Paraguay official resigns after signing agreement with fictional country
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/08/bob-menendez...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Escobar
Unofficial map:
https://joemonster.org/p/1595265/size/oryg/san_escobar_map_J...
Somaliland isn't a country but it exists and has the basic shape of a sovereign state. This 'country' mentioned in the article is just nothing. Literally nonexistent.
Apparently a polite mention in a letter is enough in their interpretation to qualify as an actual nation.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-10/meet-the-micro-nation...
Have you been to an un-recognised country before? I have. It's just... a country. Currencies, police, military, border security. Those are the facts on the ground. What their neighbours think are not.
For most contexts I'd agree being recognized by other countries is the most common interpretation between the two angles. That doesn't mean it's the only valid interpretation.
Or do we rely on legal fictions and group consensus to define rules on who gets to claim what?
Facts on the ground are I've claimed part of your country's territory as my own country. Your borders are a legal fiction.
Facts on the ground are you went on vacation, I broke into your house and now I live there. Your deed is a legal fiction.
If group consensus recognizes my claim over yours, my claim becomes valid and yours is not. I get the benefit of protection of the law. You, personally, can try to take it from me, but the police will recognize my claim and not yours.
If you claim part of my territory and group consensus rejects your claim, my armies and my allies' will enforce the legal fiction that is my borders and remove you from my territory.
Have you considered why these countries want legal recognition? If the law is fiction and facts on the ground matter more, why care about recognition?
A well-known example of this is Kosovo, which operates as a sovereign state, with its own police, military, taxation and secure borders with border security, but is only recognized by only a little over half of the UN. Another example is Taiwan, which has its own currency, independent taxation system, passport, military, police and representative governance, despite not being officially recognized by many member states of the UN. Israel is an example of a nation which was not recognized by any of its neighbors, despite being in control of its territory, but ended up being recognized around the world all the same.
When you point out countries that are only officially recognized by half the countries on the planet, that's not in the same ballpark. Those countries have widespread but not universal recognition.
For a proper example of an "unrecognized" country... I'd say for sure there should be less than 10 UN members that recognize it, and even that is an intentionally loose bound.
https://www.theonion.com/u-s-ambassador-to-bulungi-suspected...
Which will probably surface some day.
... but which countries aren't fictional? Is there really such a thing a country? Its just an idea.
I'm not even joking - countries are a fiction, a social construct - there is no basis for these except as accepted ideas in peoples minds. Like 'Scrooge' or 'government' or 'Jesus' or any number of other things - these are just ideas without a basis in my reality. Do birds or dogs recognise such things?
Same as if I went to a very religious area, and disputed the existence of their god.
Just cos a bunch of people believe this or that bit of nonsense, perhaps almost everyone, doesn't make it real.
There's been many situations in history where enough people stopped believing in their country and suddenly the shared fiction was no more. East German police, judges and tax collectors had a lot of power until all of a sudden - they didn't.
This is like saying crowds aren't real because sometimes people disburse. Like sure, every freshman dorm debated whether reality ends at consciousness. (Descartes did it better.)
There is a difference between physical reality and social construct. But there is also a difference between social construct and fiction.
Birds and dogs also don't recognize mirrors (or windows, in the case of birds), so this probably isn't the standard you mean to apply :-)
Whether or not states are "real" things is probably the wrong question: what matters is whether they're efficacious, which they are.
What's so efficacious about a country?
Mirrors and windows are specific examples of things that trick the eye, even the human eye. If glass is clear, or a mirror is in an unexpected place, humans are just as capable of making an error as any creature.
“Fantasy” is an editorialization. What makes a state efficacious is the fact that we’re all living in some form of one, and are able to talk intelligibly about them.
Perhaps it's because abstractions are often useful.
'Bird' and 'dog' are linguistic labels for a real thing - instances of them can be pointed at, as they have a physical form.
Then, what is a country? A set of relationships. Usually, a mostly contiguous large chunk of land and ... it involves other things that themselves are big sets of relationships you need to break down, like government. The country typically has government, but that one gets deep. Governments are made of and run by people. Then people consist of ... well, on and on it goes.
Anyway, these sorts of paradoxes go away in my experience if one simply recognizes that there are no things. There are only relationships. What's behind the relationships them? Nothing. The relationships are primary.
I can see birds, dogs. They really are there. You can point at them, touch them,
What you are talking about is abstractions. You can choose not to distinguish dogs and birds - that's fine, and you can choose to pretend countries are of the same type. Most people do.
All the best.
One can hallucinate all manner of things.
When you see a bird, you're perceiving neurochemical impulses produced by photochemical interactions triggered by photons absorbed and emitted by a series of atoms between you and the surface of the bird, itself stimulated by a similar cascade likely originating in a nuclear reaction that happened a hundred thousand years ago in the core of the Sun. (Also, we're playing fast and loose by referring to the surface of the bird as a singular plane, but we can't go full Cartesian because it's a Friday night.)
Since dogs and some birds are territorial creatures and will fight to defend territory they perceive as their own, obviously yes, even if only in a rudimentary way.
Fictional means imaginary. When you manifest an idea into the world, it ceases to be imaginary. Countries are not fictions, though they did originate as ones.
> just ideas without a basis in my reality
Yes, they're social constructs. That doesn't mean they exist outside reality. Far from it.