[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
UN Observer status is most often used to discuss the status of states like Palestines but it has less of an implication of being a sovereign "state" than people think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
The only somewhat comparable thing afaik is the Holy See, but that at least has sovereignty over some land (the vatican).
[1] although this status is sometimes questioned
This is true of every state. If no one recognizes your claims, and then acts with impunity against you, you’re not a state.
The Republic of Minerva, was not a state, because no one cared when Tonga claimed it.
Conversely, Taiwan is a state, even with its bizarre legal status, as it has well defined borders, and de facto foreign recognition and military alliances.
> If no one recognizes your claims, and then acts with impunity against you, you’re not a state.
Ukraine only fits one.
cf Western Sahara. The international community was not interested in preserving Western Sahara as a state, and so now its entire territory is governed by Morocco, save for some tent cities in a corner of desert the Polisario Front clings to mainly because it'd be bad PR for Morocco to wipe them out.
Monaco remains a country, because of interference by France, and the fact that they’d be severely sanctioned by EU and the rest of their allies.
This is not always the case. There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land (and much more contested areas too, of course) but were never accepted as a state by many (any?) others. Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
I did not say it was always the case. I said "plenty of", not "every".
Life and politics are complicated, and I left plenty of room in my original statement for nuance and counter examples, please do not remove that for me.
> There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land
Unchanging is not the same as uncontested, and I'd argue that IS never had an "unchanging" area of land. Every square foot of IS territory was actively contested, and if you look at the map of its territory over time it moves and shifts and is full of uncontrolled pockets. The nice, clean maps of IS territory on the news were in fact simplifications for easy public consumption. The real situation on the ground was always much more fluid and complex than that. If you look at a map[0] of the actual territory that IS controlled, it is pretty far from the necessary boundaries to run a state. Put bluntly, this is a battle map, not the kind of map that you can make a state out of.
Even the areas that IS held, it did not hold for very long or very securely. Take Tikrit, for example, which IS only held from June 2014 to March 2015, with forces massing for the attack in February. It's hard to argue that a group holds "unchanging" territory when major cities are changing hands every 10 months or so. Furthermore, if an opposing force is able to mass an army outside your city and put siege to it, you are very far away from having "sufficient ability to defend their borders". Given that IS' territorial claims collapsed rather quickly, I think that assertion is pretty good.
> Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
Right, because the war was still on, IS was still trying to seize the land and fortify the borders of what they hoped would eventually be their state. If IS had won or fought the battle to a draw, I have no doubt that they would have gotten roughly the same level of international recognition that say, North Korea gets and they'd stop being "so called". But they didn't do that, so they never stopped being "so called".
Really, the counter example you should have gone for here is Haiti. Haiti unquestionably was capable of defending its borders, and in fact repelled several attempts to retake the island. It also did not get recognized for nearly 20 years by basically anyone until they agreed to reimburse France for the loss of their property, including distastefully the value of the slaves who were now free. While plenty of states get recognized once they manage to successfully hold and defend territory, not every state gets recognized that way. Sometimes other factors dominate, such as the fear of other slave holding states in recognizing the independence of a country created via a slave revolt.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State#/media/File:Near...
You also cannot defend a patch of ocean without some land, at least with current technology. War ships require quite a bit of time in dry dock for fueling, refit, and rearmament. And that's before we consider the subpar fighting capability that crews without shore leave would provide.
No, they'd still need to buy or borrow some land, even if they had the hardware to run a moderate navy.
Anyhow, I've learned to be careful about equivocating nations or cultures. Saying something like, "country X seemed just as nice as Y" might rub someone from X or Y the wrong way.
It's all thinly disguised racism, of course. But it does pose an interesting woke paradox: what if all a nation has left is its prejudice against another nation?
I believe this reveals the existence of a tree-like hierarchy (very loose) of human cultures, and I also believe it goes way lower than just the country level (all the way down to individual people). xkcd also said it a long time ago: https://xkcd.com/1095/
In context of island erosion, this poses the question of whether a nation without any territory can exist purely in opposition to another similarly situated nation (i.e. both sharing a positive history that is indistinguishable within the context of a broader society to which they've emigrated). And that creates an interesting ethical dilemma if the goal is to preserve national identity, especially one that has been "victimized" by [perpetrators of] global warming.
So, trade could bring wood, materials, solar, desalinaton. If done slowly, over years, as parts submerge, it wouldn't be a massive outlay at once.
I agree.. not cheap, but individual citizens have to buy building materials currently, their new houses would just be on stilts.
Most likely this will be treated like when a country invades and destroys another: .TV will cease to exist and its citizens will be absorbed in other States.
3m is just around 9ft. And we are talking about less than 12000 people living in about 25sq.km of land. It would be trivial to increase the height of the land by a couple of metres.
Wealth could be preserved by seeking restitution from nations according to lifetime emissions (which has led to sea level rise), and creating a trust to manage and distribute the returns from those funds invested to citizens where ever they are. Once submerged, it’s unlikely the land has any value beyond tourism for diving yachties transiting the pacific.
Tribal lands exist largely so that those resistant to integration will stay out of the way of colonizers.
Fiji gets a share of Tuvaluan fishing grounds, and the Tuvaluans get a place to live AND some protection for their territorial waters by a nation that is still landed.
By the way, what do you mean by "orbital rights"? IMHO according to the Outer Space Treaty you have only the right to the orbits you are currently actively using with your satellites and nothing more.
Calling the Britons "British" and Anglo-Saxons "English" is confusing... Usually those terms are used for modern Great Britain and modern English.
Galicia: the local king.
On the other hand, both China and Taiwan spread money around in the PNA countries as a form of soft power and to get some level of looking the other way.
Probably there still few advantages to be recognized as nation. Being Tax shelter and selling domains(.tv is somewhat popular) comes to mind.
Similarly, I wonder what would happen if Tuvalu decided its laws should not recognise copyright as a concept any more. The government could run an official "legal" file-sharing site and other countries would have to decide whether to prevent their own citizens from accessing it. I imagine these other countries would lose a lot of sympathy for the people of Tuvalu if such a site were created, though.