A Crypto Micronation’s Future Hangs on a Border Dispute
Late one morning in April, a boat called Liberty sailed down the Danube on a reconnaissance mission, toward a destination found on no map or atlas. It was decorated with the yellow livery of the Free Republic of Liberland—a tiny new country in the making on the border between Serbia and Croatia. As Liberty turned onto the river, at the rear of a small convoy, a Croatian police boat pulled out from among the waterside vegetation and began to follow.
One way to think about Liberland—a portmanteau of “liberty” and “land”—is as an experiment in ultra-libertarianism. The project is the baby of Vít Jedlička, a Eurosceptic politician from the Czech Republic who believes modern democracies are burdened by overtaxation and overregulation.
In 2014, frustrated with EU bureaucracy, Jedlička decided a fresh start was called for. A simple internet search yielded a promising result: an apparent legal no-man’s-land, a 7-kilometer-squared terra nullius in the Balkans, on the west bank of the Danube River. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, there was a border mismatch: The Serbian government drew theirs along the deepest part of the Danube, the thalweg; the Croatians along the river course as it was in the 19th century, before engineering works and natural processes diverted its course. This created pockets of land on the western riverbank that are, technically, unclaimed by either nation.
