Curaçao and Sint Maarten become autonomous and the remnant of the islands (the BES islands) become special municipalities of the Netherlands.

The question is: how should we replace Netherlands Antilles (with country code ISO-3166-2:AN) in the country dropdown of the average webapplication? I can't find any information about the new country codes. Do we have to add Curaçao and Sint Maarten to the dropdown with the country code AN? How about the BES islands?

Answer 1

Last week they have finally new ISO 3166 codes assigned.

From the ISO 3166-2:AN page:

The Netherlands Antilles were officially assigned the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code AN before it was dissolved into five separate territories in 2010, and the entry will be deleted from ISO 3166-2 as a result. Curaçao and Sint Maarten, which became overseas countries in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, are now officially assigned the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes CW and SX respectively. Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba, which became "special municipalities" of the Netherlands, are now officially assigned the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code BQ under the collective entry "Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba".

The ISO 3166-1 decoding table was last updated on December 15, 2010.

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On existing webapplications, I think it makes sense to keep AN for at least one year for display only. I would however show some messagebox in some user profile page and/or send an email to AN users that the user has now the opportunity to fix the country selection to match the actual new country.

Answer 2

The relevant ISO codes have now been assigned. The following answer does still stand in terms of handling jurisdictional changes (including the fact that some data should still be recorded as being related to AN, because it relates to something that happened in AN when AN existed).

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Neither, as yet, have ISO codes assigned.

For some uses, considering it part of the Netherlands (NL) will serve, as they are constituent countries. Note that "constituent country" isn't a rock-solid distinction as such matters go, and it's quite common to e.g. consider the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a single unit in a context where one might also consider Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands as three separate units.

For others, encoding as "Former Netherlands Antilles" will serve.

For other uses, this would not be acceptable. My recommendation would be to use codes from the user-assigned area of ISO 3166 (AA, QM to QZ, XA to XZ, and ZZ, though you may wish to avoid those in common usage in public contexts), and reassign to the code assigned later, if that happens.

Note also, that it may be worth keeping Netherlands Antilles as an option in some cases, as Netherlands Antilles is obviously the place where some things happened in the past which may remain worth noting for some time to come (one reason why many complained that CS was re-assigned from Czechoslovakia to Serbia and Montenegro too soon, is that valid and useful data about Czechoslovakia was still in active use at the time).