Currently, in order to sort the countries in the MappedCountry list, something like the following has to be done:

object birthplace_country extends MappedCountry(this) { 
  val collator = java.text.Collator.getInstance() // might/should receive the lift locale 
  override def buildDisplayList: List[(Int, String)] = ( 
    super.buildDisplayList.sortWith((s1, s2) => collator.compare(s1._2, s2._2) < 0) 
  ) 
  // override def defaultValue is probably not solvable on a global scale, or is it? 
}

The collator part is important here, otherwise the output is still wrong. (Depending on the locale o=ö, o<ö or o<z<ö.)

It would be a good idea to add this maybe to the country fields (and other i18n fields) or at least to add a Helper function for locale based string sorting.