What makes the North Atlantic a region

Two constitutions, neither of them local

Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory. Under section 62 of the Bermuda Constitution Order 1968 the Governor holds external affairs, defence including the armed forces, internal security and the police; the elected government holds the rest. Saint Pierre and Miquelon is an overseas collectivity of France, governed under article 74 of the Constitution and named in the general code of territorial collectivities as the collectivité territoriale de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon. It was a territoire d'outre-mer until 1976, a département after that, and a collectivité territoriale from the law of 11 June 1985. Everything downstream of those documents diverges: English against French, the Bermudian dollar and the pound sterling against the euro, driving on the left against driving on the right, the calling code +1441 against +508.

The list one of them is on

Bermuda has been on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 1946, when the United Kingdom began transmitting information on it under Article 73 e of the Charter, and it remains one of the 17 territories on the agenda of the Special Committee on Decolonization. Saint Pierre and Miquelon is not on that list, although French Polynesia and New Caledonia are: the position France takes is that the archipelago is a part of the Republic rather than a territory administered on the Republic's behalf. Both islands answer to a European capital, and they are counted in wholly different ledgers because of it.

Sea, not land

The United Nations records Bermuda's land area as 53.35 square kilometres and its exclusive economic zone as 450,370 square kilometres, and nothing else lies close enough to argue about. Saint Pierre and Miquelon had no such water to claim, because Newfoundland is next to it and Canada had declared 200 nautical miles of its own. A court of arbitration settled the boundary on 10 June 1992, giving France a zone reaching 24 nautical miles from the islands and a corridor 10.5 nautical miles wide running 200 nautical miles south to international waters, about 3,607 square nautical miles in all.

Where the edges are argued

The UN Statistics Division files both under Northern America in the M49 standard, beside Canada, Greenland and the United States. This catalogue holds a North Atlantic apart from its own North America, which carries Canada, Mexico and the United States, on the reading that a dependency in open ocean is not described by whichever mainland happens to be nearest. The disagreement is not confined to these islands. M49 files Mexico under Central America and Greenland under Northern America; the catalogue files Mexico with North America and Greenland with Northern Europe. Both schemes put the same rock in the same water and differ over what it should be grouped with.