Time Zone change in GEORGIA (Eastern Europe), time zone is no w GMT+3 (no longer GMT+4)

[Aiet Kolkhi]

Hmm, interesting discussion.

> By that reasoning, since France and the United States belonged to
> SEATO (the South-East Asia Treaty Organization), they must be
> Southeast Asian countries.

I agree with the fact that since a country once belonged to SEATO is
not a reason enough to consider a country Asian, but being a EU
member, thus being a part of Europian economy, Europian jurisprudence
(and bringing your legislation into line with over 90 000 pages of
regulations controling everything from fiscal policies to
banana-quality standards, like Kim Iskyan suggested), having Euro as a
national currency, also being culturally, historically and religiously
more Europian than Asian, being a geographical part of Europe, being a
member of Europian Council, being politically targeted to
Euro-intergration, being a historical and genetic ancestor of all the
Europian people, being a member of UN Economic Commission of Europe,
adhering EU dst rules, should, in my ipinion, let us think about
considering putting the country link in Europian region as well :)

Is there any rule that would let us decide whether a country is purely
Asian or Europian one? Do we consider the historical, cultural,
racial, political, religous and geographical factors, or just
geographical? Has there ever been a strict definition where the border
between Europe and Asia lies? I think when deviding Europe and Asia
historicans or geographers usually considered the cultural background,
along with current political state of a country.

A clear example can be Byzantine empire, which was purely-europian and
it would be improper to refer to it as an Asian country or empire, but
since taken over by Ottoman Empire in 15th cent. AD, the country
became purely Asian and very little remained from the Byzantine
culture, behavour and spirit. Untill 19th cent., it would be improper
to refer to Turkey (or Ottoman Empire) as Europian. After that period,
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk chose more or less wetern political direction,
which led to present-day Turkey, which, along with its Asian culture,
is becoming a part of Europe too. What I want to say is that
as borders and definitions of countries and empires change as time
goes by, so does the geographical definitions of them.

Eugene Volokh has some interesting views on the subject too:
http://www.mail-archive.com/volokh-l@lists.ucla.edu/msg02346.html
and http://www.mail-archive.com/volokh-l@lists.ucla.edu/msg02474.html

> OK, to do that, in my next proposed update I'll add a cross
> reference from the "europe" file to the "asia" file. We already do
> this sort of thing for Turkey and Russia, two other countries that
> straddle the boundary between Europe and Asia. I've drafted this
> change:

Yes, I think that would be the best solution.

> I agree with the approach, but I would not recommend the text you have. As I
> said, the best reference in all such cases is the UN Statistics Division:
> http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm. That is, for example,
> what the proposed successor to RFC 3066 (language tags, as used in HTML and
> XML) is using. And according to that, Georgia is in Asia.

I am not sure if we can rely on it as the only source. Like I mention
above, the UN itself is not strict with its division of Europe and
Asia, as there are many "Euroasian" countries in its Europian
commissions. When it comes to RFC country-specific standards and
language codes, we can definetely refer to it as a standard and try to
correct any irregularities right there at first, should the case
concern the language or country codes, though not when we are talking
about defining a country as Europian or Asian.

Sorry for the long mail :)

Regards,
Aiet