What are countries famous for?

I have become quite the world traveler recently. It came with the job, and started gradually about a couple of years ago. And only recently with multiple trips this year, has travel-aversion reduced a little, and I am realizing that this might have been something I wanted in the past.

Typing this from Seoul now. This trip had to straddle a weekend, and I went out touring this morning. Went to Seoul's royal palace, saw the change of gaurd ceremony and all. Read some history before hand - it appears Korea suffered quite a bit under Japanese occupation before the second world war. Also read Samsung means three-stars.

In the afternoon, having some time and solitude, I began to think. Among all the nations in the world, what is India's identity? What are the identities of the different nations? Can a country claim to be great? If a country's political leadership claim that they are the greatest, does it do good for the people, or make them smug or worse illusion-ed?

 I just could not shake this topic, and I wanted to come to a conclusion that India had some outstanding greatness that could top all countries. In the end, I concluded that each country has it's own claims to fame, and it is impossible to compare. Even the countries that are going through terrible times currently, hopefully are only negotiating their own dark ages.

For India, perhaps, the greatness lies in being the largest number of people held together by an ancient and continuing cultural tradition. And our diversity. For the US, it is technological and scientific innovation. For Europe, human well-being (one hopes). For Africa, a life closer to nature.

In the end, also googled, and found some interesting views:

http://chartsbin.com/view/37790
http://mentalfloss.com/article/56754/every-countrys-highest-valued-export
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-countries-are-best-at-2014-1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_international_rankings_by_country
https://iq-research.info/en/page/average-iq-by-country (I though India would do good here)