This man just claimed a new European nation. 160,000 people want to live there
littlerock.com.mt
littlerock.com.mt
They are ripe for fraud: selling passports, fraudulent government bank, etc. In the event that they pick up any traction, they are swallowed by their neighbors with real armies (eg. Minerva), and the rest of the world sighs with relief.
An interesting example of one that is still officially around, also claims land in Croatia, and exists just for fraud is the Dominion of Melchizedek [2].
Even Lichtenstein, which thrives on laws that allow outside companies to evade their local taxes, skirts on the definitions of "legal", "nation", et al. (though I have a few friends from there who are all great guys)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation [2] http://www.quatloos.com/groups/melchiz.htm
Existing government is sub-optimal and competition tends to increase quality. Is there a special property of government service that makes this principle fail here?
We do sometimes see multiple governments competing in the same "markets". We usually call them "warlords" though, and it hasn't really worked out all that well for the people and lands being competed for.
In a sense, but they're subject to a tragedy of the commons (that's almost the definition of a negative externality), so competition does not improve them.
I don't think the "rest of the world" really has any stake in it at all. A few hundred people do, at most. These people may not be completely harmless, but they also lack the capacity to hurt people in any significant numbers. If you can be hurt by a micronation, perhaps you need to reevaluate what your government is doing. How badly do they have to fuck up to the point that a micronation becomes relevant in your life?
Government is not a product or service. It doesn't follow market rules. Heck, who enforces market norms when at anytime you can send out warships and conquer everyone?
If anything, we have way many small governments that often must bow down to the regional power and become de facto client states with limited autonomy and almost no ability to fight off the regional power if it thinks you've offended it in any way. Ukraine is getting a lesson in how little autonomy they have when they're so close to an aggressive regional power. Just because you are recognized as a country doesn't mean you enjoy the autonomy a country should. Smaller nations are just going to be under the thumb more than larger nations who can put up a proper military deterrent.
"For this reason, the family sought to acquire lands that would be classed as unmittelbar ("unintermediated"), or held without any intermediate feudal tenure, directly from the Holy Roman Emperor. " ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein#Principality )
The quasi-independent fragments of the British Isles / Empire are also interesting and tend to operate as tax havens.
Unfortunately, the Paraduin people seem a bit nutty to me. An excerpt from their constitution, which is in Dutch:
"Paraduin is een monarchie. De titel van de monarch is prins(es), voluit Prins(es) van Paraduin. Monarch zijn Prins Ogidius en diens wettige opvolgers. De opvolging wordt bij wet geregeld."
Translates to:
"Paraduin is a monarchy. The monarch holds the title of Prince(ss), in full the Prince(ss) of Paraduin. Monarchs are Prince Ogidius and his lawful successors. Succession is determined by law."
Paraduin itself is something like a religion, they (if there's more than one person, I'm not sure) believe there's a magical parallel universe from which some people are fleeing unto the earth we live on.
People think it's easy to found your own country. Just find unclaimed space and be done with it.
But there are many rich people out in the world who would hire armies to kill for such a spot.
Imagine if from those 160.000 signups they could get 5.000 people to pay $1000 in taxes per year, that could fund a Serbian police/military officer and a small office. Just his presence and his commitment to engage in violent conflict with aggressors could deter any other party. (Killing him would be an act-of-war or at least a criminal act against his country)
To be fair, I'm a Serb and I fully welcome Liberland. Since the two neighbors cannot decide on their boundaries, I do not see why anyone else cannot take a no-mans land. The issue is that we must define our borders sooner or later, and I am afraid there will be no more space for Liberland. But, that will be Croatia's business then, I hope :D .
This also makes it unlikely that either would act as a guarantor of the independence of a new sovereignty that sought to establish itself on the land, or even to recognize such a sovereignty.
Not sure they appreciate the concept of shared expenses though, from their objectives "a country where honest people can prosper without being oppressed by governments making their lives unpleasant through the burden of unnecessary restrictions and taxes.".
Wasn't the point of founding this country to get away from taxes? How ironic
This is tribalism (or our modern version - nation states) in a nutshell. For all the hand wringing here about NSA SIGINT, defense spending, etc the reality is that the world is dangerous place. Not too long ago "liberal intellectuals", "russophiles," and "policy experts" were telling us how Russia was just going to eventually become a defacto if not outright EU member, would never invade a neighbor, never target civilians explicitly, never annex land, etc. These people forgot the golden rule of civilization: war happens.
Well, sort of a nitpick but Hitler and religion is a bit more complicated than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler
Probably not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War
I've always found the similarities between Dutch and English fascinating. I can actually understand that!
This great article is unfortunately unreadable for me because I can't scroll down.
I just put my name down. It's a laugh. I'd probably be willing to fork over $30 for a passport. I don't actually want to live there. I suspect many of the 160,000 are similar.
On a more serious note I could see an argument for setting up a new country that was open to all comers a bit like the US used to be when the "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.." thing was happening. The US and EU could maybe buy the land off some hard up African country. You could govern it a bit like Singapore.
Likewise there are many people with citizenship who would prefer to be a citizen of another nation for the purposes of travel.
But living in San Marino or Liechtenstein must be great - if you get to the national football team (which shouldn't be hard), you will have a chance to play against word class teams from time to time ;)
If the situation around the Mediterranean does not improve, the EU will be forced to consider such a plan sooner than we might think.
Still, better it be done somewhere other than Europe.
> I'd much rather have no man's land, than have a land owned by a particular man's ideology (regardless of how much I may be inclined to agree with it).
I think that's an equally valid scenario to try out. If only my country did not have anti-sedition laws...
There is also a lot of effectively lawless land around the world.
But many countries, including most of the 'powers', have also signed treaties ensuring that no one can lay claim to Antarctica...
PS: What most intellectual Anarchists want is high quality fertile land free for the taking. But, so does everyone else which is why it's not free in the first place. With some effort you could live in the middle of the ocean and never see another person. When you get down to it most of them really want to live with the benefits of government without paying for it.
Over the course of human history, it is exceedingly likely that every piece of at least marginally potentially interesting land is claimed at some point.
Furthermore, only unused land can truly be no man's land, which is why it is a bit curious why you'd be so interested in no man's land in the first place. (As soon as you go there and do something remotely interesting with it, even if it's just camping there, it stops being no man's land and starts being de facto your land, until somebody challenges you to it.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZdkqqjosCM&t=6m49s
Essentially the river has changed, but the two countries claimed land at different times.
What do you mean with that?
Could you share more? Are there any decent write ups about the more interesting attempts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_micronations (Liberland is already listed)
Some are just notable crackpots, some take advantage of geographic changes or artificial structures (Sealand the most famous), some are whims tolerated by controlling sovereignties, some are violently overthrown, some are long-respected special cases (Vatican), some are genuine attempts that failed (Oceania).
I found these resources about Sealand http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/sealand-and-haven... and a much more detailed about the legal situation in Sealand (80 pages, PDF) https://web.archive.org/web/20130114064309/http://illinoisla...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9383560 Liberland (liberland.org) [0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9384107 Liberland (wikipedia.org) [1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9385492 A New State Has Been Declared - Liberland (between border of Croatia and Serbia) (liberland.org) [2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9388699 New state established on unclaimed territory between Croatia and Serbia (wikipedia.org) [3]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400443 About Liberland (liberland.org) [4]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400443 Liberland - Europe's Brand New Country (liberland.org) [5]
Yes, I know this is a repeat - the submission title got
changed. It's also a repeat submission of [0], and the
submission with the most discussion - over 80 comments.
[0] http://liberland.org/en/about/
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland
[2] http://liberland.org/en/news/press-release-a-new-state-has-b...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland
[4] http://liberland.org/en/about/
[5] http://liberland.org/en/about/
[6] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/welcome-to-li...
This is the first time I've seen news about this particular 'country', and I'm glad I saw it this time because it is interesting.
Duplicates FTW!
So the idea is to ensure that anyone interested in an item can, should they choose, easily find and read the comments made by other HN contributors. Feel free to disagree, although the 17 upvotes (at the time of writing - votes may go down as well as up) indicate that there are people who do find it valuable/useful.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8499286
Edit: Just checking your profile I see that you've been here less than a year, so you may not be aware that because it's me to whom you're replying, I can't down-vote you. In fact I've up-voted you, because while I disagree with you (obviously) I don't think your comment is especially negative.
I love the idea of stopping the 'split discussion' issue, but I feel like it's at odds with a site like HN where stories fall off of the front page so quickly. I'm not able to read it all day long, and I rarely look at it in the evenings. Especially when we have articles about potential gaming of the article positions, it seems unrealistic to expect that you would have a chance to actually get the real 'news' at any given point without duplicate posts.
What I mean is, there are certainly more than 30 in-progress topics appealing to HN readers. If I look at the front page in the morning and again in the afternoon, I'm only going to get a small subset of the topics that are out there. That's why I appreciate duplicates so much... it's really the only thing that makes a site like HN relevant to the occasional reader.
Anyway, thanks for supporting me even though I wasn't the most ambassadorial. :)
It's true that things fall off the front page quickly, but that's why there's a "More" link. It doesn't take long to click through, scan the headlines, and check on the ones that look interesting.
It's also true that things wouldn't fall off the front page if there weren't so many duplications! It's less of a problem now, but I remember occasions when several of the front page submissions were all about the same thing, each with their own conversation, and preventing other topics from making it.
And as you say, at any given moment there are likely to be more than 30 "in progress" topics in the tech world, so the only solution is clicking through to see those items ranked 31 to 60, and 61 to 90. There is nothing else you can do. In part that's why I think it's important and relevant to link related conversations/submissions. Duplications will happen, items will fall off (or never make) the front page, so the best we can hope for is coherent discussions.
Hope that makes things clearer. Now I'm off to do some work. Cheers.
The problem is that the HN front page only has 30 slots. Those slots are the scarcest resource on the site. Since we have no way of knowing what you've seen, we have to target overall coverage.
We don't treat stories as dupes just because they've been posted already; they have to have had significant discussion. But I get that you're talking about precisely those stories. I do think we have more work to do here.
In the meantime, one thing thing you can do is look at https://news.ycombinator.com/active and https://news.ycombinator.com/best for major discussions you missed.
For now, thank you SO MUCH for mentioning /active and /best. I had no idea those existed, and they are exactly what I need.
Can this microstate be interesting for entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, doctors, economists - those who can contribute a lot to build some prosper experimental state, say micro-Singapore?
How can this country attract them, maybe, introduce sort of point based system for giving residence / citizenship?
(1) Uruguay. It's legal for now, the current president is not happy at all about legal marijuana and wants to revoke the law.
The current president is more like a king at the moment with a lot of influence to shape the country, but can also be heavily influenced by external forces (by money, armed force). A lot of things depend on personalities and hidden agendas of people who will rule there, and it may be difficult to control them. Money from illegal activities like drug traffic may be very attractive.
I am just speculating about this potentially interesting experiment.
The U.S. ironically (they're the ones who got the world to sign treaties promising to never legalize) has the some of the best decriminalizatoin/legalization laws on the planet
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands
The word "nation" is sometimes used as synonym for:
State (polity) or sovereign state: a government which controls a specific territory, which may or may not be associated with any particular ethnic group
Country: a geographic territory, which may or may not have an affiliation with a government or ethnic group
Thus the phrase "nations of the world" could be referring to the top-level governments (as in the name for the United Nations), various large geographical territories, or various large ethnic groups of the planet.
In general, whenever I come across the word "nation" I assume it's being used colloquially to refer to "nation-state", unless the context is specifically related to ethnic nationalistic identities.
Edit: Got the activation link in SPAM, perhaps google didn't recognize the new country sending emails :P
A state based on anarchy is an oxymoron.
Only the Collectivist/Socialist Anarchists have the audacity to call themselves "Anarchists" without any qualifying suffix or prefix. The fact that they've coined "Anarchism" (of which they are "Anarchists") to mean something that isn't a pure Anarchy is extraordinarily disingenuous.
Even now, the official definition is "a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority." Though, the origin is: "...from anarkhos, from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler.’"
At least, when used properly as a qualifier to a system of government (or lack thereof), it has much much better connotations associated with it. Though, again, that depends on who you ask and which type of "anarchy" you're describing. You get ridiculously odd ones such as "anarcho-communism".
Every odd year they should send an ambassador with 1000 BTC tribute to Belgrade.
And every even year they should send an ambassador with 1000 BTC tribute to Zagreb.
As you already guessed, I propose them to adopt Bitcoin as a national currency ;)
It already is, from what I can tell. As "official" as you can get at this point.
And if no-one claims the area, you can wander in and stake your own claim. Of course, if no-one recognises you, there's not much you can do, and if you don't ally with someone meaty, no-one will stop an 'annexation'. Ultimately it's a jape, but unlike most micronations, it's not stretching the rules - the land really is currently, officially, unclaimed.
I can't help but to make the connection here, what do you think guys?
These investors would have a direct stake in propping up the idea that this is sovereign land, as that's what will give them the best return on their investment. So the new ruler and the investors form a tight bloc.
The whole idea is to make the area attractive to commerce, once the businesses start coming in, and the people to run and operate the businesses, then there's a critical mass to begin the process of drawing up a constitution, figuring out how to set up legislative bodies, the machinery of governance.
Only after all this is done is international recognition needed.
The reason micronations never got off the ground is because nobody was ever able to court enough investment to build up to that critical mass that can support commerce. They were just way too small. City-size seems to be at just the right scale for this kind of experiment. It was just a matter of time until something like this happened.
Note this is also the exact same process whereby new townships are formed in the US, particularly in the 1800s where we were in our expansionary period. Only they don't have to set up the full machinery of state, they already have a state and federal government to build off of.
Eventually somebody is going to get this right in the developing world, and that will kick off a hoard of copycats. As regimes topple, people will start breaking these countries up into city-states. Think of how gentrification works in the US, if you think about it, it's just the process of cities growing. Sovereignty in the developing world is going to follow the money.
But in Kaliningrad's case it used to be attached just fine to the rest of Soviet Union from which Russia "inherited" it.
No part of former Yugoslavia was ever close to bordering Russia. At least not yet :P
Probably setting up strong, well paid and well monitored police force would be sufficient to provide secure environment for the business.
And some of them (even under the "no armed forces") list actually have a military from the descriptions there, its just a reserve military, an armed police force officially designated to serve military/defense functions, or, in the case of the State of Vatican City, the military of the entity -- the Holy See -- to which the state is itself subordinate.