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Comment by samdung | Hacker News Reader

Came across Liberland about a year ago and filled a citizenship form on their site (https://liberland.org/) out of curiosity. I occasionally get their newsletter. Altogether i find this a an occasional and nice distraction from my work. Maybe this is how all countries came into existence.

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Any country you can name came into existence when a collection of warlords established it by force. Ironically, you would expect libertarians to know this better than others.

Power of the state comes from its ability to engage in coercion and hence generally it is true that you can't expect to have a country without someone at the top with power to beat up the citizens into submission.

But generally the warlords are powerful only to the extent the underlying nation is engaging in extensive co-operation and wealth creation out of their free will. Nations are truly created by those ordinary people.

I am reminded of a powerful Indian tyrant named Muhammad Bin Tughlaq. He for some reason decided to move his capital to a different geographical area. By moving he literally wanted to move everything including the people to this new geographical area. Not only he failed miserably his name Tughlaq is synonymous with "idiotic behaviour high on power".

"There is more to the transfer of capital than what is generally written. It is believed that Tughluq wanted to make Daulatabad an Islamic cultural centre, thereby helping him to have better control over the region, reducing the number of "Hindu" rebellions. His efforts to bring Ulema and Shaikhs from provincial towns and make them settle down in that city give a clue to his true intentions. The view of Muhammad Tughluq was that something like the above had to be done in the Deccan to strengthen the Muslim position in that area.

As regards its remote effects, the Deccan experiment of Muhammad Tughluq was a remarkable success. The boundaries which had separated the North from the South broke down. It is true that the extension of the administrative power of the Delhi Sultanate into the Deccan failed, but so far as the extension of the cultural institutions was concerned, it was successful."

The Vatican City came into existence because Mussolini, a warlord, specifically did not want to move against the pope, and the VC was born out of a sort of gentleman's agreement: you don't denounce me, and you get your own country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City#Lateran_treaties

I think it's extremely unlikely that Vatican City would be independent except for the previous existence of the Papal States and the way that they were incorporated into Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_in_the_Vatican

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Question

No, some formed peacefully. Cities joined into commonwealths.

Merchant princes and warlords are kinda the same thing.

Shh, they haven't heard of Carthage, or the Serene Republic, and get tetchy thinking of weaponized grocers. (Although they are, they have press out the wazoo.)

NZ came into existence relatively peacefully. It was not predominately created by force.

I am not sure when you consider New Zealand to have "come into existence", but wouldn't the Musket Wars and the New Zealand Wars contradict this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Wars

You know when it comes down to it, you're probably right that NZ was not an exception. Violence was inevitably going to be a part of its sovereignty

However, a couple things about those citations

1 - to the best of my knowledge the musket wars predominately were inter-tribal warfare b/w Maori. Basically Europeans gave them muskets and they turned them on each other.

2 - the NZ Wars actually occurred after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which occurred in 1840, and is the same year when NZ was claimed as a sovereign country.

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