Is there an internationally agreed-upon method by which a piece of land could be purchased and transformed into a new sovereign state, gaining UN recognition? Is there a peaceful way to this end, absent conquest and overwhelming force?
With climate change and increasing regional instabilities, new territories may soon open up for settlement. Could, say, a bunch of Silicon Valley elites band together and purchase marginal land somewhere, form a nation state, rehab the land and live out their techno-eco fantasies with international recognition, maybe with a mercenary navy on the side?
With the weird exception of the Bir Tawil there is no true terra nullius anywhere, save Antarctica. I guess no one will stop you from forming a country there - you are technically breaking international law but if you did it peacefully and out of anyone’s way (Marie Byrd Land, which is huge, is totally unclaimed) I doubt anyone would stop you - but it seems unlikely you could put together enough of a permanent population to gain recognition.
Bir Tawil is rather small and not a nice place to live, and a serious attempt to make it a country would doubtless be stopped by Egypt, Sudan, or both.
There just isn’t any sort of legal framework for this. You become a country by convincing everyone else you are a country; that is the only standard. Even if you occupy territory that’s not necessarily enough - no one ever recognized the Confederate States of America, for instance, for fear of angering the United States.
Anyone can start a country at sea. Just get a raft, call it an island nation, and live on it, making your own rules. You could probably do something like that in Antarctica or a barren desert too and no one would bother you.
If you want a piece of useful land, with natural resources, navigable waterways, or god forbid, subjects, it’s going to take bloodshed to get it.
I suppose you could buy a large island or an abandoned sea platform, hire someone to protect it for you and call it a nation. Isn’t that what they did with Sealand?
As in a real, Divine Intervention, flaming hands and thunderbolts from the sky wandering pillar of fire and 10,000 plagues upon any who oppose you type act of God.
I do not know of any lands that are suitable that are not already in someone else’s jurisdiction, so that means war and conquest.
Bir Tawil is unclaimed per se, but i would not call it suitable.
I also think the surrounding parties might take unkindly to you attempting anything crazy in it.
You are also going to need a fair number of followers to follow you to and help establish your country of new shangri la
Those followers need food, medical, jobs, protection, etc.
You also need an army if we are going the conquest route, so you need money and arms etc.
You are going to need at least some of the worlds leading nations to recognise you
as the legitimate country of new shangri la, so you will need a working non BS government, and that costs money too.
Antarctica, well if you could manage to actually live there on a forever basis i am sure a nice world coalition would come down and kindly remove you from trying to develop the continent, lest it be ruined.
You are a few hundred years too late for the country building event, now days you just take over an existing one.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS—EXCEPT EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
Outside of our solar system i suppose, what other worlds might we have any right to claim?
And of the worlds in our own solar system, which of them may be laid claim to by anything less than the entirety of mankind and no specific country/countries
1000 years ago, most of the world didnt care dick if you went rolling into papa smurfs country and claimed the territory, long as it wasn’t their territory.
Now days, you may well get a global ass beating.
And if you are some unestablished wannabe pissant, the ass beating will probably be monumental rather than diplomatic
Unless you’re going back to before Native Americans crossed the Bering isthmus, or when Cro Magnon man first left Africa, you’re not going to find a time when the land you’re standing on wasn’t claimed by some nation, tribe, chief or city-state. Going back through all recorded history, no piece of land or its population ever became sovereign without a fight. Depending on who was in charge before, it might not have been a big fight, but still, it was a fight.
Okay, sometimes you ask and you get permission. Like when Pakistan split from India (-- I know, it wasn’t that easy). But if someone doesn’t give you sovereignty, then you have to wrestle it from them in combat. In no case in historic times was a country just created from nothing, with no one having claimed it before to either grant permission or put up a fight.
That’s my understanding at least. I’m willing to be educated on the matter. Like I said, got examples?
No, what he said was right. No one cared if it wasn’t their country (usually). Obviously, the people whose country it was did care (usually). When European countries conquered each other, it was Might makes Right. It wasn’t until the Peace of Westphalia of that things started taking on a modern sense (in Europe, anyway).
Oh, and Cro-Magnon man didn’t leave Africa. Cro-Magnon is the term used for modern humans in Europe. There are steps between “leaving Africa” and “entering Europe”, so speaking of Cro-Magnon Man outside of Europe doesn’t really make sense.
I don’t think this is really the problem. The world’s wealth distribution is so uneven that I think it would not be difficult for a wealthy group to offer enough money to a poor nation to buy a piece of territory with an agreement that the nation would cede sovereignty; and to compensate any current residents well enough to agree to leave. The problem would lie in getting the rest of the world to recognize the arrangement.
It would have been done before if it was not difficult. Might (and money) makes right, perhaps, but you still need the support of the people, if only in a “we hate this, but not so bad that we’ll rise up in open rebellion” sense. Assuming it were peaceful though, and the citizens had at least a token say in the matter, I don’t see why the international community would complain. They have no problem letting Saudi Arabia continue to exist.
Another issue is that people with enough money, the Gateses and Zuckerbergs of the world, who have bank accounts larger than some GDPs, don’t find it worth their while to spend their money on buying third world nations. Perhaps they could, but they find their money is better spent elsewhere. Which goes to show sovereignty is nice, but it isn’t as important as huge amounts of non-sovereign power in a much larger, more influential nation.
1000 years ago, if babylon invaded kuwait for example, the combined indigenous population of north and south america would not care 2 hoots.
Nor probably the population of Persia, or Japan, or Briton.
20th century is another story.
Hey, you invaded and hurt our friend, you are getting a collective ass kicking.
Not to nitpick but cro-magnon man never walked out of africa, he’s a paleo european.
The buses from africa left a long long time ago with Homo-Erectus driving one to asia
Homo-Antecessor driving one on the european tour.
Homo-heidelbergensis drove a bus all the way to stone henge (cause stone henge was the Wacken of the prehistoric world), where they had a big party and a lot of the girls got knocked up, and poof, baby neanderthals everywhere.
*please take none of the above as scientifically correct except in the minds of bill and ted perhaps
It doesn’t really matter if the land mass existed before, or was previously populated; most territory on planet Earth is already gridded off and “claimed” (or in Antartica’s special case, explicitly agreed to be unclaimable - for now) by some government or the other.
In the end a transference of sovereignty only requires two things: for a formerly recognized claimant state - if any - to reliquish the territorial claim, and enough other countries to recognize the new claimant. New countries have come into existence several times recently; Eritrea from Ethiopia, or the “Velvet Divorce” of Czechoslovakia into Czechia and Slovakia.
It would be unusual for both new and former claimants to present a “new country” to the world, but for the majority of other countries not to recognize it. This would probably be because they were perceived as fake puppet states, like the “homelands”, or “Bantustans”, of South Africa during the Apartheid era.
Fair enough. I conflated Cro-Magnon Man and “Anatomically Modern Humans”, because that’s what they were, but restricting the term to Europeans makes sense, too.
True, but the Kuwaitis cared. Or whatever the people in what is now called Kuwait were called 1000 years ago. Which was my point. Perhaps I missed yours. Either the Kuwaitis gave permission for the Babylonians to take over, or they fought against them. In neither case was there an empty plot of land and someone said “This is now the nation of Kuwait” without consulting or arguing or warring with someone who already claimed it.