The temptation to use macronational law to threaten fellow micronationalists endangers the hobby's creative spirit.
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Lazia, 3 February 2020 — Ever since the word “micronationalism” was coined in the mid-1990s by Robert Ben Madison, the emergence of entities styled as unrecognised nation states has been a peculiar business — their aim, variously, to replace, to imitate, to mock, or simply to coexist alongside the recognised nations of the United Nations and its company.
The grey legal waters in which such entities swim have prompted a corresponding effort to meet the criteria of statehood set out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, criteria that most micronations cheerfully ignore. Setting aside those whose sole purpose is fraud, the very ambiguity of micronational activity has bred a striking creativity — comparable, in its way, to that which sampling brought to modern media — that could scarcely have arisen without it.
Micronationalism is, like its recognised brethren, no stranger to scandal. It has its share of freaks, oddities and megalomaniacs, from thirteen-year-old IRA-sympathising communists to self-declared caliphs, and so makes a fine petri dish for the legal troubles that attend such things.
The prevailing spirit of the pursuit — one of creativity, co-operation and mutual development — is not without its detractors; and when that spirit is set beside the megalomania so often present, the temptation arises to abuse macronational legal systems to threaten, intimidate and censor fellow micronationalists. Such abuse would replace that spirit with one of conformity and mutual distrust, and would, in time, ruin micronationalism in its wake.
Edited for the relaunch of the Courant van Lazia.
