Croatia demolished houses of libertarian project “Liberland”, seized property
liberlandpress.com
liberlandpress.com
Free Republic of Liberland is a sovereign state located between Croatia and Serbia. It is a 7 km² piece of land referred to as “Gornja Siga”.
The founder and elected head of state is President Vít Jedlička. Liberland is a constitutional republic with elements of direct democracy. The state has two Vice Presidents and 5 Ministers. The language is English. The Liberland merit is the currency of Liberland. The country's motto is: To live and let live.
After 8 years of international diplomatic efforts, Liberland recently opened its border with Croatia on the 6 August 2023. This marks a significant step forward for Liberland, followed by an active settlement of the land. The Liberland community aims to construct enduring structures to facilitate economic growth for both the residents of Liberland and the surrounding community.
It's another postage stamp self declared sovereign state, although being bang in the midst of already disputed territory it's more interesting than, say, the Principality of Hutt River.
It's kind of the logical opposite of disputed territory. Due to the nature of the dispute, the parcel is in territory that neither side claims, if they are being consistent with their claims.
Propaganda works, that is all there is to get here.
It seems especially tone-deaf calling it propaganda when we're currently experiencing how it usually plays out with what started as a small scale conflict over borders in "Donbas".
Self-determination is a core principle of international law, people arguing against it are almost always repeating propaganda points.
Arguably, the core principle of international law is, "everyone's got some slice of the planet, now let us all agree that past is past, and stick to the borders as they are now, so we can all focus on something more useful and mutually beneficial, instead of continuing to spend blood to adjust them". Attempts to change borders, or to create or remove countries, are quite a big deal.
Self-determination at the level of the existing countries is a core principle, not the individual: that's literally the reason we formed international law.
It didn't start as small scale fighting over borders in the Donbas.
The large scale invasion from leased bases in Crimea occurred in 2014.
This is that kind of nitpicking where you just make yourself seem lost in the conversation by taking an argumentative tone: Crimea and Donbas are both just examples of why pining for a world where borders are seen as flexible and flowing doesn't make sense.
We're in a fully globalized world. Things are past the stage where anyone besides large countries looking to bully are able to move borders and keep them there. It doesn't really take propaganda to understand why that is: just looking at the current world is enough.
I don’t see how that prohibits me from looking at this particular “state” and thinking “its chances are bad and there’s no reason to hope it succeeds.”
The schadenfreude is because libertarians seem unwilling or unable to acknowledge the fact that violence trumps rules or contracts.
When their pie-in-the-sky "micronations" face this unsurprising fact - typically at the hands of real nations, they act surprised every single time.
The irony of doing this in former Yugoslavia is astonishing. Yes, states can fragment and borders can move .. at a considerable cost in human life. You can see it happening today in Nagorno-Karabakh, as well as the much more visible attempt by Russia to move the borders of Ukraine.
A state is only a state when it can defend its territory.
At the individual level, the praxis of property rights is that something belongs to you if the person with the biggest stick says it is - this is typically the state (libertarian utopia's excluded).
One reason for this support, is perhaps the explicit acknowledgment that violence trumps rules or contracts.
One of the funniest experiments with this kind of thing I ever read was a small town in the US being overtaken by libertarians, only to succumb to... bears. (as the citizens could neither organize waste regulations, public garbage disposal, or prevent one crazy guy from feeding the bears in the first place)
And protected and funded by the US ;)
That’s a double-misrepresentation popularized by Russian propaganda proxies seeking to sow discord in the West.
Nonsense. That's not how reality works. Countries like Luxembourg or Portugal aren't "subsidized" because they don't spend 2% of their GDP in dissuading Russia from invading other NATO members.
Also, military spending per GDP is set as a line in the sand. Germany doesn't meet the 2% mark but still is the second biggest supporter of Ukraine's defense against Russia's invasion, which is the whole reason of existence of NATO.
The next clade of states are those formed during civil wars or other breakdowns of states, such as Somaliland or competing governments in Libya and Yemen. There's a preference by the international community to stitch countries back together rather than admit their dissolution. Partially, it should be recognized that states fracturing up this way tend not to produce stability--turning internal administrative boundaries into international boundaries makes life very bad for people on the wrong side of the border, and there's usually no easy solution to that. Partially, too, there's a desire to discourage wars. For similar reasons, there's also a clutch of unrecognized states that are essentially frozen conflicts being perpetuated by a third party (not uncoincidentally, most of these are in the former Soviet Union--see previous note about international borders).
The final clutch of stuff is the performative micronation (cases like the state at question here), which is almost invariably about trying to evade the authority of existing states. And that should immediately explain why there is very little desire on the part of those states to sanction their existence.
These are clearly of even less significance than the performative micronations in your classification. But at least their creators typically recognize this, and don't make claims which get them noticed by the real nations which they inhabit.
Consequently they like to style themselves as royalty. The most well known even had a crowning ceremony, later bought an abandoned hospital (with accompanying scam), tried to declare independence and got swiftly removed by the very real German Police.
Personally, I am very against borders(extremely unpopular position these days) and at the same time I’m very against changing borders.
They should have entered politics, and create a community there, Within the framework of the current state. Or find a real unclaimed land that they can defend.
That is what they did here, they still got bullied by other countries. International politics is mostly the strong bullying the weak, that is life but don't applaud it when it happens.
1. Croatia does claim the land: Croatia actively and persistently treats the land as part of Croatia; it e.g. sends Croatian cops to enforce Croatian immigration law and Croatian land use regulations.
2. Croatia signals it would be happy to relinquish its claim to Serbia in exchange for certain other land elsewhere, but that does nothing to invalidate the claim in the here and now. The scammers' invocation of terra nullius is ahistorical and silly; their invocation of bona vacantia is violently dumb.
How exactly do you not have borders, without eliminating modern nation-states and having a single global government?
Obviously, I’m not talking about administrative borders used to define administrative responsibility zones.
The Schengen zone is basically the same as the EU, which isn't a single government, but it's acting a lot like one in many ways. Either way, what you seem to be advocating is a single global government. There's no way to have no borders without having a single government controlling everything.
Anyway, what does it mean global government? Is WTO or UN a global government? Why do you need this “global government” to let people travel around?
Don’t forget that travel restrictions on people is a very new phenomenon, not too long ago people were able to travel wherever they wanted without visa or passport or anything like that.
Why do you think that we should keep those restrictions?
No, because they have no ability enforce any policy.
>Why do you need this “global government” to let people travel around?
You said you don't want borders. That's different than just letting people travel freely. National borders entail much more than freedom of travel.
>not too long ago people were able to travel wherever they wanted without visa or passport
Yeah, because it was really difficult to travel anywhere except maybe between neighboring countries. When travel became cheap and easy and countless millions of people starting doing it, they made more restrictions because some people were taking advantage of it.
>Why do you think that we should keep those restrictions?
Do you want criminals from other countries coming to your country? In those wonderful olden days you speak of, that's what happened: people committed terrible crimes, and then evaded capture and fled to other places where no one knew who they were or what they did. Understandably, people don't really want that any more.
We also have the issue of economic migrants. No country really wants to be inundated with millions of poor people from some other country; in the era of modern social services, countries don't have the resources to provide for them. In those olden days, when people moved to a new country, they either figured out how to make a living, or they starved to death, or maybe were exiled or killed if the people there didn't like them for some reason.
Yeah, I think I clarified that a few messages ago. I'm not against administrative borders, cities have borders too and I'm completely fine with it - governments can claim control over regions and that's fine. Feel free to load all kind of meanings to borders as long as you don't guard them with people that control who can pass and who can't based on bureaucratic paperwork.
And for the "bad people will come" claim, I think you are too trusting for the abilities of your visa department of detecting bad people.
And for the economic migrants, yep that happens all the time and it's very normal. Have you heard of H-2B visa? It's based on this ridiculous idea that the government employees can choose the workers better than the companies that want to employ them. It's so bezire. There's this strange idea that companies will employ unskilled people if you let foreigners come. Can you imagine Apple employing an Afghani shepherd as a product designer because didn't have to go through the immigration procedures and vetted by the government first? Completely ridiculous.
No one is asking you to provide people with free money or anything, just let anyone travel anywhere and do anything legal. Don't worry, you don't waste resources when someone they come over and find a work. On the contrary, the more people working the more wealthy the society is going to be.
If you look closely, the people who cause disturbance are those who are rich enough to travel anywhere and simply consume the resources there without working. Cities like London are suffering from the super rich who just buy properties and consume resources there. The numbers can go up, but the life quality of the natives go down as those who have no involvement in the society start to dominate the economy and compete for the resources with their wast fortunes.
The main cause for the non-working rich causing problems is again the borders. Money means dept, when someone has $1M, it means the society owns him that much worth of services and if that person made that money somewhere else normally when he spends his money the natural flow will quickly reach equilibrium as services and resources will travel to the money. However, when you artificially restrict flow of people and resources without restricting the flow of money you end up with people inflating the demand when restricting the supply causing huge issues to the local people because they will have to compete for resources and provide services tho those who accumulated money somewhere with restricted flow.
And as for the criminals? Deal with them regardless of their paperwork, it doesn't matter if someone is French, British or Pakistani, this should't be relevant.
Yet most of the inhabitants of the United States are descended from people who immigrated during the time period you're talking about. Why was it ok for them but not for people immigrating today?
> Do you want criminals from other countries coming to your country?
Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours? No, but that doesn't justify banning everyone from coming to your town. The normal standard is that to stop someone on the basis that they might be a criminal, law enforcement has to have some reasonable cause for suspicion. But for some reason, in the case of national borders (and not state, province, etc), the burden of proof is reversed. Everyone is guilty by default and has to prove to the state's satisfaction that they aren't dangerous. Why? If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
> We also have the issue of economic migrants. No country really wants to be inundated with millions of poor people from some other country; in the era of modern social services, countries don't have the resources to provide for them.
Immigrants pay taxes, and the state doesn't need to pay for their education. It's not clear that the mean additional immigrant under an open-borders policy would have a higher net cost to the state than a native citizen. But whatever, let's just assume they would. Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel, but it's way crueler to not even offer them that.
Why do you think it was OK back then? Have you talked to any Native Americans about the effects of uncontrolled migration on their tribes? Plainly put, it was an unmitigated disaster and a genocide. They used to control the whole continent (but divided between various tribes of course, that sometimes didn't get along); now their numbers are puny and they're corralled in some shitty reservations.
>Do you want criminals from other towns/counties/states coming to yours? >If open borders work between Washington and Oregon, why don't they work between Washington and Canada?
Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily. That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel (since they agreed together not to give these out to serious criminals).
>Immigrants pay taxes
Some do, some don't. Some go to Germany expecting a free ride, passing through all the poorer countries along the way.
>Instead of banning them, why not just let them come but make them ineligible for social services? That's cruel
Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
In 1776, the population of the United States was mostly British. Most of the population of the United States today is descended from non-British European immigrants. But they didn't wipe out the existing British population – they just assimilated into it. The genocide of indigenous people was not a consequence of "immigration," it was a consequence of conquest. I'm against immigrants waging war against and driving out existing populations of the countries they come to, but that is not what is being discussed.
> Within a country, it's easy: people have criminal records, and can't just skip town and go to the next town and assume a new identity. (Centuries ago, however, they did.) Between countries, it's not so easy: countries don't share their criminal data that easily.
Ok, so then countries should work to start sharing criminal records and then they can have open borders, right?
> That's why we have passports: it's an identification document that shows the destination country that the person is not a criminal and is allowed to travel
A passport effectively only allows you to travel if you come from a rich country. If you come from a poor country, you need to apply for a visa. But in either case, you still need to go through a controlled border, and you're only allowed in the country for a limited time. If the concern is really about letting in criminals, and a passport or visa alleviates that, why is it so limited? And why aren't countries working to share criminal records so they don't have to do this song and dance? Hint: it's not really about crime.
> Why is that cruel? If 100M people suddenly decided to move into Andorra, how exactly do you think the country is going to pay for social services for them?
Andorra is part of the Schengen Area – there's no reason why they would all stick around in Andorra. If 100 million people came into the Schengen Area, they would get jobs and pay taxes to fund social services just like everyone else. But you ignored my main point – if you're convinced that immigrants will consume more social services than they pay taxes, why not just let them in but make them ineligible for social services? It's not really about social services either.
The reason that first-worlders don't want third-worlders coming to their countries is because (a) they don't like their skin color, (b) they don't like their culture, and (c) they'd rather have people live in extreme poverty far away than in a reduced level of poverty where they can see it, the same reason they're against building affordable housing in their own neighborhoods. When Western countries started implementing immigration controls, they were very open about this, but since the 1960s it's become fashionable for them to pretend otherwise.
Now, you might object: if that's the reason, why don't all the rich Western countries have open borders with each other? I mean, most of them do (Schengen), but still, why doesn't the USA have open borders with Canada? And the answer is: there's no reason at all. I can't think of any argument against open borders with Canada. The only reason it's not the case is because if all the white countries had open borders with each other, they wouldn't be able to lie about the reason anymore.
But yes, the core reason is obviously selfish, but also understandable.
most of the people entering America right now are not doing so under passports or visas.
and actually i have no problem with opening up immigration contingent on ineligibility for all social services. that way, people will be forced to leave if there is no work and can easily come if there are open jobs.
that said, i think practically this would harm our quality of life. our cities are already breaking. look at how poorly the yankees handled the few thousand illegals we shipped to their "sanctuary cities".
and it was more okay for prior immigrants because we had systems like sponsorship. you couldn't show up and get on the dole. this has changed, which is why central american refugees will skip mexico (a closer country they MUST instead stay in to be legitimate refugees) and come through to here.
there are hordes of people who would come here and take advantage of social programs if we let them. those programs effectively keep people here - you can't argue for supply and demand if you tip things such that people are never forced to go elsewhere to look for work, support a family.
That's probably what GP means.
This seems a way where you can have localized governments and distinct legal jurisdictions, without "PAPERS PLEAZE!" for people exercising their right to vote with their feet.
In effect, borders plus freedom is a way to get a more ideal world without necessitating a global government. That it may require or be improved by a bit more global cooperation and coordination among nevertheless distinct jurisdictions is a not a bad thing tho.
Tho maybe I haven't thought this through. What do you think the problems are with this permeable borders approach are?
Look at the news sites that make it to the front page of hacker news. As of writing there's:
- New York Times
- PBS
- The Guardian
Do you expect the people that upvote these things to be sympathetic to libertarianism?
2008: Distinct sites: 3458
Site Stories Points ( mean ) Comments ( mean )
------------------------------ ------- ------ ---------- -------- ----------
n/a 1304 33699 ( 25.82 ) 44937 ( 34.43 )
techcrunch.com 440 12437 ( 28.20 ) 6954 ( 15.77 )
nytimes.com 333 7457 ( 22.33 ) 4817 ( 14.42 )
wired.com 124 3166 ( 25.33 ) 1818 ( 14.54 )
readwriteweb.com 103 1794 ( 17.25 ) 889 ( 8.55 )
37signals.com 101 3794 ( 37.20 ) 2079 ( 20.38 )
economist.com 82 1686 ( 20.31 ) 858 ( 10.34 )
wsj.com 76 2329 ( 30.25 ) 2047 ( 26.58 )
alleyinsider.com 75 1597 ( 21.01 ) 980 ( 12.89 )
arstechnica.com 74 1602 ( 21.36 ) 672 ( 8.96 )
codinghorror.com 68 2284 ( 33.10 ) 1578 ( 22.87 )
cnn.com 64 1620 ( 24.92 ) 1249 ( 19.22 )
gigaom.com 58 1147 ( 19.44 ) 562 ( 9.53 )
sethgodin.typepad.com 57 1548 ( 26.69 ) 841 ( 14.50 )
youtube.com 57 1915 ( 33.02 ) 760 ( 13.10 )
guardian.co.uk 53 1410 ( 26.11 ) 914 ( 16.93 )
businessweek.com 52 1248 ( 23.55 ) 809 ( 15.26 )
cnet.com 52 1108 ( 20.91 ) 630 ( 11.89 )
bbc.co.uk 49 1059 ( 21.18 ) 757 ( 15.14 )
yahoo.com 47 1070 ( 22.29 ) 880 ( 18.33 )
mattmaroon.com 45 1762 ( 38.30 ) 1880 ( 40.87 )
By 2010 you could add theatlantic.com (#11) and npr.org (#23).
Source: own research based on the HN front-page archive.
There is no such idea. Nations are created, destroyed, grow, shrink, break off etc. on a very regular basis. The difference is that the process happens via guns and blood, not a twitter account and "sovereign citizen" bullshit.
So the sovereign types can cry me a river because they don't even try to do things the legit way.
subregions should generally be able to secede. this is essential to maintain "consent of the governed"
Germany has border "disagreements" with half of its neighbours. Some are bigger like lake constance (Switzerland&Austria) and the ems delta (Netherlands). Some are smaller like the Vennbahn (Belgium).
Some of Germanys border is also shared as a Condominium with its neighbours (Switzerland, Austria, Luxemburg).
And finally Denmark and Germany have a land border but not a sea border
What you wrote down was exactly a central thought behind the foundation of the United Nations after the Second World War.
It's a stone cold fact that quote is their story.
I'm equally happy to quote others on their view of the same situation.
Characterising that as "spin" is quite the leap on your part and the strawman judgemental interpretation and soft castigation that follows appears to flow contrary to the HN comment guidelines.
1. The "unclaimed territory" story is a blatant lie.
2. The land in question (Gornja Siga) is a floodplain. It gets completely flooded with water multiple meters deep every couple of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland
EDIT:
> Define "scam"? Who is trying to scam who in this situation?
Jedlička sold quite a few Liberland "citizenships".
But there's no dispute that either Serbia or Croatia owns it, and it doesn't really matter, as to any third party attempt to set up a state in defiance of the status quo administration, whether Croatia is conducting non-hostile administration of Serbian territory with Serbian consent or administering its own territory.
If there's a smudge in the only copy of a contract you can find and you think it called for a 60/40 split of profits from a certain kind of joint activity in your partner’s favor, and they think it called for a 60/40 split in your favor, there's 20% that is uncertain until some reolution is reached, but that doesn’t mean that someone else can just restructure the deal unilaterally to be 40/40/20, which is (but for the actual numbers and the nonfungible nature of land) what Liberland is trying to do.
The Liberlanders' claim that the patch was terra nullius was silly from day one. An area is terra nullius if there is no recognized government hoping to run it, not if there is no recognized government that will publicly commit to keep running it forever.
The Liberlanders' new claim that the patch is bona vacantia is just completely batshit gaga. Bona vacantia is about private ownership title rather than sovereignty, does not exist in civil law jurisdictions, and when successfully invoked just means ownership of the item in question has reverted to the Crown.
We need a moratorium on ancaps having legal opinions until their semantics games become functionally distinguishable from SovCit woo.
So it seems clear that (1) its either non-ceded Croatian territory being administered by Croatia with a diplomatic choice not to make an affirmative claim without arbitration of the border, or (2) it's by prior treaty Serbian territory, which may or may have been ceded to Croatia, which is being administered by Croatia without challenge to any rights Serbia (and only Serbia) may have.
Furthermore international law differs from normal law as usually at least one party has tanks.
So, neither side claims it, because they both claim a better area. But whoever ends up losing the better area is going to take it.
Edit: Replying to people by editing your own post is bad form. It makes the conversation very hard to follow.
I fail to see how a Liberland citizenship is any more scammy than any of the other supremely silly things people decide to spend their money on. I'd like to see concrete evidence that people buying a Liberland citizenship thought they were paying for something real.
It looks like a fun project, but I wouldn't consider it evidence that anyone there was fooled by the founder into thinking they could actually live there permanently.
So who claims it?
People are trying to play this off as if Croatia doesn’t “want” the territory, but that’s not really it at all. They don’t want to lose a larger dispute. They’re happy to have the land.
So: yes, this is approximately “building on Yellowstone” levels of silly.
It deserves to be noted that even people who camp in city parks do have some supporters. That said, people who have the resources to build a solid home with amenities, including electricity and satellite network access, and keep a website running to tell their one-sided story, are not comparable to homeless campers.
This is why a key precondition of being a state is recognition and border agreements with your neighbours - without that, the hypothetical state literally has no rights, not even the right to exist.
That doesn't mean either side will accept some third party adding another algorithm and set of borders into the mix.
Ah, so that was the catch. I have to wonder, what do the libertarians do when their entire nation is meters deep in water? Apply for asylum at the Croatian border?
Or did it just not happen so far?
They pull themselves up by their bootstraps!
My legal position is that I'm king of the universe, but I've had some difficulty getting recognition by other states.
This will go down exactly how all these silly "sovereign citizen", seasteader, etc. type things go down. People have somehow forgotten that all of our "legal fictions" we've created are just that: fictions. They are general rules that we've set up to manage society, but unless you have the ability to back up your stance with force, or to convince someone else to back you with force, "legal positions" are meaningless.
These "market anarchists" have an odd need to believe that the literal interpretation of human-dreamed-up laws would will be sufficient to protect them forever. It seems like this belief goes with the need to believe that in their future "selfish-market-behavior-creates-mutual-benefit" society, the stronger won't use their strength to subjugate the weak.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...
Not that the only group of people who want to bother nobody else need any justification for living their lives as they see fit, but how else is humanity going to learn about the different ways we can organize society if we don't try them out?
It would be phenomenal for humanity if people with ideas outside of the box organized as they saw fit without outside interference and we all get to see what works and what doesn't.
Historically this is not the reason. And as a justification for continuing to have many countries it would only be convincing if people were free to choose which "experiment" to join or start.
The reality is, we are all guinea pigs that get thrown into some random country where some experiment has already started and we have no right opt out. If this is indeed someone's experiment, I would say it's highly unethical :)
Existing countries are captured by various interest groups who use their control over the government to their benefit. In a democracy this is generally various industries or government factions that control a large voting bloc or resources politicians need like campaign contributions. In a non-democracy the existing rulers want to remain in power and continue to rule as they see fit.
If the experiment you want to run is a country with an extremely limited government, you would either need a stable country where that is already the case (not currently available), or a way to overcome the entrenched interests in some existing country (good luck), or you need a new country not already beleaguered by entrenched interests.
It is land that Croatia very actively considers someone elses land. That is why Liberland was established there in the first place. Two countries are arguing "not mine, its yours" about a plot of land.
If anything, this can be used against Croatia to argue that it is in fact Croatian territory
It doesn't consider the land to be "someone elses land" it considers the Serbian definition of the shared border faulty. Letting people that cite the Serbian definition of the border settle there is the last thing they want, since it actively undermines their own definition of where the border between it and Serbia should be over its entire length.
Edit: I suppose that actually allowing an independent state to settle there would ruin their chances of ever trading it with Serbia for the eastern land, but the chances of that are slim to none anyway.
> their border claims then they should see Liberland as strictly Serbia's problem.
They don't want it to just be "Serbia's problem" they want a signed document by Serbia accepting Croatias definition of the entire border stretch.
Also just because both sides do not want to claim the territory does not mean you can leave it entirely lawless. Hell there is a small but popular lake near my home town that the three towns bordering it disclaim any ownership of, which doesn't get rid of the issues surrounding the lake, like the fact that they have to pay for road maintenance and everything else related to it, it just makes it a mess to sort everything out. Police would also drag of any group of crazy people trying to create their own floating country in the middle of the lake.
You only get into full terra nullius when no country will claim the land. Since there is no higher umbrella authority, any police force operating in terra nullius is operating outside its self-professed jurisdiction.
After looking up the definition of terra nullius it seems to be a term historically rooted in colonialism where states could only establish themselves by successfully applying massive amounts of "sovereignty" aka military power against colonial powers.
Given that Liberland seems to be unable to showcase its sovereignty against Croatian invaders it fails the basic test for acquiring land or even official statehood required by terra nullius.
> Since there is no higher umbrella authority, any police force operating in terra nullius is operating outside its self-professed jurisdiction.
And who is going to complain about that? Certainly not an established state.
The Darien gap, China & Myanmar border region, central Africa -- these are "lawless" areas despite having clear territorial ownership.
After all, look what happened with Kugelmugel - another of these liberal experiments:
https://theculturetrip.com/europe/austria/articles/kugelmuge...
Spoiler: the bigger states always win.
However, this was a product of the Boomer generation, when they were young. It might not be possible in today's more authoritarian world.
However, despite Croatia's claims, there's also been some gray-area Croatian forestry going on there, through Hrvatske Šume. And since the Liberland movement started to claim the parcel as "no man's land", Croatia started patrolling it with police and arresting people occasionally.
How is this in any way unique to libertarians?
Maybe take a look at civil forfeiture abuses in the US?
Not to mention other county where the rule of law is more of a polite suggestion.
A lot of people in this thread are laughing at the Liberland folks for being doomed to fail, not realizing that "might makes right", etc. Well how would we be reacting if they became terrorists instead? Defended the area with homemade bombs? What if Jeff Bezos built a private army and decided to secede from the US?
The morality or intellectual interest of a people's claim to a territory (along with their chosen system of government) is completely orthogonal to their ability to enforce it. For the other end of the spectrum just look at Ukraine, as others here have pointed out.
And btw I'm personally not even a libertarian...
Libertarianism requires a government to protect property rights.
Is that what they want? That is how society worked before we had modern governments. The only way to prevent this is to have a government who tells me I can't just bring a bunch of thugs and take stuff from people.
Libertarianism is a free market economy, with the government serving as enforcer of property rights and contracts. The government also enforces individual rights.
Such as the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Well, its about claiming land that the Croatian government doesn't even claim to own.
Ironically, the fact that the Croatian government kicked them out, harms the Croatian government's legal claims with Serbia.
I feel as though you're taking a rather naive view of the situation. Currently Croatia isn't claiming the land as their own because it's part of a larger dispute, and if they do lay claim to it, they lose a larger chunk of more important land to Serbia.
Do you REALLY think if they allow ethnic Croatians to start building permanent settlements on the property in question, they can continue to claim that it's not theirs in the broader land dispute?
This isn't "a fun experiment that costs taxpayers nothing". It is a GREAT way to lose permanent rights to a much larger swath of land so that some people who think they're free from government oversight can play make believe. I'm not sure what the actual benefit to the people of Croatia is but I'm open to ideas.
Do we know the ethnicity of these settlers? The founder is Czech, and the resources I've found suggest that local Croats and Serbs are a tiny minority of those involved.
You are right, I was being purposely naive in order to show the narrowness of thinking. The "gray area" of the law could have worked in this case for both side. Croatia government didn't have to do anything besides close one eye, which they do ALL THE TIME, for people "who know the right people".
Feel free to google search the term "ilegalna gradnja" with Croatian location, to get a feeling of scale of it and how little a settlement like the one that was demolished really matters. There are too many of illegal settlements, usually in form of houses and luxury villas, that haven't been demolished for years, even even local governments pleaded to have them destroyed.
To be crystal clear, I didn't suggest giving land to anyone, just make an exception that is made constantly for the "right people".
I'm all for liberalisation of land use, and think Croatian bureaucracy and petty corruption are slowly destroying the Croatian state economically, but people acting independent of the law, because they claim they're special, doesn't wash. The tourist angle is a red herring. Tolerating unlawful occupation isn't smart at all.
ok, but you get Kentucky Fried Chicken and 7-11 stores in the current version of things.. right?
Another reading of the situation is that Serbia can claim that the land is a part of Croatia because they've allowed people to inhabit it and it's contagious to Croatian land, given that 'Liberland' has no legal basis.
Given that Croatia has no good options here, they've chosen the least harmful option.
If Croatia says the territory belongs to Serbia, then Croatia has no business sending police there outside of very narrow circumstances such as people there launching attacks into territory Croatia does claim. On the other hand, Croatia would probably be within its rights to enforce a border with this territory, as would Serbia. That would rapidly become unpleasant for anyone trying to live there.
Croatia, even if it claims the land is Serbia, consistent with its border claim, it still administers it as a practical matter, that includes keeping people out of where they shouldn't be.
There are (or were) some places where Indian territory was entirely surrounded by Pakistani territory, and some places where Pakistani territory was entirely surrounded by Indian territory.
But it didn't stop there. There were a small number of cases where within one of those surrounded territories there was an even smaller territory that was part of the other country. E.g., a small Pakistani territory entirely in a larger Indian territory which was entirely inside Pakistan.
Pakistan and India aren't friendly with each other.
So suppose you went to one of those innermost territories and convinced the people there to join you and declare themselves a new independent state. Say some Pakistani territory inside some Indian territory inside Pakistan.
Pakistan can't reach you to kick you out without crossing Indian territory, which India is not likely to give them permission to do.
This wouldn't work the way you imagine. The fundamental reason the India-Pakistan border situation is so dicey is that the "percentage of population which is Hindu vs. Muslim" is a smooth gradient across the area. The British drew an arbitrary line through this gradient as best they could and called that the border, but no line can ever fix the problem entirely. But all the people involved are more loyal to their ethnoreligion than an actual abstract state-- that's the whole reason there's a dispute to begin with-- and proposing a new state based on foreign ideas of libertarianism would not be met with eagerness from anybody.
I am an old man, so apologies in advance for making an old man comment: in all of my travels, I have uniformly found people kind and decent and I have found governments to be fucked up. To be honest, there are a (very) few governments on our planet that I respect so maybe my generalization is unfair.
There's a whole ton of assholes out there. You can get ripped off in any culture if you don't watch your back.
Yet somehow I guess the inevitable happening is still shocking to some. When I'm either old or dead, I'm sure this will repeat itself on Mars
"...
Sean Illing: And how did they take over the local government? Did they meet much resistance?
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: When they first showed up, they hadn’t told anyone that they were doing this, with the exception of a couple of sympathetic libertarians within the community. And so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians. And they were pissed. They had a big town meeting. It was a very shouty, very angry town meeting, during which they told the Free Towners who dared to come that they didn’t want them there and they didn’t appreciate being treated as if their community was an experimental playpen for libertarians to come in and try to prove something.
But the libertarians, even though they never outnumbered the existing Grafton residents, what they found was that they could come in, and they could find like-minded people, traditional conservatives or just very liberty-oriented individuals, who agreed with them on enough issues that, despite that angry opposition, they were able to start to work their will on the levers of government.
They couldn’t pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.
Sean Illing: Then what happened over the next few years or so?
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.
So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.
Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.
Sean Illing: When did the bears show up?
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: It turns out that if you have a bunch of people living in the woods in nontraditional living situations, each of which is managing food in their own way and their waste streams in their own way, then you’re essentially teaching the bears in the region that every human habitation is like a puzzle that has to be solved in order to unlock its caloric payload. And so the bears in the area started to take notice of the fact that there were calories available in houses.
One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.
As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them. Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.
It was an absolute mess.
..."
True enough, you don't usually get "full blown libertarianism", because, well, hardly anyone wants that, which means people don't vote for it. Would make for an interesting experiment, though.
The goal was to move there and influence the government towards their own policies. The fact that all these problems showed up is a measure of their success.
If they were inept they would have caused the opposite thing to happen, Grafton would have become more restrictive and the bears stay in the woods.
It doesn't seem at all valid to critique someone for the amount of snow on the roads if they organised as a group specifically to remove snow plowing.
This is as ridiculous as measuring the original Woodstock by its sound quality, or available amenities. Are people who call it the best concert ever wrong? Are they allowed to have a different definition of success?
Maybe there are some who are like, "I don't care if bear attacks are way up, the point is that I can choose to be eaten by bears if I want", but for the most part they believe both that more 'liberty' is morally correct and also that it improves society in general.
- Bears are a problem everywhere, (town police doesn't deal with bears, Fish & Game does generally, and that's not the town's business. Having dealt with problem bears and Fish & Game - their response is usually "You got a gun?")
- somehow the Grafton dump is still operational, despite libertarians existing;
- ignore the appalachian trail that has long been a route for various forest squatting through-hikers that have been shitty about their trash, ignore the multiple camps of people living in the national forest around these parts due to various reasons (seasonal work, just squatting, getting away from life...)...
etc, etc.
It honestly was the first article in any news source that made me really question the journalistic profession. But we'll forever disregard the reality on the ground in favor of sensationalist bullshit.
You can't really occupy useful land without expecting quick and dire consequences.
I think nowadays you can't properly set up a new state, period. It’s just impossible. Currently existing states would do anything to push you out (unless you maybe play along with their political games somehow – and even then you get maybe just a tiny bit of recognition).
If these people had a reasonable functional economy (somehow), plus enough military gear/people to make it too costly to try invading, then they'd probably be ignored if they didn't cause trouble.
That "enough military gear to make it too costly to try invading" is an absolutely key requirement though. In some ways similar to the China/Taiwan thing.
China could invade Taiwan (manpower wise, etc). Taiwan knows it though, so they've focused their defences on asymmetric warfare. "You might take us, but you'll bleed forever from the attempt" kind of thing.
At that point, it's basically academic whether the people running the place are ideologically committed libertarians or a heavily armed criminal gang.
Additionally, if you want to go up against an armed force, the Croatian defense forces are more capable than most.
But you repeat yourself.
Sorry if any ideologically committed libertarians are reading this thread, but libertarianism is one of those things that theoretically works and practically fails every time. People consolidate power into governments because it is effective.
That's nothing unusual though. Isn't every nation existing today the remains of a heavily armed gang of one sort or another?
> ... drug dealing, sex work, and unregulated immigration and unregulated manufacturing.
Those probably wouldn't qualify as "reasonable economy" though. Instead, those would lead to their neighbours being pressured to "do something" about them.
Alternatives though... yeah, good question. Maybe they could set up something online gambling wise, but it could run afoul of the same problem.
Maybe something high-tech instead, though the investment required up front would be... interesting to say the least. ;)
The area seems quite rural, is probably prone to flooding, and is reliant on Croatia for electricity and internet.
If not, they're likely just wasting their time and effort.
That aside, they'll need to be prepared to add other civilisation fundamentals as well. eg police, emergency services, medical facilities, etc.
Doing it properly though would probably take some decent up-front investment.
... unless it's insulin or other "cheap and easy to manufacture" type of generic.
No idea how expensive the needed quality control / testing / etc would be to set up though.
Couldn't an existing state democratically decide to split into two?
The reason “nobody wants it” is that it’s similar to the Bir Tawil triangle: accepting it as part of your country means abandoning your claim on the larger and more valuable area linked to it in dispute.
It does not mean a third party gets to come in and go “well if nobody wants it…” it’s still part of the contention.
If two heirs battle over shares and neither wants property A because it means giving up on the more valuable property B, property A is still part of the inheritance and you will get forcefully ejected if you declare that since nobody wants it property A is now yours.
that sounds to me exactly like a third party coming and going "well if nobody wants it..."
Of course, in reality it's always about whether or not you can defend your territory with military power. And it doesn't even need to be unclaimed.
> There are currently three territories sometimes claimed to be terra nullius: Bir Tawil (a strip of land between Egypt and Sudan), *four pockets of land near the Danube due to the Croatia–Serbia border dispute*, and parts of Antarctica, principally Marie Byrd Land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius
Next, someone says that wikipedia is not a credible source.
Here, Wikipedia is faithfully recording that some people make that claim. It’s not saying that there’s a consensus or endorsing any claim or its contrary.
However, they are implicitly reasserting that no, Liberland did not establish a country there, that Croatia doesn't consider this as a state, that there is no such thing as Liberland.
And perhaps they are intentionally making a point of it to demonstrate that yes, they can and will push it out if you make unwarranted claims of sovereignty without their consent - for example, prosecuting individuals for using fictitious passports, as according to Croatia Liberland and its passports are fictitious.
The key part of setting up a new state is an agreement with your neighbours that they acknowledge your sovereignty over certain borders (i.e. "play along with their political games"), which certainly is possible as there have been multiple new states set up during 21st century, but until that is achieved, you don't really have a state.
A lot of countries maintain small areas where they are more relaxed about these things than in the rest of the territory they de facto control. Sometimes these areas are states in a federal system (Delaware), other times they take the form of special economic zones (Cayman Islands) but in a few cases they form de jure sovereign nations.
I think the (more or less) hidden agenda of Liberland is to become the de jure sovereign, de facto tolerated, "special economic zone" of Croatia.
When they will have built a hotel, the casino is probably not far and like the other tax haven, money laundering, gambling areas of this world it will be tolerated because it is of mutual benefit to them and their host country.
If it pans out: new (de jure) sovereign nation, without a (significant) army.
South sudan and east timor would have a word.
You probably can, but just not where people want to. It all comes down to whether your country wins the military battles that inevitably take place, and one modern soldier can really do a lot these days. The US exists, for example, because the British absolutely bungled the response to the revolution. Nowadays, it would take a lot more incompetence from their end to lose territory; if the ground troops are all neutralized, just hit 'em with an ICBM or something. It's crazy the amount of resources you'd be up against.
People are trying to secede from countries that literally have nuclear weapons. Your 3D printed guns aren't going to win against that. But, if you're fighting the local warlord or whatever, you probably have a chance.
So it's not enough to have military power, you need also the political will to use it. I get the sense India exists because the British were fatigued after WWII. There just wasn't the will to try to hold on to something they didn't feel like they had the moral right to anymore.
Scotland had a chance, but the population democratically refused to take it.
With either a large swath of population to break away, or with a large army to take over some other population’s land.
I mean even Joshue needed to kill all the Canaanites to get to Israel (it’s the point of Exodus that “your people will live in other people’s houses”).
I don’t think Jedlička is 21st century’s Alexander the Macedonian.
As part of the dispute, Croatia didn't claim it, and neither did Serbia.
But in the meanwhile, Serbia did control various other disputed areas. So it would make sense that in turn, Croatia did the same with 'Liberland'. There's no contradiction between [not claiming an area] but still [asserting some degree of control there].
'Liberland' people claimed homes demolished "without warning" etc, but then complain about having been harassed for years.
So, more likely there were previous warnings, legal procedings or whatever, Liberland ignored those because 'not in our country, doesn't apply', and at some point time is up.
Given its history, it's logical Croatia would be sensitive about border disputes. And then some 3rd party steps in, complicates things & proclaims a new country between your neighbour & yourself?
Can't have that! So this whole clearing operation would simply be "what a nuissance these people! Let's fix that" on Croatia's side. And in the process, assert some control over the area.
All in all it seems the Liberland folks are rather naive about land being abandoned, or how border disputes work. Possibly no-one would care if they'd just squatted there without proclaiming anything.
But that's de jure. De facto, it's part of Croatia, and as a basic national security issue Croatia isn't interested in letting squatters have free reign on a parcel of land adjacent to their border.
I do know that parts of Swedish foreign aid is in the form of building public institutions, reforming tax collection, etc.
All those states have very specific historical reasons why they dodged unification with their surrounding countries. The most surreal being Monaco's sovereignty saved by Grace Kelly's fame as an actress moving American public opinion to pressure France not to swallow it.
Also, note, that all the towns you listed are (historically) worthless border towns wedged between titans who would violently oppose their neighbor swallowing them. Sure, now those microstates are rich, but historically they were worthless and not worth war with a powerful neighbor to take over.
See above
Except for Luxembourg a few hundred guys could besiege all of the states listed above. Ten thousand would suffice for Luxembourg. As it stands no one is really sure if China - with one of the the world's largest armed forced - could successfully invade Taiwan.
I'm not quite sure that this was the case. Monaco was independent long before Grace Kelly married the incumbent prince.
The country is a tax haven, which seems to be enough for many micronations to survive.
> In 1962, the crisis was triggered by a very technical provision on the nullity of share sales under certain conditions (Mourlane, 2005). The provision was introduced specifically to enable the state of Monaco to regain control on Radio Monte-Carlo (RMC) and Télé Monte-Carlo (TMC), two leading media outlets in France (Bézias, 2007). The French government owned the shares of the companies through various subsidiaries. This was a political matter: with the war in Algeria, media were closely controlled in France, so broadcasters from Monaco and Luxembourg (RTL) enjoyed more freedom and the right to air advertisement. The amusing fact is that the transmitters of RMC and TMC were located on a nearby hill… in France.
> Organising more OECD workshops on double-taxation is certainly not as romantic as trying to starve Princess Grace Kelly, but, as de Gaulle said in 1944, “The most noble principles in the world live only through action“.
[0] https://www.finance-watch.org/lessons-from-history-the-monac...
They're like parasites in a global economic system. Imperial powers are similar to carnivores, they can force their economic will onto other nations, but at the high cost of maintaining large military, and smaller nations that build up their economy are like herbivores, they focus on internal prosperity, rather than outside world.
Austria, or any country can only be defended if they have their own nuclear weapons. That is the only deterrence that works.
Unless one of those larger countries breaks up, there will be no new sovereign territories.
You don't need deterrence if there is noone to deter, which is the case iff any newly established states are established with a consensus of their neighbors.
The TL;DR of this is, ultimately, that a state is whatever other states say is a state, and they're generally wary of recognizing anything disputed. There's a fair bit of nuance there though so it's worth a proper read. And, as we know from Ukraine, even when the state is widely recognized with well-established borders, you'd better be in a position to enforce those borders by force if your neighbour decides they disagree.
Heck, just look at the difficulty communist China had being recognized as a state, and they certainly could defend themselves.
https://community.intercoin.app/t/qbix-and-intercoin-around-...
https://community.intercoin.app/t/greg-magarshaks-travelogue...
I went to Honduras to see Prospera, and other “micronations” or libertarian experiments, and want to help them out. I interviewed Patri Friedman on our show (and if anyone knows Balaji Srinivasan, who wrote The Network State, please message me — I’d love to interview him too)
Say what you will about running a crypto startup, but I get to do fun things:
Not exactly a comprehensive history, but it highlights and celebrates the human story of why people dare to engage in these seemingly insane projects.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/This-Land-My-Micronations-Self-Made/d...
Similar story but people escaped over the wall.
https://alternativeberlin.com/2015/05/21/the-amazing-story-o...
E.g., Bir Tawil [1], which is 2000 km^2 (800 mi^2) of disputed territory on the border between Egypt and Sudan. Egypt says it belongs to Sudan, and Sudan says it belongs to Egypt.
However, as demonstrated by this situation, in practice that doesn't mean that some third party can just grab that land - and I'd expect the same thing to happen in Bir Tawil; legal technicalities are nifty but they aren't really sufficient for de facto recognition, which is the main thing that matters in international law.
They usual go the "spiritual" route and end like pretty much every cult ends, ie. it becomes an harem, someone gets raped and/or killed and police gets called.
The other way is the "political" route, they usually get a small group and try to create their own "perfect system" isolated from external influences ( of course.. ). When police comes down and tells them they can't simply take some land and make their own "laws", of course its the police being "oppressive/fascist/[insert your one "ism"] and they are the victims.
I've seen this playbook and least since the 60's but I'm sure it existed before that.
Oh no, they created a government!
Minarchism, also a part of libertarianism, is definitely more realistic though.
I can't make any sense of this.
All past revolutions sought to replace government. The universal revolution of all humanity is to leave no reason for it to exist.
[0] https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm#indirect
Lots of countries have tiny armies, and those that have large ones aren’t habitually invading their neighbours. There are a couple of potential exceptions to this, but it’s been holding up pretty well.
At this moment, several countries in the world can completely annihilate and depopulate the US. One of the things that are stopping them is... Lockheed Martin.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I'd assert that demolishing some illegally built sheds in the backyard of some locally popular actor, politician or businessman (I'd assume Croatia has hundreds people each of whom are more widely known there than Liberland is) would be far more newsworthy than this, but still likely not newsworthy enough for most media, perhaps only as a filler for some celebrity gossip yellow press.
I'm 100% sure if this happened near some major city, it would be top 5 news item of that day. But alas, it happened in the middle of nowhere, so it kind of not happened if you get my meaning.
"Teeny group of squatters get evicted" isn't exactly headline news in most places.