Moderator Note
While we allow a certain amount of joking in GQ once the question has been addressed factually, we don’t allow sarcastic snipping at other users. Keep the jokes lighthearted. If you can’t do that, then just stick to the facts while in this forum.
Drop the sarcasm. “He started it” isn’t a valid excuse.
If either of you want to continue being snippy, take it to the Pit.
The problem all these “why can’t I start my own country?” questions run into is that they get the problem backwards. If you’re a rich bastard with enough money to take over a remote island and declare yourself king, there’s absolutely no need to declare yourself king. You just move to your island and do whatever you like, and when the people who run the country you live in show up, you cut them a check for however much it takes for them to leave you alone.
The question is: what problem do you you have that starting your own country would solve? You wanna do drugs? Wanna avoid taxes? Wanna marry your 12 year old cousin? What exactly is it that you could do if you controlled your own country that you can’t do in your own home today?
You aren’t allowed to do various things by the local authorities because you’re a poor and powerless nobody. You aren’t allowed to get away with nothing, because you’re nothing and nobody.
Start climbing up the wealth and power food chain and you’ll find that you’re allowed to get away with all sorts of things. So rather than start your own country so you can make your own rules, you just use your wealth and power to let you make your own rules even though you live in a country where the unwealthy and unpowerful don’t get to make their own rules.
Take a look at the various microcountries around the world that actually exist. Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, The Vatican, Lichtenstein, Tuvalu, Nauru, and so on. How many of them are ruled by billionaires who make their own rules? I mean, Monaco has a prince, yes? And The Vatican has the pope. But even the pope is not an autocrat, he only gets to be the pope because everyone agrees that he’s the pope. How many of them are set up as playgrounds for libertarian billionaires?
The thing is, if you’re the autocratic ruler of a country you don’t need a libertarian government with low taxes that lets people do whatever they like, because now you’re the government. In fact, now you want high taxes and intrusive regulation, because you’re the guy making the rules for everyone else, and you’ve got to make sure they’re doing things the right way. You only want a libertopian government when you don’t run the government, the second you run the government you’ll find all sorts of reasons why you need more control.
But even in the days of absolute monarchy, kings didn’t rule by whim, not if they wanted to keep that crown on their heads. Annoy too many people and suddenly all those soldiers stop following your orders, or some foreigners with guns show up, and you’re shipped off to some island somewhere, if you’re lucky. Or you just get lined up against a wall and shot. Being an autocrat isn’t an easy job, and if it ever looks to you as if there’s an autocrat who has an easy job it’s a pretty safe bet that he’s not really an autocrat, he’s just the spokesman and mascot for the people who really run the country.
Canada and Denmark do in fact have militaries that could pretty easily do something about it. It wouldn’t take much effort to take over Richie Rich’s frozen homestead.
No one on earth in rich enough to afford a private military that could stop even a smaller country’s modern and well-trained army from stomping them. You have $5 billion to spare? Not nearly enough. Putting all that together and maintaining it in the Arctic is just too hard.
So you’ve got a billionaire who wants to invade Canada and set up his own country. He cashes in all his assets and now he’s got a billion dollars to pay his mercenary army. Sounds like a lot of money, right?
Except Canada spends $25 billion dollars annually on its military.
Assuming each side gets the same value, dollar for dollar, the Canadian Armed Forces outclasses the billionaire 25 to 1.
But wait, there’s more! That 25 billion is just the annual Canadian military budget. Assuming Canada has been spending approximately that much for say, the past twenty-five years, that’s a lot of military assets.
And, since Canada is part of NATO, the Canadian Armed Forces have the same type of training, doctrine and equipment as other NATO members, as part of the integrated command approach.
How many mercenaries with similar equipment and training is Richie Rich going to hire? And from where? And with what equipment? And how and where will they train, and for how long before they try to establish Billionaire-stan?
And how do they get to their target in northern Canada? Fly in undetected?
Except Canada is part of NORAD, fully integrated with the US military, to defend the North from military incursions. It’s mainly intended to detect those pesky Russkies coming over the Pole, but I would imagine there would be rapid detection of any unauthorised large-scale flights in the northern airspace. Which would trigger a rapid air response, again NORAD co-ordinated, so likely USAAF assets, not just RCAF.
Or would Richie Rich try a naval landing? Well, that’s only possible for a few months a year, and there’s only a few ports. So they’d be noticed pretty quickly.
And even if they capture Churchill or Tuktoyuktuk, what then? The railway to Churchill is out at the moment, and that’s the only land link. Land access to Toktoyuktuk isn’t very good either, and is much more difficult in the winter.
But even assuming Richie Rich does get his troops ashore somehow and finds a relatively unused piece of land, what then? Agriculture is pretty non-existent in the North (that’s one of the reasons for the low population density). How does Richie Rich feed his troops? How does he pay them? Internet access is very spotty in the North, only at municipalities, so internet banking is out.
And what do all those troops do? Heck, what does Richie Rich do? Unless you have a group of mercenaries skilled at living off the northern land, and dressed for it, you’re going to run into serious logistical issues.
“Winter is coming.”
What if he’s busy that week?
A Czech activist claimed an uninhabited portion of land on the Serbia-Croatia border in 2015 and declared it an independent nation.
Of course, I don’t believe any nation has recognized it.
Libertarian visionary and Paypal founder Peter Theil shares the dream and has the gazillions to make it happen. In 2008-2014 he funded the Seafaring institute which would later sponsor Blue Frontiers, an enterprise devoted to creating, …ocean-based colonies that would “cure the sick” by stripping medicine of bureaucracy; “enrich” hundreds of millions of “poor and oppressed” people with “no place to go” by providing them with ocean-surface communities; “feed the hungry” with farmed algae and open ocean-farmed fish; “power the world” with solar energy; and “improve governance” by giving the world’s citizens a “fluid frontier” where they could “sail about and choose the states they want.”
Peter Thiel-founded floating-island plan for paradise sunk? Unfortunately for this libertarian fluid frontier, the agreement with the government of Tahiti expired in 2017, and the government of French Polynesia has been backing away. Theil is no longer entirely aboard, but they’ve pressed on: I gather that they expect to be saved by the blockchain.
They find out that Henry Norwest got his job for a reason.
The Phoenix Foundation, led by a guy named Michael Oliver, has made three attempts to declare independent republics on various islands.
Neither Tonga, nor the Bahamas, nor Vanuatu was willing to part with the territory.
Remarkably there is a book that addresses all the issues about starting your country and even gives several examples of people trying to do it:
And two of those were willing to part with 99% of their web domains.
Form your own country. In theory you could so this if you paid enough that the govt/body politic of the country you were taking the land from agreed to it. If you were doing it by force then it would really be invading and dismembering the country. Peace treaties featuring payments for land seized in wars have happened, but they are the result of war, not arms length commercial transactions. If you tried to just make it a fait accomplit, other countries or the ‘international community’ as a whole would probably not accept it if the country’s central govt didn’t, even if that govt was itself too weak to kick you out.
As far as doing it as a voluntary transaction the two countries (though Greenland actually isn’t a 100% independent country) mentioned don’t seem likely candidates. Africa would seem the more likely area to find countries willing to make such a deal, both because they are poorer and the demarcations of countries in Africa are sometimes arbitrary products of colonial decisions in recent times. This is a challenge for many African countries’ national unity and governance in general. And some countries there have quite weak central govts.
Still, it’s only relatively less far fetched in poor countries, not likely. Some African (and poorer Pacific) countries have had agreements to set aside land to commercial control by Chinese entities for agriculture for export to China. They haven’t allowed these places to be actually part of China or legally separate; in theory at least everyone in them is still subject to the host country’s laws. And still there’s been a backlash.
I think it’s highly doubtful that any African country would agree to surrender sovereignty over part of its territory for money. The inhabitants of the land in question would not take it easily. It would just be 21st century colonialism. And that won’t fly.
From what I read he was just a millionaire. I disagree, with many poor nations and corrupt leadership, there is always a price for something.
Not for this, it seems, unless you can point to a successful example.
Again, what problem do you have that “start your own country” would be an efficient solution for?
There are lots of billionaire assholes in the world. How many of them have succeeded in forming their own countries to solve the problems that billionaires face?
A corrupt official can agree to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, the problem comes when nobody else will agree to act as if you own the Brooklyn Bridge.
If you’re going to have to defend it anyway, why waste money on buying it? Pay mercenaries instead and start the revolution!
But there is already an African country that nominally has sovereignty over some territory but is actively disclaiming it. According to the 1899 boundary agreement in force between Egypt and Sudan, a 2000 km² area known as Bir Tawil is on the Sudanese side of the border, but Sudan doesn’t want it (and neither does Egypt). I’m sure they’d love nothing more than having a naïve billionaire offer them wads of cash in exchange for recognition of said billionaire’s sovereignty over it.
They both don’t want it because they’d rather have a bigger and better chunk of land, Hala’ib Triangle. De facto Egypt controls it, but dispensing of the other territory doesn’t fix the situation.