Serbia Abstains as UN Backs New World Map, US Votes No
The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the world move on from the Mercator map. The United States voted against it, and Serbia was among six countries that abstained.
Serbia was one of six countries that abstained on Friday, September 4, when the UN General Assembly voted on a resolution recommending the world move away from a map that has been in use for four and a half centuries and adopt a representation that restores Africa’s true size. Belgrade’s choice not to vote either way sets it apart from the European Union, which backed the proposal as a bloc, and adds a domestic angle to a story that world media covered almost entirely as a dispute between Washington and African states.
The resolution, titled “Correct The Map,” passed with 164 votes in favor, just one against, and six abstentions. The United States was the only country to vote no, while Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine abstained. The proposal was put forward by member states on behalf of the African Union and the Bahamas, with France as co-sponsor. Togo led the negotiations on behalf of the African group of nations.
The resolution is not binding. It does not ban the Mercator projection or mandate a replacement, and it explicitly does not affect the projection’s use in maritime and air navigation, the very purpose Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator designed it for in 1569, since straight lines on his map correspond to constant compass bearings. That precision comes at the cost of landmass proportions, which grow larger the closer they are to the poles, meaning Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa on a Mercator map even though the African continent is about fourteen times larger. Rather than imposing a ban, the resolution encourages governments, schools, international organizations, and tech companies to use the Equal Earth projection and other equal-area projections when showing the relative size of continents, and to teach the limitations that come with representing a sphere on a flat surface.
“A fair map does not change the world’s geography, it changes how we see the world,” Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign minister, told the UN General Assembly. Dussey added that maps “shape our understanding of the world” and “guide education, feed the imagination, and influence collective perceptions.”
The European Union backed the resolution as a bloc, noting that the measure concerns only the relative size of land masses and has nothing to do with sovereignty or internationally recognized borders. Ukraine abstained over concern that maps drawn under the Equal Earth projection could create ambiguity around occupied territory. France announced just hours before the vote that it would drop the Mercator projection from its own world maps. “The United States, Russia and China get disproportionate visual prominence compared to Africa, Latin America or Southeast Asia,” said Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, at the United Nations.
For Serbia, which typically aligns its foreign policy moves with Brussels, abstaining on a vote the European Union backed as a bloc marks a departure rarely seen in this kind of multilateral vote. The same group of abstaining countries also included two EU members, Estonia and Lithuania, as well as Ukraine, whose representatives explained their votes with a specific security concern. No explanation for Serbia’s vote has been made public so far.
Togo has announced it will update its own school geography materials by the end of 2026 and will call on other governments, schools, and tech companies to do the same. That deadline, the end of this year, will offer the first real test of how much a non-binding resolution has actually changed the way the world is depicted in practice.
