What countries shaped the modern world?

My top 3 is:

1-Great Britain : It conquered the world. Founded America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa...
English is a global language. London is the business center of the world.

2-France: France colonized Africa, the middle east and the West Indies. Paris is the cultural capital of the world, and the of many artistic and philosophy movements.

3-Spain: Spain conquered Central and South America, and their occupation resulted their language and many cultural things being taken by the people of Central America.

I have excluded the United States, because it's part of the modern world, and it's very young compared to England, France and Spain.

ross4thus : Where was the United States 300 years ago?
Do Americans not understand questions?

Youth of a country has nothing do with the impact it may have on shaping the "modern world". By leaving out the United States, you have left off perhaps the largest contributer to "shaping". Without trying to sound ethnocentric, the US has provided as much or more than most of the countries you have listed combined. This would include: saving all three of the countries you have listed in two world wars, providing research and medicines that have cured or help most of the major diseases that caused death less than a few decades ago, arguably refining the democratic way of governing, and the US is one of the few countries to break away and form its own country without failing miserably or turning into a dictatorship (see Spain and France). And yes, Americans know how to answer questions, since your question is simply which countries helped shape the modern world. There was no mention of how many centuries you consider "modern". "America" as you say, was actually alive and thriving 300 years ago, but had not yet declared their independance, but they were definitely beginning to shape the world around them.

France hasn't won a war in 500 years

This shows it (us liberating their asses)
http://archives.gov/research/ww2/photos/...

As a historian, leaving the US out is both logical and not normal. Compared to the overall impact of other nations, like France, Britain, Spain, or earlier, Rome, Greece, China, the US's achievements are more recent.
Note that my analysis holds for the modern, WESTERN world, and not for any parts of the world, and that I am purposely leaving out Islamic nations, and Asia because of the fact that my analysis concerns the western world.
I agree with Britain and France for the reasons mentioned above. It was also in Britain and France that the idea of Democracy was 'modernized' (Voltaire, Diderot, and most important for American democracy were Montesquieu's spirit of the laws AND John Locke's treatises). Cartesian logic is the basis for scientific reasoning, and Claude Bernard's work on observation is still used heavily for medicine and Biology (on France's very important achievements: discovery of Uranium -Pierre and Marie Curie, Penicilin- Louis Pasteur) and the Industrial revolution was well underway in Britain than in most areas of the world (by comparison, such factory lifestyle did not hit the US until the mid nineteenth century). I like Spain (they did put America on the map, sponsored exploration and intercontinental trade), but Germany seems more appropriate. The whole theory on Quantum mechanics was 'invented' in Germany in the early twentieth century, Nietzche's philosophy is as influential on modern minds as Sartre's existentialism, and some literary behemoth were produced in Germany: Thomas Mann's Mountain, Bernard Schlink's the Reader, Goethe's Faustus and Werner, not to mention their impact on archaeology and history (German is an extremely important language in historical research).
BUT, you cannot underplay the US. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the US was a major, and the major, economic player. Important scientific discovery (lightbulb, telephone, telegraph) were made in the US, and military has played a major role in modern times (2nd world war, and I won't get into the Cold War). Still you are right not to place the US... yet on the same level as the european powers, for better or for worse, they did shape the modern world, although THIS is a EURO CENTRIC view of the modern world.
The US will shape post modern world, without any doubt in my mind.
For people who wish to go into France's military achievements... France invaded Germany in 1920, and pulled out in 1936. Despite being invaded, they were still at the Victor's table (unlike say, all the other countries under NAZI rule), possibly because North Africa and their colonial empire was largely independent of the Vichy rule. Being a Frenchman, soon to be American, thanks for bailing Europe out of WWII, and we remember it (there are after all, French run American cemetaries in France, as well as numerous memorials to American troops, and my grandparents only talk about THE AMERICANS when dealing with WWII), but I wonder how much longer this will be brought up.