Micronations in International Law: How US Policy Could Improve the Fortunes of Upstart Libertarian Countries
After years spent toiling as an activist against the tide of Czech politics, Vít Jedlička concluded that it would be easier to build a libertarian nation from scratch somewhere else. In April 2015, he declared that a new country called the Free Republic of Liberland would be founded on unclaimed land on the Danube River.
Legal scholars Harry Hobbs and George Williams reject the prevailing perspective that Liberland and other similar initiatives are “mere oddities” that are “more suited to humour than serious study.” The status of micronations under international law and their prospects in the years ahead are the focus of Hobbs and Williams’s book Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty, published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press.
Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty is the first comprehensive book-length academic treatment of micronations. The challenge of defining a micronation speaks to why the topic has garnered limited scholarly interest. The lack of a universally accepted legal definition of a state leaves upstart entities like micronations with an ambiguous legal status.
The book provides a coherent definition of micronations that fits within the current realities of international law. The authors consider micronations to be state-like entities that fall short of statehood but can be placed on a “statehood spectrum.” The central feature of micronations is that they “express a claim of sovereignty despite the absence of any basis in domestic and international law for that claim or for their existence.” Micronations declare themselves nations. They “perform and mimic acts of sovereignty” by, for example, defining citizenship rules, writing constitutions, and printing currencies. They “adopt many of the protocols of nations,” such as deploying diplomats around the world.
Using this criteria, Hobbs and Williams identify about 135 territorial micronations that have operated throughout history, albeit in widely varying form and function. These do not include virtual or simulated micronations, which are generally beyond the scope of the book’s inquiry.
Common motivations for launc
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