Liberland: Czech Libertarian Declares New State on Danube Disputed by Croats and Serbs

This past week a new nation was declared, on a spot of land in the murkily demarcated border zone in the region of Slavonia where the Republic of Serbia and the Republic of Croatia meet.  But it is not a Serb or Croat behind the project, but a Czech one, and it is more ideological than ethnonationalist. The founder, Vít Jedlička, on April 13th, announced the independence of the Free Republic of Liberland (Svobodná republika Liberland) on a parcel of land on the west bank of the Danube (the mostly Croatian side) around Gornja Siga, an area which is a de facto no-man’s-land since neither side asserts a claim on it.

Gornja Siga, in green, is only one of several parcels of land
along the Croatian–Serbian frontier with no clear status.

In 1991, Croatia successfully seceded from the ethnic-Serb-dominated Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was subsequently whittled down of all of its peripheral republics until it became simply the rump Republic of Serbia.  Croatia is in the European Union (E.U.), but Serbia is still on a rocky road to normalization with the West.

The self-declared President Jedlička—a 31-year-old local official of the Czech Republic’s marginal, libertarian Free Citizens’ Party (Strana svobodných občanů), which is hostile to Czechs’ membership in the E.U.—admits that there are no “facts on the ground,” as it were, in Gornja Siga itself, only a declaration made from afar.  There was also an impromptu, unauthorized flag-raising on Liberlandic territory.  But although, as Jedlička told Time magazine, “it started a little bit like a protest, ... it’s really turning out to be a real project with real support.”

A Czech ZZ Top tribute band rocked a recent Free Citizens’ Party rally.

The three-square-mile statelet is to have no enforced taxation and no military and seems to be modeled on libertarian ideas that would be familiar to, for example, followers of Ron Paul and Rand Paul in the United States.  “The objective of the founders of the new state,” says Jedlička, “is to build a country where honest people can prosper without being oppressed by governments making their lives unpleasant through the burden of unnecessary restrictions and taxes.”  Apparently, there are already 20,000 applications for citizenship, being processed by seven volunteers working around the clock, but Jedlicka plans to cap the on-paper population at 3,000 or 5,000 for the time being.

One of the few requirements for citizenship is a lack of a Nazi, Communist, or “extremist” past.  (Presumably, radical anarcho-libertarianism is, for these purposes, not classified as “extremist.”)  It is unclear at this point whether anyone currently lives in the designated territory of Liberland, but aerial photos suggest that it its status as terra nullius is de facto and not just de jure.  The Serbian and Croatian governments have not yet responded to the declaration, though Egypt’s foreign ministry has already warned Egyptians against trying to move there.  Bitcoin, reportedly, is to be the national currency.

Originally, Jedlička’s idea was borne of frustration at the marginalization of libertarian ideas in the Czech Republic—even though his country is more committed to free-market principles than almost any in the world.  The Free Citizens’ Party has one seat in the mostly powerless European Parliament and none in the Czech legislature.  “I’m still going to be active in Czech politics,” he added.  “I would probably resign and let somebody else run Liberland for me if there was a chance to do political change in the Czech Republic.”

Most high-profile micronations can be found in the English-speaking world (especially Australia, for some reason) and Scandinavia, with some in the rest of western Europe as well.  The Balkans have vanishingly few so far.  But the Czech Republic is no stranger to the phenomenon.  In 1997 a Czech photographer named Tomáš Harabiš founded a Kingdom of Wallachia (Valašské Kralovství) in the republic’s Moravian Wallachia region (not to be confused with Romania’s region of Wallachia), and the noted Czech comic film actor Bolek Polívka was crowned King Boleslav the Gracious (later deposed). There are, on paper, 80,000 “Wallachian” citizens.

Moravian Wallachia’s King Boleslav the Gracious

More flamboyantly, a 16th-century castle in Černá, in the central Czech Republic, in 1996 became the physical site of the Other World Kingdom (O.W.K.), a micronation based on the B.D.S.M. (bondage-and-discipline/sado-masochism) subculture, in particular the “femdom” (female domination) branch of it.  Really a glorified sex club, it touted itself as an absolute matriarchal monarchy under Queen Patricia I, with institutionalized male slavery.  The O.W.K. now exists only online.

Four worthless vermin—I mean, citizens—pay tribute to Queen Patricia I in the erstwhile Other World Kingdom.

It is no accident for the Czech Republic to originate what may yet prove to be the most prominent libertarian micronation movement.  During the Cold War, Czechoslovakia was arguably the most culturally Western-leaning part of the Communist, Soviet-aligned East Bloc, possibly even more than East Germany; Prague, after all, is farther west than Vienna or Berlin.  The country’s leading dissident, Václav Havel, who became president after the 1989 revolution, was an unabashed Americophile, obsessed with the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol.  His successor, Václav Klaus, was one of the most ardently pro-free-market heads of state—more Thatcherite than Margaret Thatcher herself.  When a dissident-spearheaded set of mild reforms known as “socialism with a human face” (socializmus s ľudskou tvárou) led in 1968 to the brutal Soviet invasion and crackdown known as the Prague Spring, it understandably soured many Czechs on the idea of the mixed-economy social-democratic approach halfway between socialism and capitalism which was the emerging model in western Europe and in places like Poland, where dissent took the form of organized labor.  And, as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, Czechs were influenced by free-market economists such as Austria’s Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School of economic theory and two Nobel laureates: the Viennese-born Prussian–Bohemian aristocrat Friedrich Hayek and the dwarfish Milton Friedman (author of Free to Choose), who was (like Andy Warhol, funnily enough), the son of immigrants from the old Czechoslovakia’s eastern region of Carpathian Ruthenia (now an increasingly contested part of Ukraine, as discussed elsewhere in this blog).

Milton Friedman (left; actual size) also had Czechoslovak blood in his veins.

But Liberland is hardly the first libertarian experiment in the annals of micronationdom.  In the 1970s, a Lithuanian-American real-estate tycoon named Michael J. Oliver attempted to take advantage of the unrest accompanying two separate British colonies’ independence days with libertarian insurrections.  First, in 1973, he played on the fears of black rule on the part of the large white minority on the Abaco Islands portion of the Bahamas to try to declare a separate free-market utopia, with the help of white-supremacist activists and C.I.A.-linked American mercenaries, including Larry Flynt’s alleged personal hired hit-man.  Then, in 1980, as the United Kingdom and France’s shared “condominium” rule came to an end as the New Hebrides, in the South Pacific, became Vanuatu, Oliver tried to piggy-back his cause onto a separatist movement among the cargo cults of the archipelago’s northern Espiritu Santo island, which he wanted to call the Republic of Vemerana.  He even strung the French government along for a while with the idea.

Oliver’s most tragicomic attempt at a libertarian state had been in the early 1970s, when he barged tons of sand from Australia to the Minerva Reefs, a set of low seamounts between Fiji and Tonga which did not spend enough of the tidal cycle above water to be classified under international law as “territory.”  But as soon as the island was built up enough to pass legal muster, Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, Tonga’s king, claimed it, sent a naval vessel to eject Oliver and his nascent Republic of Minerva.  (Today, the reefs have eroded away once again to nothingness, but rival claims are still being made by Tonga, Fiji, and one “Prince Calvin,” an American who says he is the “island’s” monarch.)  Oliver’s similar “seasteading” project in Palmyra Atoll, a U.S. territory near Hawai‘i, got even less far.

Another libertarian seasteading pioneer was Werner K. Stiefel, an American drugs mogul who in 1969 tried to start a utopia by fomenting a rebel movement in the uninhabited Prickly Pear Cays during a brief separatist rebellion in the British colony of Anguilla.  After British troops put an end to that, Stiefel tried landfilling to seastead something called “Operation Atlantis” on Silver Shoals, disputed specks of land between Haiti and the Bahamas.  Atlantis was a name for the invisibility-cloaked libertarian refuge in the Rockies in Ayn Rand’s influential 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged.  (For more on seasteading, see articles from this blog on the Principality of Sealand, here and here.)

An artist’s rendering of the planned Principality of New Utopia, in the western Caribbean

Similar attempts in the Caribbean were the Wall Street swindler Robert Vesco’s “Sovereign Order of New Aragon” territory, on Barbuda, and the Principality of New Utopia, founded on reefs between the Cayman Islands and Belize in the 1990s by another shady Wall Street type, Howard Turney (using the pseudonym Lazarus Long, borrowed from Robert A. Heinlein’s libertarian sci-fi novels).

Would you buy a used micronation from this man?
Robert Vesco was never a big fan of government regulation.

Other projects have included, in the 1950s and ’60s, the nation of Taluga (a.k.a. Aphrodite), on the unclaimed Cortes Bank off the coast of Baja California; recent plans to build free-market city-states in Trujillo, Honduras, and on Belle Isle, a park on a riverine island between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario; and a west Texas community called Paulville, after Congressman Ron Paul, though Paul himself wants nothing to do with it.  Even Silicon Valley has (as I’ve written about in this blog) gotten into the act, with plans either to split the region off California as an autonomous state free of government economic regulations or found a free-market “floating city” just outside northern California’s territorial waters to be called Blueseed.

Of all these past attempts, President Jedlička might do well to note the fate of the Republic of Minerva.  He chose the Minerva Reefs because they were pieces of “land” that had fallen between the cracks of two established states, Fiji and Tonga, which were not claiming them.  But then as soon as the project got rolling, the neighbors changed their minds and wanted in on the project.  That ended badly.  Imagine how much uglier it could get if Jedlička not only lost his utopia invaded but found himself literally in the middle of a renewed territorial battle between Serbs and Croats.  Liberland might be in a pretty spot, but it’s one of the most volatile borders in recent history.

Thanks to Trena Klohe and Alexander Velky for first alerting me to this story.

[You can read more about many of these and other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Breaking News: Pro-Kremlin Mob in East Ukraine Declares “Donetsk People’s Republic”; Unrest in Luhansk, Kharkiv as War with Russia Looms

Today (April 7th) marks the second time in about a month that Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk oblast, which is dominated by Russian-speakers, has declared independence.  (The first time, in early March, shortly before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, was reported at the time in this blog.)  That time (as also reported in this blog), the ringleader, Pavel Gubarev of the Donbas People’s Militia (Donbas being the name for this border region), was arrested by Ukrainian authorities shortly after he invited Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, to send in the military to “protect” the fledgling republic.  This time, it might not end so quickly.

For one thing, today’s pro-Kremlin street-politics offensive is multi-pronged.  On the same day, oblast government buildings were taken over in two other capitals of eponymous Russian-speaking oblasts, Kharkiv and Luhansk, as part of a cat-and-mouse game between pro-Russian mobs (many of them clearly agents provocateurs bused in by Moscow) and pro-unity ethnic Ukrainians.  (Some Russian-speakers and ethnic Russians side against the separatists, too, but figures are hard to come by.)  The city of Kharkiv is a particularly symbolic prize because it was the capital of a pro-Bolshevik republic during the Russian Civil War, shortly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, while Ukrainian nationalists based in Lviv and Kyiv defended doomed Menshevik redoubts in what is now Ukraine’s west.  The Kharkiv republic eventually became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic within the U.S.S.R.  The latest word, however, from Ukraine’s interior ministry, is that pro-Ukrainian forces have retaken the Kharkiv government buildings.

The scene today under the Lenin statue (in Donetsk or Kharkiv?).

In Donetsk, however, pro-Russian forces remain in control of the government buildings as of this writing.  An independent “Donetsk People’s Republic” has been declared (Gubarev’s rebellion called it simply “Donetsk Republic”).  A popular so-called Council of Donbas has taken control of the government buildings, as well as the state police headquarters and a power station.  A statement from the Council, addressed to the general public as well as Putin, was released, reading, in part, “The Donetsk Republic is to be created within the administrative borders of the Donetsk region.  This decision will come into effect after the referendum.  Without support it will be hard for us to stand against the junta in Kiev.  We are addressing Russian President Putin because we can only entrust our security to Russia.”  The referendum is to take place, the Council says, by May 11th. Ukrainian national elections are already scheduled for May 25th.

The Council of Donbas.  That is the Donetsk coat-of-arms at top.

According to Ukraine’s ministry of the interior, the unrest in Luhansk, capital of another border oblast, included pro-Russians storming the state police headquarters over Sunday night and seizing an armory.  There were nine injuries.

This Council of Donbas member seems to be wearing a “Free Pavel Gubarev” t-shirt.
(Russian media report that Ukrainian authorities have tortured him in prison.)

Media are also reporting sporadic violence against Ukrainian soldiers by Russian ones.

This weirdly ornate, czarist-looking (?) flag was brandished by a
Russian ultranationalist today in Donetsk after the declaration of independence.

The Ukrainian government is in crisis mode.  Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s minister of the interior, has recently arrived in Kharkiv, while Vitaly Yarema, the first deputy prime minister, was en route to Donetsk, as was Yulia Tymoshenko, the anti-Kremlin opposition leader who was jailed during the tenure of Ukraine’s recently impeached pro-Kremlin president, Viktor Yanukovych.  Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andriy Deshchytsya, told Russian media today that if Russia sent the military into eastern Ukraine then the two countries would enter a state of war.

They haven’t yet made flags that add “People’s.”

The international community has reacted swiftly. The president of the Czech Republic, Miloš Zeman, said, “If Russia decides to extend its territorial expansion to eastern Ukraine, the fun is over” and added that in such a case the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—of which the Czechs are a member but Ukraine is not—should intervene on the ground.  The United States government is accusing the Russian government of fomenting the current unrest.

The scene today in Luhansk.  (Flag on left is unidentified.)

Watch this blog for further updates.

Pro-Kremlin activists take over the state security service building in Luhansk.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

In U.N. Vote, Palestine Gains Nearly the Last Remaining Markers of Sovereign Statehood

Some countries that win their independence get it all at once.  Others achieve it in painful, incremental steps over decades.  The State of Palestine is in the second category.  Yesterday, November 29, 2012, the State of Palestine was admitted as an “observer state”—not member state—in the United Nations General Assembly.  This is the same status that Switzerland had before 2002 and which Vatican City still has—both of them long recognized by the entire world as true, sovereign states in every sense of the word.

What is—or rather, perhaps, will eventually be seen to be as—the date of Palestine’s independence?  1948?  1974?  1988?  1993?  2011?  2012?

Palestinians were offered an independent state after the Second World War, as part of the same U.N. plan that created the State of Israel, but Palestinians did not want their homeland divided and half given away to new arrivals, so they rejected the plan, and Israel filled the entire vacuum created by the United Kingdom’s relinquishment of its Palestinian mandate, and Israel forced aside as many Palestinians as it felt it needed to in order to build a nation in its enlarged allocation.  The seeds of decades of grievance were planted.

Born in two disconnected shards of territory—the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—relinquished by Jordan and Egypt in the 1970s after their defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, the idea of a newly sovereign Palestine arose gradually, with the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.).  The P.L.O. was granted “observer” status in the U.N. General Assembly in 1974 as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people,” but it was not a member state.  The P.L.O.’s government-in-exile declared independence in 1988, and one by one nations around the world, starting with its Arab allies, recognized it.  Not just the Muslim states that never—and in some cases still don’t—recognize Israel, but eventually most of the world.  Perhaps the moment when states recognizing Palestine tipped above 50%, whenever that was (some time in the 1990s?) could be thought of as its independence day.

In 1993, the concrete trappings of statehood—the administration of actual territory—came with the Oslo Accords.  These agreements created the Palestinian National Authority, which now governs Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank.  In exchange, the P.L.O. and Fatah (which governs the West Bank) officially pursue a two-state solution and recognize Israel’s right to exist.

In 2011, Palestine applied for full member-state status in the U.N.—a symbolic gesture, since it was a foregone conclusion that the United States—Israel’s only true ally—would use its veto power as one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to block the move, despite the fact that the motion had an overwhelming majority of member states supporting it.

This time around, with a revised goal of observer-state status, vetoes are not possible; it is a clear vote by the General Assembly.  The vote yesterday was 138-9 in favor of admission, with 41 abstentions and 5 absences.

The “yes” votes included the Security Council members Russia, China, and France; and major nations such as India, Pakistan, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia, Spain, Italy, Austria, all of Scandinavia, nearly all of Latin America, the entire Muslim world, nearly all of Africa, etc. etc.

The 41 abstentions included NATO and other U.S. allies such as Australia, the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, and South Korea, as well as NATO and other western-leaning countries in eastern Europe which are known for their slavish adherence to U.S. foreign policy: Poland, the Baltic States, Slovakia, and so on.  But even these countries would not go along fully with the U.S. denial of the arc of history.

The eight “no” votes were the U.S., Israel, Canada, the Czech Republic (see “slavish adherence,” previous paragraph), four former U.S. colonies (Panama, plus the quasi-independent Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau), and Nauru, an eight-square-mile speck in the Pacific which is the third-smallest country in the world.  If there were ever any doubt that the U.S. was on the wrong side of history on this question, this pathetic list drives the point home once and for all.

How U.N. member states voted on Palestinian statehood this week.  “Yes” votes are in green, “no” votes in red, abstentions in yellow, and absences in blue.

So what does this mean in practical terms?  Not much right off the bat.  Palestine already enjoys diplomatic relations of a sort with much of the world and deals, to all practical purposes, as a sovereign state with nearly every country—even those that do not recognize it diplomatically, including Israel.  But now all of the things Israel does to Palestine—bombing its cities, blockading its ports, building illegal armed settlements in its territory, assassinating its leaders—are acts of aggression by one state against another.  So, of course—and very justly so—are Hamas’s rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.  No longer can Hamas hide behind the legalistic ambiguities enjoyed by “non-state actors.”  In the long term, this is the best thing for the Israeli people and the Palestinian people both; their fates are intertwined, and they both deserve equal amounts of dignity and recognition—and responsibility for being peaceful global citizens.

Meanwhile, not only the terrorists of Hamas but also Israel’s bloodthirsty generals, its unaccountable and amoral intelligence agencies, and its ultra-right-wing fanatical West Bank settlers—who do not represent the Israeli people as a whole, it should be said—all of them are stomping mad about what happened yesterday.  That’s perhaps the surest sign that this was the right thing to do.

Happy birthday, Palestine.

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

South Ossetia War Jitters, 27 Killed in North Caucasus Insurgency, Dagestanis on Trial in Prague: Caucasus Update, 16-22 September 2012

TOP STORY:

SOUTH OSSETIA CLAIMS GEORGIA GEARING UP FOR WAR;

E.U. TEAM SAYS ONLY TROOP BUILD-UP IS RUSSIAN, ON OSSETIAN SIDE

European Union observers along the border between Georgia and South Ossetia

The president of the mostly-unrecognized Russian puppet state of the Republic of South Ossetia, Leonid Tibilov, said on September 18th that what he called a build-up of Georgian troops along their shared border meant that “Georgia is preparing seriously for a war” to retake what Tbilisi still considers a Georgian rebgion.  However, the European Union Monitoring Mission along the border claims that there is no Georgian military build-up, but that there is one on the South Ossetian side by Russian troops that have occupied South Ossetia since Russia invaded Georgia and solidified South Ossetia’s secession in 2008.  Other than Russia and a handful of minor countries, the world regards South Ossetia as part of the Republic of Georgia.

Leonid Tibilov is prepared for war.

NORTH CAUCASUS (CHECHNYA, DAGESTAN, INGUSHETIA, CIRCASSIA)

Czech Court Tries Dagestani Counterfeiters Linked to Caucasus Emirate.  In the Czech Republic, a court in Prague began on September 20th its trial of four men from southwestern Russia’s Republic of Dagestan, along with two from Bulgaria and one from Moldova, accused of manufacturing counterfeit identity cards in the service of Shariat Jamaat, which is the Dagestani branch of the Caucasus Emirate movement, which would like Russia’s predominantly-Muslim areas to split off and form an Islamic state.  None of the suspects, who include one woman, pleaded guilty, but some claimed that they did not know the counterfeiting operation was connected to terrorism.  This is the Czech Republic’s first terrorism trial.

24 Rebels, 3 Police Killed in Violence across North Caucasus.  In southwestern Russia’s North Caucasus region, the federal National Anti-Terrorist Committee announced that five Islamist rebels were killed in the Republic of Dagestan on September 15th in a skirmish with special forces.  The leader of the “Tsuntinsky gang,” Gamzat Magomedov, was among the dead.  Casualties on the Russian side were limited to a police sniper from the Republic of Adygea, in the western North Caucasus, who died, and three others injured.  However, the Islamist separatist Caucasus Emirate group that operates in Dagestan claimed on its website that three “Russian invader policemen” were killed, quoting “a local puppet official,” though official sources all say only one policeman died.  A grocery store in Babayurt, Dagestan, was raked by gunfire on September 17th, followed by a bomb planted at the store’s entrance being defused by authorities.  There were no injuries.  Then, on September 18th, media reported the police killing, also in Dagestan, of two militants, including one leader, Rustam Alderov (nom de guerre: Abul Muhammad), who is suspected of having been in charge of over 30 people organized into about 10 cells.  The same day, local police and members of Russia’s Federal Security Service (F.S.B., successor to the K.G.B.) killed five rebels in the Republic of Ingushetia, in a gun battle resulting from a traffic stop.  Three of the dead men were on wanted lists and were wearing explosive belts.  Eight suspected militants were killed on September 20th in the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, in the western North Caucasus.  Those rebels, including two women, had barricaded themselves in the republican capital, Nalchik.  Also on that day, a policeman was injured when gunmen opened fire on a police checkpoint in Dagestan.  The same day, the Chechen Republic announced that skirmishes between security forces and militants in its territory had killed two officers and four rebels.  The often-unreliable website of the Islamist separatist Caucasus Emirate movement put the figures in Chechnya for this week as 7 Chechen Republic (i.e. pro-Moscow) “minions” killed and 15 injured and two “mujahideen martyrs” (i.e., two rebels killed).

North Caucasus Republics’ Leaders Speak Out against Anti-Muslim Video.  The governments of the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, the Chechen Republic, and the Republic of Ingushetia demanded this week that Internet providers in their territories block access to Innocence of Muslims, the low-budget, Coptic-American-produced video parodying the Prophet Muhammad which has inspired anti-American rioting across the Muslim world.  Chechnya’s Moscow-appointed authoritarian president, Ramzan Kadyrov, used the occasion to blame the film for the assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Libya earlier this month and to praise Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for promoting religious tolerance [sic].

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it in spring 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]