is it possible to create a nation online?
No.
Of course, you may have a different definition of a nation from everybody else in the world.
There are two common definitions of what makes a nation, the “it looks like a nation” definition and the “everyone thinks it’s a nation” definition.
For the first, to be considered a nation, you need to have the stuff that nations generally have, such as an army, a government, money, official insects and the like, and most importantly, actual control over some bit of territory. It doesn’t have to be much, but there does have to be some, and a lot of the citizens have to live there. So it seems that if you go by this definition, you cannot have a nation online.
However, by the second definition, you don’t strictly need any of these things. If all the other nations agree that you’re a nation, then they will make treaties with you, let you into the UN, send you ambassadors and well, treat you like a nation. While I find the establishment of a nation in this manner to be extraordinarily unlikely, it does seem possible that a new type of nation can be formed online.
So, to sum up: yes and no, but mostly no.
And that last bit is the sticking point - all land on earth is claimed by some nation or other. There was an interesting experiment in creating a libertopia on an artificially constructed island: the Republic of Minerva:
It’s a pity, it would have been interesting to see start-up nations actually succeed once in a while.
Traditional nations won’t take kindly to people that live within their borders but claim to be citizen of an abstract online nation. It’ll be hard to maintain an online government and military of some sort when every citizen is still subject to the laws of their physical nation. And that “physical host nation” still has the power to cut off the internet access for these would-be nation founders.
this is a nice response. a non-physical nation. could it work is the question.
maybe one tiny island, with servers and a satellite dish would suffice for the physical element of this nation. ive heard of people buying islands for amounts of dollars one human can accumulate in less than one lifetime.
Actually there’s a fair bit of Antarctica that is unclaimed. However, most of the more important countries won’t recognize any territorial claims that Internetia might happen to make in that territory.
Most of you are talking about a state, not a nation. In order to properly answer the OP’s question (and in order for the OP to properly phrase his or her question) it needs to be clear what you are talking about.
A nation is a group of people who feel they share both a common history and destiny. Typically they live in a contiguous geographical area, share a religion and speak one language, although examples undermining all of these criteria exist.
A **state **needs a body of people in a certain geographic area over which it legitimately (ie without significant challenge) exerts a monopoly of force (ie it can police the people). The state needs people but does not have any requirements as to whether these people share anything other than living in the same area). Both states and nations exist but they often do not overlap; when they do it is called ‘a nation-state’. Many modern states approach this ideal-type but do not attain it as some element of national identity is contested or because part of the nation lives outside of the state.
Nope. Boots on the ground.
Sure, you can buy an island. What happens when you try to claim citizenship on it? Especially if you don’t live there? Who’s going to recognize you? Why should they?
This is one of the perennial questions on this Board, and predates it for the print column. The answer is always the same. In the real world, you’re not a nation unless other nations say you’re a nation. That’s not going to happen to an internet enclave at any time in my lifetime.
Švejk, all the member nations of the United Nations are nations, even though by your definition they are states.
thx for that fact.
Agree the answer is “No.” But here’s the next best thing: http://www.nationstates.net/
Yeah. I was thinking about this just after I posted. I suppose, though, that if everyone wanted this to work, it could, but I think the end result would be a bit strange. Even today, too much of the regular life of the nation (or state, thanks to whoever brought that distinction up) requires physical links to just work. How would the online nation arrest people for crimes? manage taxes? and so on.
You are wrong. They are *not *all nations, even though a lot of people commonly refer to them as such (ie as the collective body of people that find themselves citizens of a certain state). They are all states - it’s just that when the UN came into existence the name ‘United States’ was already taken, even though it would have been far more appropriate.
As an example of states that do not overlap with a nation, consider Russia (just as an example - there are many, many more cases) - many Russian citizens are not Russian, do not consider themselves to be Russian and are not seen by Russians as Russian. For this reason, the Russian language has two words for Russian: russkiy and rossiyskiy, with the former referring to things pertaining to things and people ethnically and or linguistically Russian, the latter referring to things and people ‘civically’ Russian. The country is called ‘rossiyskaya federaciya’; the language is 'russkiy yazyk.
Indeed. And, to give a converse example, Ireland was a nation, with a common history, culture, identity, etc, and recognised as such by non-Irish people, long before it was a state.
This is basically a micronation, the Principality of Sealand being a good example. The problem with them is they don’t usually qualify as states and no one recognizes them as such.
Svejk is absolutely right. Nations are not the same things as states, aka countries. Nations are groups of people, not political entities. This isn’t even a question in the political sciences; it’s just a fact.
Afghanistan is a state without a nation. Kurdistan is a nation without a state. The US is a state. The “American people” make up the nation.
Carry on.
Exactly. You’d be invited to depart for your nation.
Sorry, but if there were a formal distinction it was abandoned in everyday English a long time ago. A huge amount of linguistic change took place after the 1960s, and the common usage pattern shifted. My 1987 Random House uses your definition of nation but my newer dictionaries (American Heritage, 1992, and Encarta, 2001) both gave as the primary definition of nation some variation of, “people in land under single government.” Dictionaries tend to lag changes in usage and the Random House was probably keeping to the first edition usage from the 1960s.
There’s no harm in forcing the distinction, but today it’s pretty much like insisting that the U.S. isn’t a democracy, that it is only a republic. At one time the usages were distinct. Today the U.S. is a democracy and a nation, because that it is the common usage among good writers.
Your analogy between the concepts of nation and democracy is false - this is not about an ideal-type and archaic usage; no political scientist would argue that the US is not a democracy because it does not look like ancient Greece. The definition of democracy has changed over time - and over much more time than just ‘since the sixties’. This is not the case for the concept of nation, which has been with us for a couple of centuries now and which has not undergone noticeable conceptual change in the way social scientists think of it.
Of course, there is also a more colloquial usage, which is what you are referring to, which clearly exists but which is much less precise. Just because it is in a dictionary does not mean it is an adequate way of conceptualizing phenomena such as these. Dictionaries just reflect usage, even if it is outright false, and you should not rely on dictionaries to do the work that social scientists are supposed to do. If you want a more useful overview, I can recommend the wikipediaarticle which covers this ground quite nicely right in the introduction.
To be sure (as should be clear from the wiki article as well as some other dictionary entries (#3), if you insist on relying on those), the academic notion of nation that I am using is far from abandoned - it is not some sort of archaic sixties usage or something. Instead, it is still the standard among the very ‘good writers’ you mention and in the social sciences the distinction between nation and state I make is broadly accepted, common-place and uncontroversial, whereas the usage that you advocate is (rightly) seen as inaccurate and unsophisticated, since it does assumes incorrectly that every group of people that is considered to have a shared destiny (both by the group itself and by outsiders) has a government, and that every group that has a government necessarily has a shared destiny. Shared identity and shared government are not the same, and if you consider some of the examples offered above you will realize that the distinction is not just academic but affects real political life quite significantly.