Micro nations are not new, and they are almost never successful [1].
They are ripe for fraud: selling passports, fraudulent government bank, etc.
In the event that they pick up any traction, they are swallowed by their neighbors with real armies (eg. Minerva), and the rest of the world sighs with relief.
An interesting example of one that is still officially around, also claims land in Croatia, and exists just for fraud is the Dominion of Melchizedek [2].
Even Lichtenstein, which thrives on laws that allow outside companies to evade their local taxes, skirts on the definitions of "legal", "nation", et al. (though I have a few friends from there who are all great guys)
Liechtenstein is entirely legal, although formed by this kind of manoeuvring 200+ years ago.
"For this reason, the family sought to acquire lands that would be classed as unmittelbar ("unintermediated"), or held without any intermediate feudal tenure, directly from the Holy Roman Emperor. " ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liechtenstein#Principality )
The quasi-independent fragments of the British Isles / Empire are also interesting and tend to operate as tax havens.
The Principality of Hutt River in Australia is a micro nation in an interesting position. It seems as though it may be legally valid due to an administrative mistake and clever use of some obscure laws. Its continued existence seems to be largely due to the Australian government refusing to get involved any more than it really has to.
Agreed, but why should the "rest of the world sighs with relief"?
Existing government is sub-optimal and competition tends to increase quality. Is there a special property of government service that makes this principle fail here?
>Existing government is sub-optimal and competition tends to increase quality.
Government is not a product or service. It doesn't follow market rules. Heck, who enforces market norms when at anytime you can send out warships and conquer everyone?
If anything, we have way many small governments that often must bow down to the regional power and become de facto client states with limited autonomy and almost no ability to fight off the regional power if it thinks you've offended it in any way. Ukraine is getting a lesson in how little autonomy they have when they're so close to an aggressive regional power. Just because you are recognized as a country doesn't mean you enjoy the autonomy a country should. Smaller nations are just going to be under the thumb more than larger nations who can put up a proper military deterrent.
Government is not a service. It nearly always provides services, but it also provides stability and a means of dealing with "negative externalities". Running a government with a particularly lax policy on fraud, pollution, etc. can easily export problems around the world.
Also, governments don't compete with each other in the same market. Australia and Denmark aren't trying to outdo each other in recruiting the same "customers".
We do sometimes see multiple governments competing in the same "markets". We usually call them "warlords" though, and it hasn't really worked out all that well for the people and lands being competed for.
How many people do micronations actually have the capacity to harm? I mean in the real world, going from real world performance, not in fevered day-dreams of what "could" happen.
I don't think the "rest of the world" really has any stake in it at all. A few hundred people do, at most. These people may not be completely harmless, but they also lack the capacity to hurt people in any significant numbers. If you can be hurt by a micronation, perhaps you need to reevaluate what your government is doing. How badly do they have to fuck up to the point that a micronation becomes relevant in your life?
Aren't stability and "dealing with negative externalities" also services? Without goverments people would seek them elsewhere (other forms of ruling, insurance companies, etc.)
> Aren't stability and "dealing with negative externalities" also services?
In a sense, but they're subject to a tragedy of the commons (that's almost the definition of a negative externality), so competition does not improve them.
This country is also on the verge of having its first war. The Liberland flag has already been removed by another micro-nation that claims to have laid claim on the land just over a month earlier:
Unfortunately, the Paraduin people seem a bit nutty to me. An excerpt from their constitution, which is in Dutch:
"Paraduin is een monarchie. De titel van de monarch is prins(es), voluit Prins(es) van Paraduin. Monarch zijn Prins Ogidius en diens wettige opvolgers. De opvolging wordt bij wet geregeld."
Translates to:
"Paraduin is a monarchy. The monarch holds the title of Prince(ss), in full the Prince(ss) of Paraduin. Monarchs are Prince Ogidius and his lawful successors. Succession is determined by law."
Paraduin itself is something like a religion, they (if there's more than one person, I'm not sure) believe there's a magical parallel universe from which some people are fleeing unto the earth we live on.
That's a very good point. Obviously the only way any country can be bootstrapped is with military power. If Liberland is serious they should immediately engage Paraduin with a show of force. Secondly, I think the best course of action would be to secure funding for buying a protectorate like situation with either Croatia or Serbia. Though I don't know what the political consequences of such a situation would be.
Imagine if from those 160.000 signups they could get 5.000 people to pay $1000 in taxes per year, that could fund a Serbian police/military officer and a small office. Just his presence and his commitment to engage in violent conflict with aggressors could deter any other party. (Killing him would be an act-of-war or at least a criminal act against his country)
> if they could get 5.000 people to pay $1000 in taxes per year,
Not sure they appreciate the concept of shared expenses though, from their objectives "a country where honest people can prosper without being oppressed by governments making their lives unpleasant through the burden of unnecessary restrictions and taxes.".
That's why it's hard to make a country. You have to allocate resources to education, defense, health, public goods maintenance, etc. And inevitably some people will think that some expenses are not necessary.
It seems like killing the only security officer in a country would probably be the end of the war.. Most of the expressions of interest I've seen are explicitly because people think they'll be able to stop paying taxes so I'm curious what kind of voluntary funds they would be able to raise.
I think the point was that killing a Serbian military officer would start a war with Serbia. Of course, the challenging part would be convincing Serbia to back the scheme; if Serbia was going to defend the territory they'd be more likely to claim it themselves.
Serbia has no intention to claim this territory whatsoever. Serbia treats the Danube as the border and that is it. The new Danube stream that is, the one now dividing the two countries. There is an old Danube stream which is almost completely gone decades ago, and Croatia considers it its border. The reason is that there are some other inversely interweaving parts which are pretty and maybe a nice tourist attraction and both countries want them. So, accepting Liberland as their own territory would mean waving the right to those other, more profitable, territories. But TBH, using the old stream as the border would just cause more trouble.
To be fair, I'm a Serb and I fully welcome Liberland. Since the two neighbors cannot decide on their boundaries, I do not see why anyone else cannot take a no-mans land. The issue is that we must define our borders sooner or later, and I am afraid there will be no more space for Liberland. But, that will be Croatia's business then, I hope :D .
Neither Serbia nor Croatia claim the land because they both -- under different interpretations of the underlying agreement -- recognize it as land belonging to the other under an agreement between the two of them.
This also makes it unlikely that either would act as a guarantor of the independence of a new sovereignty that sought to establish itself on the land, or even to recognize such a sovereignty.
If your countrymen hadn't killed 126.000 Russians, and maimed 180.000 more, you would now be governed by homophobic, corrupt and oppressive Vladimir Putin.
I am not pro-war. I am not suggesting anyone should be attacked, but if you don't have the power to defend what you stand for, you will trampled by those who do.
I am from the Netherlands. The only reason we exist is because the U.S. won the second world war, and we allied ourselves to them. We're not as strong and mighty as the Fins, we use diplomacy and money to establish our sovereignty.
This kind of thinking leads to war. What I'm saying is that if we really want to create peace, we should think about peace. Not attacking. It doesn't matter who is attacking. If somebody is doing it, then it leads to more of this action.
Sorry for offending you, was not my cause. Just trying to see why somebody would think they should show force even though they are a new country and they have the possibility to act differently than we have done before.
I understand this is not a popular view, as we are being taught that we are "naturally" violent and warmongering race of beings, but I do not feel it is true. I feel it is something that is taught, and something that can be taught out of also.
Thanks for responding. I wasn't offended, I actually upvoted you to counter-act the downvote storm a little. (It was your offensive prejudice against U.S. citizens that triggered your downvotes, any apology should be directed at them)
I believe that violence is not taught, or even human. I believe it is a fundamental aspect of nature, and only humans have the power to overcome it. A group of humans overcoming nature and violence is what I would call a civilization. Unfortunately any group of humans has only a limited influence, so civilizations have borders.
Outside the borders nature rages violently, attacking civilizations for the resources they dig, farm and build. To keep nature out we need to make some sort of sacrifice, be it resources, lives, or our own morality.
Our morality is what makes us human, so war should never be a solution. But our civilizations are also precious, so they have to be guarded. That's what I believe anyway.
>But there are many rich people out in the world who would hire armies to kill for such a spot.
This is tribalism (or our modern version - nation states) in a nutshell. For all the hand wringing here about NSA SIGINT, defense spending, etc the reality is that the world is dangerous place. Not too long ago "liberal intellectuals", "russophiles," and "policy experts" were telling us how Russia was just going to eventually become a defacto if not outright EU member, would never invade a neighbor, never target civilians explicitly, never annex land, etc. These people forgot the golden rule of civilization: war happens.
While taking this opportunity to 'demonstrate' your point of view (and how it's justified) concerning military/defense, it is just an opinion. I'd say it's more of a cultural sickness, than a human necessity. At least most people claim to believe in the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi, even if they can't find a way to walk the walk (just talk the talk).
Considering the worst mass murderers, despots, and warmongers of history were usually devoutly religious, I really, really don't think you want to play the religion card here. Heck, by far our most Jesusy president, GWB, sent over 100,000 Iraqis to their deaths by starting a major conflict with them with trumped up intel and knowing full well the civilian cost would be huge. Hitler considered himself a good Christian. Putin is a good Christian loved by the Orthodox church. Iran beheads women who supposedly cheat on their husbands yet as a theocracy they follow Allah's benevolence. The religious middle-east in general is humanity's armpit. Need I go on?
I'm sorry to be that guy, but a small note to all webdevs on Hackernews: please make sure to skip all bloated and hip Javascripts. Because not all visitors have the latest and fastest devices.
This great article is unfortunately unreadable for me because I can't scroll down.
And to all sysadmins on HN... I receive 403 for this article, so do whatever is necessary to keep it from happening on your websites that reach wider audiences :)
I just put my name down. It's a laugh. I'd probably be willing to fork over $30 for a passport. I don't actually want to live there. I suspect many of the 160,000 are similar.
On a more serious note I could see an argument for setting up a new country that was open to all comers a bit like the US used to be when the "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.." thing was happening. The US and EU could maybe buy the land off some hard up African country. You could govern it a bit like Singapore.
You laugh at the concept of a passport but there are lots of people who don't have a passport at all and no citizenship to any country. They would like to be a citizen of one country or another. This might be a great way to do it.
Olympics are a bit different because I believe there are requirements to be met in terms of performance.
But living in San Marino or Liechtenstein must be great - if you get to the national football team (which shouldn't be hard), you will have a chance to play against word class teams from time to time ;)
Why must every inch of this land have to be incorporated somehow? I'd much rather have no man's land, than have a land owned by a particular man's ideology (regardless of how much I may be inclined to agree with it).
I'm not sure if you're seriously looking for an answer. If you are, it's actually rather obvious: As long as there is a piece of unclaimed land, it is sufficient for a single person/organization/state to decide at some point in time to claim it for themselves, and from that point forward it is likely to stay claimed forever.
Over the course of human history, it is exceedingly likely that every piece of at least marginally potentially interesting land is claimed at some point.
Furthermore, only unused land can truly be no man's land, which is why it is a bit curious why you'd be so interested in no man's land in the first place. (As soon as you go there and do something remotely interesting with it, even if it's just camping there, it stops being no man's land and starts being de facto your land, until somebody challenges you to it.)
I welcome all kinds of socio-economic experiments. If people were free to try out various scenarios, we'd have a much better understanding of socio-economics.
> I'd much rather have no man's land, than have a land owned by a particular man's ideology (regardless of how much I may be inclined to agree with it).
I think that's an equally valid scenario to try out. If only my country did not have anti-sedition laws...
Nobody is going to stop you setting up a tent there. Creating a factory or even a city would be another issue, but as long as you think like a hobo an unenforced rule is meaningless. The same thing applies large stretches of the US let alone much of Afghanistan or other failed states.
PS: What most intellectual Anarchists want is high quality fertile land free for the taking. But, so does everyone else which is why it's not free in the first place. With some effort you could live in the middle of the ocean and never see another person. When you get down to it most of them really want to live with the benefits of government without paying for it.
Land being unclaimed is an unstable configuration, whereas land being claimed is a relatively stable configuration. Probabilistically speaking, any given piece of land is therefore more likely to be claimed than unclaimed.
As a Serbian I welcome our Liberland neighbours. It really opens a lot of possibility. It citizenship doesn't require you to live there for Liberland to thrive. If he/they would just start a top level domain name for example, I can see how being citizen would be beneficial to enterpreneurs.
You can't just start a top level domain. Calling yourself a country doesn't make ICANN hand you a ccTLD, and there's not currently an open period for gTLDs, even if the people behind Liberland could get one if there were.
I understand that, still this is just opening of possibilities. EU wants to manage our thoughts, this guy is busting that trend, of course he is welcome.
If the domain name is a common abbreviation, they might be able to generate royalties from domain name sales like Tuvalu (.tv) does. (Though, if I remember correctly, it hasn't been the windfall that Tuvalu hoped for.)
This gets much more attention than it should in my opinion. Its another micro nation that within few weeks no one will remember about. Besides stamps collectors and non-recognized passport holders.
Au contraire, I've been casually following "micro nations" for decades, and attempts are often long remembered. This one is notable as it involves actual viable land (in contrast with artificial or new/fluke natural dry surfaces), which the surrounding countries just plain don't want. It's not just a rock or platform with a flag on it.
Indeed, with a little persistence and some capital this could turn into an interesting project. Like Bir Tawil, it's a piece of land which is not just unclaimed, but in fact definitively disclaimed by the adjacent nations - but instead of being a barren patch of North African desert miles from nowhere, it's a pretty little patch of forestland on a major river in central Europe. Nor does it seem likely that Serbia and Croatia will be settling their differences over the border any time soon.
Some are just notable crackpots, some take advantage of geographic changes or artificial structures (Sealand the most famous), some are whims tolerated by controlling sovereignties, some are violently overthrown, some are long-respected special cases (Vatican), some are genuine attempts that failed (Oceania).
Sidenote: This page has unbearable amounts of JS. It is unscrollable on latest generation Chromebook, a device explicitly built to browse the Web. There is a limit to how much JS one should use; if your website requires a pro gaming machine to be readable, you probably crossed that limit.
Yes, I know this is a repeat - the submission title got
changed. It's also a repeat submission of [0], and the
submission with the most discussion - over 80 comments.
Why on every aggregator does there have to be 'that guy' who thinks it's somehow his job to dig up duplicate posts? Do you comment on various news sites whenever they post an article that the NYTimes covered? It's just... silly.
This is the first time I've seen news about this particular 'country', and I'm glad I saw it this time because it is interesting.
Duplicates will always happen, and as you have pointed out, sometimes there is positive value to that. The idea isn't to avoid duplicates, per se, but to try to ensure that the same discussion doesn't get hashed out again and again in different different, parallel and unconnected threads. There have even been cases[0] where the mods explicitly dipped in and moved comments from one submission to another to avoid the "split discussion" problem.
So the idea is to ensure that anyone interested in an item can, should they choose, easily find and read the comments made by other HN contributors. Feel free to disagree, although the 17 upvotes (at the time of writing - votes may go down as well as up) indicate that there are people who do find it valuable/useful.
Edit: Just checking your profile I see that you've been here less than a year, so you may not be aware that because it's me to whom you're replying, I can't down-vote you. In fact I've up-voted you, because while I disagree with you (obviously) I don't think your comment is especially negative.
Thank you for your reply. While you said my comment wasn't especially negative, I understand that the first sentence could have been taken that way, and that's probably the reason for the downvotes. It's just that I've seen people yelling 'DUPE' since the first year of Slashdot, and it seems like every site has some who make it their personal mission to rain on OP's parade.
I love the idea of stopping the 'split discussion' issue, but I feel like it's at odds with a site like HN where stories fall off of the front page so quickly. I'm not able to read it all day long, and I rarely look at it in the evenings. Especially when we have articles about potential gaming of the article positions, it seems unrealistic to expect that you would have a chance to actually get the real 'news' at any given point without duplicate posts.
What I mean is, there are certainly more than 30 in-progress topics appealing to HN readers. If I look at the front page in the morning and again in the afternoon, I'm only going to get a small subset of the topics that are out there. That's why I appreciate duplicates so much... it's really the only thing that makes a site like HN relevant to the occasional reader.
Anyway, thanks for supporting me even though I wasn't the most ambassadorial. :)
(Thank you for turning your comments in a more civil direction. That's rare enough that it cheers us up every time we see it.)
You make a fair point about duplicates. There used to be a second-hand clothes store in my home town called "New to You". Similarly, if you haven't seen a story, it isn't a dupe.
The problem is that the HN front page only has 30 slots. Those slots are the scarcest resource on the site. Since we have no way of knowing what you've seen, we have to target overall coverage.
We don't treat stories as dupes just because they've been posted already; they have to have had significant discussion. But I get that you're talking about precisely those stories. I do think we have more work to do here.
Just happened to catch your comment in passing, so I'll reply quickly.
It's true that things fall off the front page quickly, but that's why there's a "More" link. It doesn't take long to click through, scan the headlines, and check on the ones that look interesting.
It's also true that things wouldn't fall off the front page if there weren't so many duplications! It's less of a problem now, but I remember occasions when several of the front page submissions were all about the same thing, each with their own conversation, and preventing other topics from making it.
And as you say, at any given moment there are likely to be more than 30 "in progress" topics in the tech world, so the only solution is clicking through to see those items ranked 31 to 60, and 61 to 90. There is nothing else you can do. In part that's why I think it's important and relevant to link related conversations/submissions. Duplications will happen, items will fall off (or never make) the front page, so the best we can hope for is coherent discussions.
Hope that makes things clearer. Now I'm off to do some work. Cheers.
I am trying to speculate what kind of people this new country can attract and give its citizenship? I tend to think (sorry for sounding biased) that it would be adventurers, hippies, suspicious characters, illegal migrants, fraudsters. The topic about legalisation of marijuana is quite popular on their forum so it may attract drug dealers and drug addicts.
Can this microstate be interesting for entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, doctors, economists - those who can contribute a lot to build some prosper experimental state, say micro-Singapore?
How can this country attract them, maybe, introduce sort of point based system for giving residence / citizenship?
What does legalizing marijuana have to do with drug dealers? Isn't the reverse more likely? I live in a country with legal marijuana(1) and I don't see the correlation (it does attract marijuana-related tourism though).
(1) Uruguay. It's legal for now, the current president is not happy at all about legal marijuana and wants to revoke the law.
I agree with you about legalizing marijuana in an established state with working institutions. I see Netherlands as a successful example of it. But here we have the state in the very beginning of its existence, without the recognised law enforcing institutions. Thus it may be more difficult to control drug traffic.
The current president is more like a king at the moment with a lot of influence to shape the country, but can also be heavily influenced by external forces (by money, armed force). A lot of things depend on personalities and hidden agendas of people who will rule there, and it may be difficult to control them. Money from illegal activities like drug traffic may be very attractive.
I am just speculating about this potentially interesting experiment.
Cannabis is not legal in NL and there are many problems with their current setup involving organized crime. You say you "see" NL as a successful example, but I think it's more of a belief based on assumptions. In reality it's a bit of a mess.
The U.S. ironically (they're the ones who got the world to sign treaties promising to never legalize) has the some of the best decriminalizatoin/legalization laws on the planet
Never been legal, but tolerated. If you're smoking in the streets you can still get into trouble with the police. That's why there's coffeeshops. Smoke there or home and NL looks the other way. But on the supply side there are many problems.
"Live there?" Where is that? You can't live in a nation; it's not a place, but rather a set of people, of which you can be a member. You can live in a country. A nation doesn't imply a country; nations can be displaced. Furthermore, having a certain nationality which is tied to a country doesn't mean being a resident of that country. Perhaps not all 160,000 people want to actually live in that country; maybe some only want the nationality. If this new nation has very relaxed rules about residency for maintaining nationality, they might not even have to visit there very much, if at all.
The word "nation" is sometimes used as synonym for:
State (polity) or sovereign state: a government which controls a specific territory, which may or may not be associated with any particular ethnic group
Country: a geographic territory, which may or may not have an affiliation with a government or ethnic group
Thus the phrase "nations of the world" could be referring to the top-level governments (as in the name for the United Nations), various large geographical territories, or various large ethnic groups of the planet.
In general, whenever I come across the word "nation" I assume it's being used colloquially to refer to "nation-state", unless the context is specifically related to ethnic nationalistic identities.
It's funny, I play on some Minecraft servers where this kind of thing happens all the time. The comments about competing claims and military power are true for the virtual world as well as the physical world.
Yes. But only if you think anarchist == anarchy. In reality, anarchist == anarchism, which is a collectivist/socialist philosophy masquerading as anarchy.
Yeah, the Individualist Anarchists prefix Anarchist with "individualist". The Anarcho-capitalists add a suffix to it. Both groups understand that Anarchy ("No Authority") is being altered by their beliefs, and is therefore not a pure Anarchy.
Only the Collectivist/Socialist Anarchists have the audacity to call themselves "Anarchists" without any qualifying suffix or prefix. The fact that they've coined "Anarchism" (of which they are "Anarchists") to mean something that isn't a pure Anarchy is extraordinarily disingenuous.
That's a misuse of the word, I'd say. "Anarchy" was usurped to somehow describe some sort of "violent" lack of rule/order. I.e. Riots, mobs, looting, Molotov cocktails, you name it. Very unfortunate indeed.
Even now, the official definition is "a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority." Though, the origin is: "...from anarkhos, from an- ‘without’ + arkhos ‘chief, ruler.’"
At least, when used properly as a qualifier to a system of government (or lack thereof), it has much much better connotations associated with it. Though, again, that depends on who you ask and which type of "anarchy" you're describing. You get ridiculously odd ones such as "anarcho-communism".
Not really. It actually is unclaimed land - the border between Croatia and Serbia was drawn along the middle of a river. The river moved. One country (can't recall which) claims the border is still mid-river, the other claims it follows the original river line, not the new position. This has created areas of overlap and areas of terra nullius - there are a few tiny ones, much smaller than Liberland.
And if no-one claims the area, you can wander in and stake your own claim. Of course, if no-one recognises you, there's not much you can do, and if you don't ally with someone meaty, no-one will stop an 'annexation'. Ultimately it's a jape, but unlike most micronations, it's not stretching the rules - the land really is currently, officially, unclaimed.
The examples listed there are really not very similar to Liberland. Those countries may not have military power, but they certainly have political power.
GP said "without an army and/or international recognition". None of the countries on that list lack international recognition (and most have not only recognition, but treaties outsourcing defense responsibility to some other country -- often the United States -- so they have an army committed to protecting them, its just someone else's army.)
And some of them (even under the "no armed forces") list actually have a military from the descriptions there, its just a reserve military, an armed police force officially designated to serve military/defense functions, or, in the case of the State of Vatican City, the military of the entity -- the Holy See -- to which the state is itself subordinate.
Suppose he gets some wealthy folks (especially from Serbia/Croatia) to keep their assets there. I doubt it would happen (chicken/egg problem, right?), but I could see a territory like that persisting without international recognition or an army. Of course, I'm no expert in geopolitics...
Nah, that's what foreign investment is for. Some rich developers decide they think they can make money, so they pour in capital in the form of roads, buildings, sewers, all things that make much more of a difference in an emerging nation than a pile of money would.
These investors would have a direct stake in propping up the idea that this is sovereign land, as that's what will give them the best return on their investment. So the new ruler and the investors form a tight bloc.
The whole idea is to make the area attractive to commerce, once the businesses start coming in, and the people to run and operate the businesses, then there's a critical mass to begin the process of drawing up a constitution, figuring out how to set up legislative bodies, the machinery of governance.
Only after all this is done is international recognition needed.
The reason micronations never got off the ground is because nobody was ever able to court enough investment to build up to that critical mass that can support commerce. They were just way too small. City-size seems to be at just the right scale for this kind of experiment. It was just a matter of time until something like this happened.
Note this is also the exact same process whereby new townships are formed in the US, particularly in the 1800s where we were in our expansionary period. Only they don't have to set up the full machinery of state, they already have a state and federal government to build off of.
Eventually somebody is going to get this right in the developing world, and that will kick off a hoard of copycats. As regimes topple, people will start breaking these countries up into city-states. Think of how gentrification works in the US, if you think about it, it's just the process of cities growing. Sovereignty in the developing world is going to follow the money.
If you read the article, you would have understood that the territory is a no man's land because of a border dispute between Serbia and Croatia. The two countries will probably keep each other in check.
I'm not sure if this stuff can be interpreted like EX-YU breakup wars were not about land (and which Ethnicity/Religion/Language/etc lives on it)... Or these guys should reconsider why neither Serbia nor Croatia want that part of land... Or ...
They don't need armies, they need allies. The problem then becomes finding an ally with a strong army but without a strong inclination to use said army to take over your micronation.
The ally needs some motivation to take on someone else's existential threats as their own. Lots of treaties and posturing may dampen would-be aggressors' motivation, but as the USA has demonstrated of late re: Ukraine vs Russia, all too often promises of military protection don't mean $#!^.
They are ripe for fraud: selling passports, fraudulent government bank, etc. In the event that they pick up any traction, they are swallowed by their neighbors with real armies (eg. Minerva), and the rest of the world sighs with relief.
An interesting example of one that is still officially around, also claims land in Croatia, and exists just for fraud is the Dominion of Melchizedek [2].
Even Lichtenstein, which thrives on laws that allow outside companies to evade their local taxes, skirts on the definitions of "legal", "nation", et al. (though I have a few friends from there who are all great guys)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micronation [2] http://www.quatloos.com/groups/melchiz.htm