In his classic column titled How do I go about starting my own country?, Cecil states that on of the requirements of a country is a permanent population. In other words, if the entire population of a country were to exit its territory, the country would cease to exist.
Has this ever happened? I seem to recall that one volcanic island (Montserrat?) suffered such a bad eruption that most of its population was evacuated, but not everyone left. If all the people in Iceland migrated to Canada, would Iceland the state vanish, and Iceland the island then be open to all comers?
I believe he was referring to the Jewish diaspora when he mentioned the “history of the land.”
ETA: The problem with bringing up the diaspora is that, IIRC, the state of Judea was already recognized only at the whim of the Roman empire, and even then as frontier province, not as any kind of sovereign nation. The diaspora didn’t really change this, just separated the Jews so they couldn’t revolt en masse anymore.
This is a question that, due to global warming, may arise in a practical sense quite shortly. We have already heard that Tuvalu is shopping around for some new real estate. My guess is, should (God forbid) this ever become necessary, the relevant international agreements will provide for the disposition of the Tuvaluan state.
Then there is the Roanoke Colony, but they hardly qualify as a “population.” OTOH, I agree with White’s assumption that, for a time, they had relocated to Croatan Island, as was implied my their final message. Not much of a mystery, if you leave a forwarding address.
Near the Mideast, erosion eventually filled in seaports like Scamander Bay, the port which supported Troy in the late Bronze Age. The Scamander’s estuary eventually filled in a mile and a half, and the ancient city-state was abandoned. The same thing happened at the seacoast cities of Myus and Priene in the 5th century B.C.
Then, of course, there’s always the Mayans - they didn’t ALL die out, but disappeared into the jungle and mountainous regions away fromt he invaders.
As far as being open to all comers, I think you’d find that prblematic. Entire civilisations don’t disappear unless life becomes unsustainable. Still, if you’d like to die a king, I’m sure there’s someplace where it could be arranged. . . .
Singapore (for the sake of the hypothetical) is thirty something kilometres by twenty something kilometres (total land area is a shade less than 700km), now its not too hard to imagine buying a parcel of land that size somewhere in Texas, Alsaka or even Australia.
What if the government did this, built all their own infrastructure and then shipped their citizens there en-mass. What would their chances be of seceeding from the “parent nation” Please ignore for now the logistics of shipping around four million citizens enmasse.
What if they did it using private airfields and had already fenced off the area?
bengangmo, interesting question. I think there would be serious legal questions if they just tried to buy land and set it up.
For starters, there’s the whole buying land thing, using the laws of the host country. Then there are the legal issues of transporting people and goods to a small geographic area enclosed by a larger geographic area that the host country owns and protects via armed patrols.
Perhaps we need to consider how countries go about establishing embassies. Embassies are regarded as national territory of the visiting nation, not the host country. How do they get designated such? Could, say Singapore, establish an extra large embassy, then transport all their people and stuff to their “embassy”?
Dunno - buying the land would be the easy part I suspect, I know that for Singapore citizens it is not an issue to buy land in either Australia or New Zealand (aside from some exclusions of course) and there is plenty of “foreign” ownership of larger tracts of land.
What I am most interested in, is assuming that this is a fait accompli (spelling?). All citizens are there, they are essentially to all intents and purposes self supporting in terms of infrastructure on land legally owned - how would you then go about seceeding?
I know a private citizen can’t do so, but I would imagine that a large population with the (financial and military) resources of a nation state is going to pose some different responses.
Parts of what is now the Sahara desert were abandoned by all permanent populations as the desert advanced, and this is still going on. I don’t know the specifics of the history there, but the entire desert is still claimed by one nation or another today, since all of those countries have permanent populations somewhere.
Not to turn this into a general legal discussion, but it’s pretty standard in common law that anything which is abandoned or otherwise unowned can be claimed by a third party. Back in the day when unowned wild property, minerals and animals existed, you could make them yours just by taking possession.
As an example of this that can still be relevant today… if your neighbor moves out with no notice and no one claims or uses his land, and you not only use the land but make real estate tax payments, etc. then the land can become yours. (In Washington state, it takes ten years, so it’s not like you can take over while they’re on vacation.) There are special rules for claiming lost goods, buried treasure, etc. More and more, laws seem to favor giving anything unowned/unclaimed to the government.
Thus, if the entire population of a country did leave en masse, the real question would be why you couldn’t step in and take it since, by default, you can. My guess is that the UN or some other national or international entity would have a claim. (More importantly, they’d have more firepower to back up that claim).
Parts of what is now the Sahara desert were abandoned by all permanent populations as the desert advanced, and this is still going on. I don’t know the specifics of the history there, but the entire desert is still claimed by one nation or another today, since all of those countries have permanent populations somewhere.
Not to turn this into a general legal discussion, but it’s pretty standard in common law that anything which is abandoned or otherwise unowned can be claimed by a third party. Back in the day when unowned wild property, minerals and animals existed, you could make them yours just by taking possession.
As an example of this that can still be relevant today… if your neighbor moves out with no notice and no one claims or uses his land, and you not only use the land but make real estate tax payments, etc. then the land can become yours. (In Washington state, it takes ten years, so it’s not like you can take over while they’re on vacation.) There are special rules for claiming lost goods, buried treasure, etc. More and more, laws seem to favor giving anything unowned/unclaimed to the government.
Thus, if the entire population of a country did leave en masse, the real question would be why you couldn’t step in and take it since, by default, you can. My guess is that the UN or some other national or international entity would have a claim. (More importantly, they’d have more firepower to back up that claim).
If Singapore bought an enclave in Texas and declared independence, they would find that first the Texas cops would try to enforce Texas law inside the enclave, and the IRS would try to collect taxes inside the enclave and the FDA would try to regulate food and drugs inside the enclave, and so on.
What does the body calling itself the independent government of New Singapore do then? Set up a police force to turn back Texas cops at the border? Refuse to pay US taxes?
There have been several things that have happened in the past when groups have tried to do this. Maybe the other state will weigh the costs and benefits and decide that it’s too much trouble to try to dispute the seccession and things settle down more or less peacefully. More often, they send in the military, and then the secessionists have the decision whether to surrender or resist. There are plenty of secessionist enclaves that have been pretty much flattened to the ground, Conan-style: “Crush yoah enemies, see dem driven befoah you, and heah dah lammentation of der vimmin.”
Thank you, Lemur866, for elaborating on what I was trying to imply. bengangmo, the mere act of a foreign citizen buying property does not make that property change citizenship. AFAIK, even a government buying property in and of itself does not make that property change affiliation. International law has processes for establishing embassies, which is how countries come to own their own sovereign property within another country. Thus, if Singapore really wanted to set up their own duplicate country and transfer there, they would need to follow something like the laws for establishing an embassy, i.e. declaring said property their sovereign soil and getting the host country’s agreement.
Merely buying property, setting up infrastructure, relocating an existing polity there, then declaring yourself sovereign is not legal. Now if you have a sufficient-sized military, the host country might decide it wasn’t worth their effort to stop you. But do you really think Singapore is going to be able to hold off the U.S. military in the middle of Texas? Do you really think the US would decide it wasn’t worth it to stop the precedent? At a minimum, I would expect the US to quarantine the zone, including no ground or sea transportation in or out, and shooting down planes trying to enter or leave. That’s assuming a direct approach wasn’t deemed politically advantageous.
Without the host country’s agreement, particularly in advance, such a plan is effectively an invasion. That is how it would be perceived and how it would be addressed.
If an island wants to relocate because it is going under the ocean, they would be far better off pleading with the international community for sympathy. Or finding some other small island country to take over.
This has been an interesting discussion – I thank several posters for the possible legal angles. I have nothing substantive to contribute, but I did want to point out that:
the Maya are a poorly chosen example for this occurrence. They in fact were one of the top five Amerindian cultures which survived the past millenium quite intact, with several million speakers of various Maya languages living today in a large area from Yucatan to western Honduras. I know that was sort of TruCelt’s point, but since we’re talking about “states” which did disappear or move en masse, there are many other Amerindian examples which would work better.
They don’t qualify as a nation/state, but all inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll were moved to the Rongerik Atoll to facilitate nuclear weapons tests. There were about 200 people on the atoll at this point. Some of the population was moved back to Bikini in 1968, but enough Strontium-90 turned up in their bodies that they were evacuated again.
The Bikini and Rongerik Atolls are part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which was a US territory in WWII and has had varying degrees of autonomy from then until the Carter administration. “Country” is a pretty vague term and means different things in different parts of the world. The Aswan Dam in Egypt and the Trail of Tears/Indian Removal Act in 19th Century US all involved a lot more people, but the Bikini Islanders were an isolated (though small) culture transplanted in its entirety from one location to another.
