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.]

Seeds of Fascism: Century-Old Soiled Hanky Could Enable Cloning of Carnaro Regency’s Tin-Pot Dictator-Prince

Sometimes there’s a theme in a week’s minor news stories, and this week it seems to be: the mislaid spermatazoa of flamboyantly (even specifically upward-turning!) mustachioed Mediterranean fascist-sympathizing bohemian egomaniacs.  First, there was the news that one Pilar Abel, a 58-year-old Spaniard, was filing a paternity suit against the estate of Salvador Dalí, claiming the bombastic Catalan surrealist painter had had an affair with her mother while he was married to Gala Diakonova Éluard Dalí, his Tatarstan-born Russo-Spanish muse.  Of course, the case will get tossed right out; after all, she looks nothing like him:

And now there is the news that police in Italy have used a semen-stained handkerchief to map the genome of Gabriele d’Annunzio, an Italian poet, playwright, and ennobled prince who founded his own authoritarian micronation of sorts, the Regency of Carnaro, in 1919, and styled himself “il Duce” (“the Leader”) in anticipation of the eventual rise of Benito Mussolini.  The aristocratic snail tracks were sent, in 1916, to Countess Olga Levi Brunner, d’Annunzio’s mistress, and were preserved for most of a century in a private collection in Cagliari, Sardinia.  The hanky is now housed with other Annunziana at the Vittoriale degli Italiani (“Shrine of Italian Victories”) museum at his the prince’s former home on Lake Garda in Lombardy.

Gabriele d’Annunzio, Prince of Montenevoso

In the aftermath of the First World War, the Kingdom of Italy and the fledgling Kingdom of Yugoslavia were still squabbling over where their final border would be.  D’Annunzio, a wildly popular poet and war hero, in 1919 marched a makeshift army into Fiume—a then-Italian-populated town which today is on the Croatia side of the border and named Rijeka—and claimed it for Italy.  Italy’s King Victor Immanuel III, however, wanted no part of the plot and declined to formally reabsorb the enclave.  So d’Annunzio—an androgynous and wildly prolific bisexual erotic conqueror who followed the Italian art movement called Decadentism and whose megalomaniacal nicknames for himself included “il Magnifico” (“the Magnificent”) and “il Profeto” (“the Prophet”)—declared the town the Regency of Carnaro (Reggenza Italiana del Carnaro) and ran it as his de facto–independent personal fief for a year before the Italian navy retook the town.  Carnaro’s bizarre constitution, which was a piece of performance art in itself, declared “music” to be the founding political principle of the state, but d’Annunzio’s bombastic balcony speeches and black-shirted militias anticipated—some would say laid the groundwork for—the capital-F Fascism which later, in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, swallowed up Italy and half of Europe.  (Carnaro was later known as the Free State of Fiume (Stato Libero di Fiume) and in 1924 was formally attached to Italy.  After the Second World War, despite an attempt to revive the Carnaro entity, it reverted to Yugoslavian control.)

Olga Brunner, the prince’s mistress.
She’d better wait till the maid leaves the room before opening the mail.

Two years after Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 and began gently bending the monarchy to his will, Victor Immanuel III ennobled d’Annunzio as “Prince of Montenevoso”—the geographical principality in question being an Alpine town and district then within Italy but now known as Snežnik, in the Republic of Slovenia.

Poor Prince Gabriele: before the age of smartphones and “sexting,”
little ... um ... presents had to be sent through the royal mails.

D’Annunzio’s semen and its DNA are being used for comparison with his great-grandson Federico d’Annunzio, the current Prince of Montenevoso (Italy, a republic, nonetheless retains a semi-official aristocracy), and all press reports indicate that it is a test run for forensic genomics that does not rely on exhumation.  Though one wonders if something else is going on.  A succession dispute or paternity case?

In the waning days of the Second World War, a second try
at an independent Carnaro also claimed some now-Croatian islands in the Adriatic.

Indeed, the chief of the museum which owns the crusty rag, Giordano Bruno Guerri, raised, in an interview, the specter of a kind of small-scale version of The Boys from Brazil, musing that theoretically the poet, whom Italians regard as ambivalent sort of national hero and who died in 1938, could now be cloned.  “Nobody wants to clone d’Annunzio,” Guerri hastily clarified, “but nobody knows what changes will take place in science and society.  It’s good the DNA has been collected.”  Hmm, hard to know where he’s going with that.  If Guerri is planning to clone and breed a Decadentist pro-Fascist aristocracy to wrest control of Italy from corrupt republican politicos and imperialist Teutonic creditors, then where will it end?  We may have to swipe Monica Lewinsky’s dress from the Department of Justice’s evidence vault and clone an army of Bill Clintons to stop him.  Who’s in?

[You can read more about the Free State of Fiume, the Regency of Carnaro, and other bizarre and obscure separatist movements 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.]

Serbia’s Albanians Turn Kosovo–Crimea Parallels on Their Head, Ask Tirana to Annex Preševo Valley

Residents of Preševo, Serbia, celebrating the centenary of Albanian independence in 2012 (BBC)

Diplomacy over the Russian Federation’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula this month has swirled around the question of whether Crimea can or cannot be legitimately compared to Kosovo, the ethnic-Albanian “autonomous” province in southern Serbia which declared independence in 2008 after a 1999 bombing campaign by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) chased Serbia’s ultranationalist government out of the area.  Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, declares that if NATO can unilaterally carve a new territory out of the Republic of Serbia, a Russian ally, citing Serbian oppression of the ethnic-Albanian minority that is a majority in Kosovo, then by the same token Russia can unilaterally separate Crimea from a newly westward-tilting Ukraine by citing Ukrainian government persecution of the ethnic-Russian minority that is a majority there.  Just as the international community has so far not recognized Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Putin himself uses Russia’s veto power as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council to block the Republic of Kosovo’s membership in the U.N. General Assembly, even though it is recognized as sovereign by a (slight) majority of the world’s countries.  The United States and NATO reject Putin’s argument, among other things pointing out, quite rightly, that Serbian violations of Kosovar Albanians’ human rights in the 1990s was all too real, while the so-called “fascist” and “neo-Nazi” Ukrainian government’s persecution of ethnic Russians is a shoddy myth perpetrated in the echo chamber of Russia’s (and eastern Ukraine’s) Kremlin-controlled media.  But George W. Bush’s bald-faced lies in defense of his 2003 invasion of Iraq make it easy for Russian nationalists to smirk at such hair-splitting.

Reunification with Albania is a popular idea in Kosovo.

And so the arguments go back and forth about whether Kosovo is equivalent to Crimea.  But this week leaders from the small ethnic-Albanian minority in the non-Kosovo parts of the rump Serbia are using the analogy to equate Russia’s moral position with that of Albania and Kosovo.  To understand this, one must understand that Serbian nationalists have always accused Kosovar separatists of secretly wanting to reunify eventually with Albania in a “Greater Albania” which would also include ethnic-Albanian bits of Montenegro, Macedonia, and even Greece and Serbia.  In this, their fears have been vindicated—sort of.  The leadership in both Albania and Kosovo speak now of Albanian reunification, but only within the context of eventual membership in the European Union (E.U.), and in this view Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia could be members as well (Greece already is one)—with the free movement of peoples making all these borders irrelevant.

The municipalities of Serbia’s Preševo Valley shown in red

Jonuz Musliu, deputy mayor of Bujanovac (Bujanoc, in Albanian), a predominantly-ethnic-Albanian town in southern Serbia’s Preševo Valley, said this week, “If Moscow wants Crimea, then Tirana and Priština should unite with the region of the Preševo Valley” (referring to Tirana and Priština, capitals of Albania and Kosovo, respectively).  Bujanovac and Preševo are both municipalities of between 30,000 and 40,000 people that make up the Preševo Valley region, wedged in the extreme south of Serbia between Kosovo and Macedonia.  Ethnic Albanians make up only one-half of 1% of Serbia’s over 7 million people.  Musliu, who in addition to his municipal role also heads the Party for Democratic Prosperity (P.D.P.), an ethnic-Albanian political party which operates in both Serbia and Macedonia, referred also to a 1992 referendum in which Preševars opted for joining Kosovo.  In those days, Musliu headed something called the Liberation Army of Preševo, Medveđa, and Bujanovac (Ushtria Çlirimtare e Preshevës, Medvegjës dhe Bujanocit, or U.Ç.P.M.B.), which aimed for three municipalities to secede from what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia–Montenegro).  Medveđa is a much smaller Serbian municipality to the north, along the Kosovo border.

Serbian mayor, Albanian flag: Jonuz Musliu would like to redraw some borders.

The rebuke from Serbia’s cabinet minister in charge of Kosovar matters, Aleksandar Vulin, came swiftly.  Vulin called Musliu’s statements a “threat to the territorial integrity of Serbia” and “urged the international community to loudly and publicly condemn such statements and show that it is against such attitudes,” adding, “When it comes to the latest threats to the territorial integrity and wholeness of the Republic of Serbia, this time arriving from Musliu, I wish to warn that any such statement is very dangerous and could have devastating consequences in the whole territory of Serbia.”

Serbia’s minister for Kosovo affairs Aleksandar Vulin,
portrayed here by the actor Steve Buscemi, reacted angrily to Musliu’s declaration

It is unclear what kind of game Musliu is playing.  Perhaps he is engaging in political theater, voicing support for a politically impossible proposal as a way of pointing up the absurdity of the equivalency between Crimea and Kosovo made by Serbian and Russian nationalists.  Or perhaps this represents a very real Albanian nationalist shift toward making future dreams of “Greater Albania” a crisis on the ground in today’s Balkans.

A very expansive view of a Greater Albania,
based on historical borders, not current ethnic ones.

Either way, Musliu’s comments will cheer ultranationalists among the ethnic Albanians who make up about 5% of Montenegro’s population, and fully a quarter of Macedonia’s.  (In addition, there are about half a million Albanian citizens living in Greece as immigrants, dwarfing the minuscule Albanian-speaking population in the border regions.)  And they will cause pan-Slavic nationalists among the Serbian population—including the fiercely autonomist Serbs of North Kosovo—to dig in their heels.

Another rendering, this time by district/province.

Already, the idea is catching on elsewhere in the Balkans.  In Bosnia and Herzegovina—which in 1995, after a bloody war of secession from Yugoslavia, was separated into two halves—the ethnically Serb half is talking about splitting into two independent states.  Milorad Dodik, president of the Republika Srpska, said on March 18th, fresh from a meeting with Russia’s ambassador to Bosnia, “Bring back to Republika Srpska the powers that it had under the Dayton agreement and it will not leave Bosnia.  If you do not bring the powers back, our conviction that we have to move on will get stronger.”  The Serb half (the other half is composed of Croats and Muslim Bosniaks) has gradually ceded many more powers to the federal government in Sarajevo since 1995.  The original Serb goal, during the Bosnian War, had been to attach that half to the Serb-dominated remainder of Yugoslavia, and Serbia–Republika Srpska reunification is a dream that many Serb nationalists have never abandoned.  The parallels with the Soviet break-up are multitudinous.

Bosnia’s internal partition today.  The “Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina” half
is sometimes called the Muslim–Croat Federation.

By claiming that the Russian government has the right to intervene militarily to protect ethnic Russians anywhere, he has opened Pandora’s Box.  Now every ethnonational group with an ultranationalist streak will be dreaming of a “Greater Such-and-Such” spilling over its neighbors’ borders.  Just watch.

Kosovar and Albanian flags are both common sights in Priština.

(In other Kosovo news, the Greek government announced this week that it was prepared to grant diplomatic recognition to Kosovo, and Slovakia and Romania are apparently to follow suit.  This leaves only Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia itself as the only immediate neighbors still opposing Kosovo’s independence.  This will leave Spain and the Republic of Cyprus as the only two of the 28 E.U. members with no diplomatic ties to Kosovo.  Spain is fearful to set an example for separatists in Catalonia and the Basque Country, while Albania’s interests in Kosovo are a bit too much like Turkey’s in the puppet state of Northern Cyprus for Cyprus’s comfort.  On the whole, the Crimea crisis has been good for Kosovar recognition.  Greece, Slovakia, and Romania are surely feeling now that E.U. unity in the face of aggression is now more important than fretting about needlessly antagonizing Serbia, which had been at the source of their waffling on the Kosovo issue over the years.)

[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 and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  (That is shorter than the previous working title.)  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, will be on shelves and available on Amazon in February 2015.  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 and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

El Salvador Grants Recognition to Kosovo as Haiti Cuts Ties with Sahrawi Republic

It’s been a week of one step forward and one step back for partially recognized states in the Old World trying to solidify diplomatic support in the Americas.  The Republic of El Salvador became the 105th sovereign state to recognize the independence of the Republic of Kosovo, but the Republic of Haiti surprised observers by revoking its diplomatic recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R.) (a.k.a. Western Sahara), the former Spanish Sahara mostly occupied by Morocco.

The October 4th announcement on Kosovo came via the Twitter feed of Enver Hoxhaj, the country’s foreign minister, who learned of El Salvador’s decision through the Kosovar embassy in New York.  Kosovo had most recently received recognition from Libya, Grenada, and Thailand.  The former Serbian province, still claimed by the Republic of Serbia, has been steadily gaining diplomatic partners following the signal moment in December 2012 when the Commonwealth of Dominica, a former British colony in the Caribbean, became the 97th United Nations member-state to grant recognition, which pushed Kosovo over the 50% mark (as reported at the time in this blog).

Countries that recognize Kosovo are shown in green.

But Kosovo’s membership in the U.N. General Assembly is still blocked by two of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, both for reasons of paranoia about their own internal fissions and Russia for the added reason of an emotional pan-Slavic, and thus pro-Serbian, ideological allegiance.  Currently, Western allies of Kosovo are attempting at least to convince some of the holdouts among Kosovo’s immediate neighbors, in particular Romania and Greece.

In the case of Greece, Kosovo’s secession still brings up ugly memories of the predominantly-Slavic Republic of Macedonia’s emergence from the wreckage of Yugoslavia in 1993.  Athens still points out that Macedonia is historically a culturally-Greek region lying mostly within Greece (Alexander the Great was Macedonian, for example).  Greeks also seem unable to shake memories of the Second World War, following which a new Macedonia within Yugoslavia—with the current republic’s borders—was founded by partisans of a fascist insurgent army which had connived in Nazi-allied Bulgaria’s invasion of Greece and had tried to seat an Aromanian nationalist as voivode (prince) of an independent Slavic state in the Macedonia region that would be a refuge for Greece’s Aromanian minority as well.  (Aromanians speak a language related to Romanian.)  Romania itself, a staunch European Union and NATO member, will probably come around.  (See more detail on Kosovo’s status in my blog article from last year on the subject.)

The dotted line shows the approximate extent of the traditional Greek region of Macedonia.

Other European holdouts include Spain, which has its own internal Basque and Catalan separatist movements, and Slovakia.

Countries that recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic are in green.  Dark grey are those, including Haiti, that have withdrawn recognition over the years.  The S.A.D.R. itself is in red.

A bit less understandable than Kosovo’s successes and setbacks is the recent move by Haiti, announced this week, to withdraw its 2006 recognition of the Sahrawi republic.  The S.A.D.R. claims all of Western Sahara but the “black,” sub-Saharan Sahrawi people are at the mercy of the brutal repression of (Arab) Moroccan occupation forces.  The S.A.D.R., which administers only a sliver of land behind a series of sand berms erected by Morocco, is recognized by 49 countries, only just over a quarter of U.N. member states, including most of Africa and a considerable number of Latin American countries as well—also by the African Union (A.U.).  Haiti follows a few other Caribbean nations in withdrawing membership—mostly as a result of buckling to diplomatic pressure from Morocco, which is something of a diplomatic pariah nation within Africa but which for countries farther afield is a more promising economic partner.

In red is the territory controlled by the partially recognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

But in Haiti’s case it is disappointing because of the country’s symbolic role for African anti-colonialists.  In 1804, after a successful slave revolt, Haiti became, in terms of the modern system of nation-states, the second independent modern state in the Americas (after the United States) and the first Black republic anywhere.  In the late 1960s, Haiti was also the only non-African state among the five that recognized the Republic of Biafra before that nation was crushed by a brutal siege by Nigeria.

Haiti symbolizes freedom from colonialism for many sub-Saharan Africans—
but this week not so much.

Pan-African unity is supposed to be a big deal for Haiti.  Perhaps it will before long come to its senses and put ideals before economics and convenience.

[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 some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Slovene E.U. Diplomat’s Words on Vojvodina’s Status Ruffle Serb Feathers

Vojvodine nationalists rallying in Novi Sad, the provincial capital

Jelko Kacin, a Slovenian diplomat who is the European Union’s “rapporteur” for the Republic of Serbia, stepped on a landmine in the European Parliament last week by calling for a clarification of the status of Vojvodina, an autonomous—but not really—province within Serbia.  Then his remarks were interpreted with great alarm, putting the Serbian foreign ministry into damage-control mode.

Jelko Kacin

While speaking on a panel on Vojvodina at the E.U. legislature in Brussels, Belgium, Kacin said, “Having in mind upcoming negotiations on Serbia’s membership in the E.U., I believe this is the right moment to raise the question of the constitutional and statutory regulation of the autonomy of Vojvodina.  The present framework for autonomy is uncertain and vague, which prevents Vojvodina, and therefore Serbia, from developing its capacities.”

Map showing Vojvodina within the former Yugoslavia (the green countries)

Vojvodina, in the north of Serbia and forming the only Serbian borders with Hungary and Croatia, is historically and potentially one of the most multi-ethnic and contentious portions of the former Yugoslavia, but it largely stayed out of the fray of the Wars of Yugoslav Secession in the early 1990s.  Vojvodina was an ethnically-Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but when the empire was dismantled after losing the First World War the newly created independent Hungarian Republic set Vojvodina, including a portion of what is now western Romania, as a Hungarian-dominated Banat Republic.  Serbian and Romanian forces invaded the fledgling Banatia, as it was also known, and divvied it up: Romania got what is now its western Transylvania region, while Serbia absorbed the rest and made it the autonomous province of Danube Banovina within the Serbian part of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia.  (For a discussion of separatism in Transylvania, see a recent article from this blog.)

During the Second World War, the Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet state, and Hungary, then an Axis power, took over the province and tried to revive the Banat Republic, with ethnic Germans and Hungarians in charge.  It failed, and after the war Yugoslavia filled its vacant Nazi concentration camps with Vojvodina’s Germans, who were subsequently cleansed from the province, and Danube Banovina was renamed Vojvodina.

As the “Banat Republic,” Vojvodina (dark green, at center) almost achieved independence
in the aftermath of the First World War.

Yugoslavia’s Communist dictator, Josip Broz Tito, granted Vojvodina some genuine, but limited, autonomy in 1974, but then Vojvodina’s hopes of further loosening ties to Belgrade after the fall of the Berlin Wall were dashed when Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milošević, revoked its autonomy in 1990.  It has never been restored, so it is the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in name only.  Ethnically, the region is two-thirds Serb, but the 13% Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) minority feels that, with the de facto independence of Kosovo—once Serbia’s other “autonomous province”—they are the last colonized people in the Serb mini-empire.  Belgrade is ever alert to the possibility of the province flaring up in rebellion.

Vojvodina’s autonomy: Tito giveth, and Slobo taketh away

In Brussels, Mr. Kacin—a former independence leader during Slovenia’s “Ten-Day War” of secession from Belgrade in 1990—was not being inflammatory.  He merely pointed out that if Serbia is to get its bureaucratic house in order in preparation for E.U. candidacy, then it must sort out Vojvodina’s financial relationship to the central government.  If it is an autonomous unit, then it is eligible for special E.U. funds after accession, but if so, the implication went, it would have to start being treated autonomously, and its role in the levying and spending of tax funds must be clarified.  Pending resolution of the conflict over Kosovo, Serbia is considered close to the front of the line for E.U. enlargement, along with Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo itself.

Aleksandar Vučić

Serbia was furious at this interest in its internal structure, however, and by September 19th, Serbia’s first deputy prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, had bullied Kacin into appearing alongside him at a special press conference, where he intoned sternly that Kacin’s statement was liable to misinterpretation, adding, “I can say this in Kacin’s presence, because I know he also believes that Vojvodina cannot be separated from Serbia.”

One wonders if Kacin, during this, thought to himself, “Where have I heard those words before?  Oh, yes—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo ...”

[You can read more about Vojvodina, Kosovo, other sovereignty and independence 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 interview for more information on the book.]