BBC - Future - The countries that don't exist - 2 views
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In the deep future, every territory we know could eventually become a country that doesn’t exist.
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silveiragu on 17 Jan 16Contrary to the human expectation that situations remain constant.
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Middleton, however, is here to talk about countries missing from the vast majority of books and maps for sale here. He calls them the “countries that don’t exist”
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The problem, he says, is that we don’t have a watertight definition of what a country is. “Which as a geographer, is kind of shocking
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The globe, it turns out, is full of small (and not so small) regions that have all the trappings of a real country
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Middleton, a geographer at the University of Oxford, has now charted these hidden lands in his new book, An Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist
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Middleton’s quest began, appropriately enough, with Narnia
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a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and “the capacity to enter into relations with other states”.
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In Australia, meanwhile, the Republic of Murrawarri was founded in 2013, after the indigenous tribe wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth II asking her to prove her legitimacy to govern their land.
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Yet many countries that meet these criteria aren‘t members of the United Nations (commonly accepted as the final seal of a country’s statehood).
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many of them are instead members of the “Unrepresented United Nations – an alternative body to champion their rights.
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A handful of the names will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: territories such as Taiwan, Tibet, Greenland, and Northern Cyprus.
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The others are less famous, but they are by no means less serious
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One of the most troubling histories, he says, concerns the Republic of Lakotah (with a population of 100,000). Bang in the centre of the United States of America (just east of the Rocky Mountains), the republic is an attempt to reclaim the sacred Black Hills for the Lakota Sioux tribe.
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Their plight began in the 18th Century, and by 1868 they had finally signed a deal with the US government that promised the right to live on the Black Hills. Unfortunately, they hadn’t accounted for a gold rush
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On 26 September that year, they declared it independent, with its own “direct democracy”, in which each of the inhabitants (now numbering 850) could vote on any important matter.
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a blind eye to the activities
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That is really why any interest is demonstrated towards this topic. Not that some country named Christiania exists in the heart of Denmark, but that they can legitimately call themselves a nation. We have grown up, and our parents have grown up, with a rigid definition of nationalism, and the strange notion that the lines in an atlas were always there. One interpretation of the Danish government's response to Christiania is simply that they do not know what to think. Although probably not geopolitically significant, such enclave states represent a challenge our perception of countries, one which fascinates Middleton's readers because it disconcerts them.
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perhaps we need to rethink the concept of the nation-state altogether? He points to Antarctica, a continent shared peacefully among the international community
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The last pages of Middleton’s Atlas contain two radical examples that question everything we think we mean by the word ‘country’.
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That is really why any interest is demonstrated towards this topic. Not that some country named Christiania exists in the heart of Denmark, but that they can legitimately call themselves a nation. We have grown up, and our parents have grown up, with a rigid definition of nationalism, and the strange notion that the lines in an atlas were always there. These "nonexistent countries"-and our collective disregard for them-are reminiscent of the 17th and 18th centuries: then, the notion of identifying by national lines was almost as strange and artificial as these countries' borders seem to us today.
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“They all raise the possibility that countries as we know them are not the only legitimate basis for ordering the planet,