Is there any reason (outside of common sense, horrible expense, and difficulty) why a group of like-minded individuals couldn’t create a new ‘country’ by linking together rafts and anchoring the mess out in an ocean at least 100 miles from an existing country’s shoreline?
Okay, it’s be tricky to get things rolling, but you could go in for fishing and aquaculture. Pearl farming. Use solar stills to get drinking water. Grow veggies on the flat roofs of your raft cabins.
Or go in for less basic ways of supporting your country. Like issue zillions of gorgeous postage stamps and commemorative crap. Serve as a tax haven? Be a ‘see no evil’ ship registry?
I guess I’m asking is if you could get Raftopia considered a “Real” country – like getting a seat in the UN, get invited to sign all those cool treaties – even though it didn’t have any land.
Actually, I bet you could get plenty of immigrants by offering to take in anyone with the gumption to build their own raft and sail it over to your ‘shore.’
Rose Island was a short-lived micronation located on a man-made platform in the Adriatic Sea, seven miles off the coast of Rimini, Italy.
In 1964, Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa constructed a 400 square metre platform supported by nine pylons, and furnished it with a number of commercial establishments, including a restaurant, bar, nightclub, souvenir shop and a post office. Some reports also mention the presence of a radio station, but this remains unconfirmed.
The artificial island declared independence on 24 June 1968, under the Esperanto name “Insulo de la Rozoj”, and stamps, currency, and a flag were subsequently produced.
The Italian government’s response was swift and heavy-handed: two carabinieri and two inspectors of finances landed on the “Isola delle Rose” and assumed control. The platform’s Council of Government is said to have sent a telegram, presumably to the Italian government, to protest the “violation of its sovereignty and the injury inflicted on local tourism by the military occupation”, but this was ignored. The Italian Navy then used explosives to destroy the facility - an act later portrayed on postage stamps issued by Rosa’s “government in exile”.
The Rose Island flag was orange, with a white shield in the center bearing three red roses with green leaves and stems.
Another Straight Dope perrenial. The answer is that of course you can declare yourself a country, print stamps and money, wirte a constitution, and on and on. And there you have it, a brand new country!
But what does it really really mean to be a sovreign country? It really really means that all the other sovreign countries agree that your country is a sovreign country. And the fact is that no other country is going to recognize that your country is indeed a sovreign country. The US, China, Britain, France, Russia, and every other country with a navy is going to treat your country like they would any other ship, boat, raft, or atoll. The curiosity that your particular raft claims to be a sovreign nation will be ignored completely.
Of course, no one is going to bother your curious little raft, as long as you aren’t causing trouble in some way. The seas are largely lawless places. But your protection in this case is not that you have declared yourself independent, but that you are so insignificant that no one is particularly aware of you. There is absolutely no way that you can get your country recognized by the UN, or any other country. It would be far easier to take over one of the already existing micronations. Or if what you want is de facto independence and do care about the trappings, just move to a remote area in some third world country and you will find yourself largely untroubled by the actions of the local government. Hell, there are places in the US where you could do this, see the various militia and cult compounds that seem to spring up across rural america. No one cares about their pretensions to sovreign nation status, as long as they pay their taxes and obey US law in public.
If you think about it for a moment, what possible advantage would the United States, or any other country, recognize the existance of a new micronation? What benefit does the US gain from it? If you operate as a tax haven or private data store or a refuge for smugglers, you will be hit hard. You will not be granted sovreignity in any way that matters. You will be treated just like any other ship on the high seas that engages in shady legal dealings.
Well, the Holy See has a population of only 921, but you probably won’t be able to take it from the Swiss Guards. They kick ass, and you don’t want to be embarassed by a military force that wears poofy pants and wild colors. It’d be like getting beat up by street performers at Mardi Gras.
There’s Palmyra Atoll, which has no indiginous population, but there are between 4 and 20 employees of the Nature Conservancy and the US Dept of Fish and Wildlife. But that’s considered an incorporated territory of the United States.
There’s also Pitcairn Island, which now has an indiginous population of 46, and, as far as I can tell, no scientific or military presence. But it is a territory of New Zealand.
Your best bet might be Tuvalu, which has a population of 11,468, and it is an independent nation. Have fun storming the castle.
IIRC, they’re sinking, and the leaders of the country wisely decided to make a bundle by selling most of the rights to their top level domain (.tv) and are using the profits from that to try and figure out how the hell to get out of there.
IOW, the population is ALREADY highly motivated to get out of Dodge City!
This take over will be a snap!
As for the sinking, pshaw. All you have to do is add new matter to the top of the islands at a faster pace than the island is sinking. How much garbage is disposed of every year?
Which solves two problems: added mass for my island nation (Trashland?) AND earned income from those eager to get rid of it.
Yes, okay, my country may smell a bit. There are ways to deal with that.
LIke…BALLOONS! Everybody lives up above the island in Hot Air balloons.
Ever hear of composting? All you need to do is for every three or four loads of garbage you import (which I assume you get paid for taking off someone’s hands), you ship in one load of dirt, spread the garbage evenly (well-paid crew with bulldozers and gasmasks), and then spread your bargeload of dirt over top of it. Then do it to the next acre or two, while that one has a chance to decay into rich, fertile soil (with some mineral value, thanks to all the metallic garbage in it), and repeat the process until you’ve covered the island, whereupon you start over again.
Might be a good idea to use manufactured housing and leave it potentially mobile, though, so you can move it to a well-seasoned area when the time comes to do the plot it’s sitting on. (That, or build all structures on pylons twenty feet off the ground so you can fill in the area around and under them.)
I just spent some time studying the webpage of my future domain, and I must say, very nice, very nice indeed!
Prime location, way out in the middle of the Pacific, meaning far away and out of mind of most squabbling countries. And I get not just one island, but at least seven! Maybe more, depending on how you count them, since several are atoll rings with only disconnected areas above the surface.
Who wants to join me? How can you possibly resist the idea of living on a south sea atoll named Funafuto?
