Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood

By Joshua Keating

A journalist explores how our world’s borders came to be and how self-proclaimed countries across the globe could change the map.
 
What is a country? While certain basic criteria—borders, a government, and recognition from other countries—seem obvious, journalist Joshua Keating investigates what happens in areas of the world that exist as exceptions to these rules. Invisible Countries looks at semiautonomous countries such as Abkhazia, Kurdistan, and Somaliland, as well as a Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S.-Canada border, and an island nation whose very existence is threatened by climate change.
 
Through stories about these would-be countries’ efforts at self-determination, Keating shows that there is no universal legal authority determining what a country is. He also argues that economic, cultural, and environmental forces could soon bring an end to our long period of cartographical stasis. Keating combines history with incisive observations drawn from his travels and interviews with residents, political leaders, and scholars in each of these “invisible countries.”
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Release date: Jun 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780300235050

Book preview

Keating

Invisible Countries

Keating

Copyright © 2018 by Joshua Keating.

Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Bill Nelson.

All rights reserved.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Miranda and Thomas

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction: What Is a Country?

1How Countries Conquered the World

Outlier: Knights of the East Side

2A Nation between Countries

Outlier: Virtual Countries, Real Borders

3The Invisible Country

Outlier: Land of the Free

4The Dream of Independence

Outlier: Out of State

5The Country Vanishes

Conclusion: The New Map

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Author’s Note

The goal of this book is to explore how we wound up with the current arrangement of countries on the planet, why that arrangement has stayed relatively static for so long, and whether changing the arrangement would be possible or advisable. The book looks at some of the forces keeping the current map of the world in place as well as some of the forces—economic, cultural, and environmental—pressuring it to change. The idea to write a book about why it’s so hard to start a new country—or alter the shape of an existing one—came about long before a confluence of events driven by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, ISIS, and Brexit made the topic far more timely and applicable to some of the world’s most pressing ongoing crises than it had been.

The case studies in this book are examples of places, both real and virtual, where our comfortable view of the world’s landmass as divided into neat, mutually exclusive territorial units called countries breaks down.

Each of the five countries (all of which I traveled to in 2016) described in this book’s main chapters illustrates a problem with the world map as currently drawn. Abkhazia, a Russian-backed breakaway enclave, recognized by most of the world as part of Georgia, shows how geopolitical rivalries shape which countries achieve full independence. Akwesasne, an indigenous political community that straddles the U.S.-Canadian border and predates the countries that have emerged on either side of it, challenges the notion that only one kind of nation can be sovereign. Somaliland, a semi-autonomous region in northern Somalia, has achieved all the trappings of countryhood but is simply ignored by most of the international community. The same can’t be said of Iraqi Kurdistan, a place regularly in global headlines but continually frustrated in its efforts to challenge the Middle East’s geographical status quo. Finally, Kiribati, a small island country in the central Pacific, has become a poster child for the imminent political disruptions caused by climate change, raising the question of whether a country can continue to exist when the piece of land it is associated with no longer does.

Interspersed with these primary chapters are small sections I call outliers: examples of people refusing to be confined by the world map as currently constructed. They discuss the Sovereign Order of Malta, Estonia’s electronic residency program, the free-market utopian political experiment known as Liberland, and the struggles of stateless people to have their human rights recognized in a world where national citizenship is all but mandatory.

My hope is that these examples, some well known, some obscure, will lead readers to think more critically about the contemporary map of the world and to consider more creatively what it might look like in the future.

Invisible Countries

INTRODUCTION

What Is a Country?

It was close to dusk on the Black Sea coast when the parade of imaginary countries began.

On the surface, it was an event not unlike the opening ceremonies of any other international sporting event. Sequined divas belted cheesy inspirational pop ballads. Choreographed masses of dancers performed a tribute to the glorious history of the host nation. Athletes, most with little hope of making it past the early rounds of competition, mugged for selfies and proudly waved their flags.

But the twelve teams that had made the journey to the World Football Cup in Abkhazia in June 2016 were representing countries that are not at all like the countries at the Olympics or the World Cup. And none of the flags paraded through the stadium that night are on display outside UN headquarters in New York City. These were countries that most people don’t consider countries at all.

The World Football Cup, organized by the Confederation of Independent Football Associations (ConIFA), is where countries compete when they don’t meet the threshold of statehood required for membership in bodies like FIFA (the Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the International Olympic Committee (IOC) or, for that matter, the UN General Assembly.

Some were the type of places that are described in news reports by dismissive phrases like breakaway, semiautonomous, or self-proclaimed. The host country, Abkhazia, was one such: de facto independent since breaking off from newly independent Georgia in a devastating civil war that ended in 1993 but today recognized by only Russia and three other countries. As far as the United States and Europe were concerned, this event was being held in Georgia. (The Georgian government grumbled publicly about the event but made no effort to stop it from going forward.)¹ A team represented the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without its own state but one that is now tantalizingly close to achieving the dream of independence. Somali-land, the unlikely and unrecognized beacon of stability in the Horn of Africa, was also represented, as was Northern Cyprus, the Turkish-dominated northern half of the Mediterranean island.

Some teams represented groups wronged by history. The Western Armenia contingent represented a Turkish Armenian community decimated during World War I. The Chagos Islanders, originally from a small archipelago in the Indian Ocean but now living largely in the Crawley area of London, were evicted from their home islands by the British government in 1971 so that the United States could build a military base on Diego Garcia, an expulsion the islanders continue to challenge in domestic and international courts.

Other teams represented ethnic minorities who’ve found themselves on the wrong side of international borders, such as the Koreans of Japan or the Hungarians of Romania. A Punjabi team purported to represent not only the historical region today divided between the countries of India and Pakistan but the global Punjabi diaspora. A Saami team represented an indigenous group living in northern Scandinavia that has achieved a significant level of political autonomy in recent years. Rounding out the competition were some European regions—Padania, or northern Italy; and Raetia, the Romansch-speaking region of Switzerland—that seemed less interested in making a political statement than in just playing some football. This team is not like a political thing. I think Italy is fine the way it is, the Padania goalkeeper told me at the opening ceremony.

At the opposite end of the intensity scale was Harpreet Singh, a thirty-three-year-old London accountant who quit his job and poured his life savings into building the Punjabi team. He told me, I don’t consider myself to be Indian. The Indians have perpetrated atrocities against Punjab. I don’t consider myself British. I don’t hate them, but I choose not to be associated with being British. After asking me to imagine how I would feel if my own family were murdered in front of me, he said, If you ask me now, ‘What is your family?’ my family is all Punjabis worldwide. They are my family. They are more important to me than my own wife and children.

I spent most of my time at the tournament following the team from Somaliland, an unrecognized autonomous state—considered northern Somalia by the rest of the world—that I would visit later that summer. Most of the team’s players live in Britain. The team’s director, thirty-two-year-old Ilyas Mohamed, said he wanted to build pride among the citizens and diasporic community of a place few in the world have heard of. I feel obliged. Somaliland was where I was born. Somaliland has a lot to offer, but it’s got a lot to learn from others.

Only the hardiest fans of esoteric international soccer made the long trip to Abkhazia to watch the tournament, but a fair number of foreign reporters were in attendance, attracted by the quirky spectacle of a World Cup for countries that don’t exist. The event was also a blatant propaganda exercise for the host country, Abkhazia, a place that doesn’t rate highly for news coverage even compared to other participants in the frozen conflicts of the post-Soviet world. It was easy to be skeptical about the event and ConIFA, an Isle of Man–based body staffed by a skeleton crew of volunteers, but I appreciated the open-minded approach to nationhood taken by the event.

Many of the participants hope that their membership in ConIFA is only temporary, a way station on their path to eventual membership in FIFA. While FIFA’s bylaws allow for membership for regions that are not independent, membership applications must be approved by the association’s executive committee, and world soccer’s premier governing body has fairly vague criteria for membership. FIFA’s rolls include some tiny, only semi-independent places like Montserrat, an island in the Caribbean, and Niue, a territory fifteen hundred miles northeast of New Zealand in the South Pacific. Palestine is in FIFA, though not a member of the United Nations. As of May 2016, so is Kosovo, also not a UN member state.²

ConIFA currently has forty-seven members—and no, you can’t just declare your local pub an independent nation and start a football team. New members are decided on by a vote of the existing members and generally have to be semiautonomous states or minority groups recognized by international NGOs. Still, a few members, such as Cascadia—a region of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia—seem dubious to me.

More than any other activity except perhaps war, for which they often serve as a metaphor, sports bring the world’s countries into contact with each other. You don’t have to buy the kumbaya platitudes of glorified criminal rackets like FIFA and the IOC to acknowledge that the appreciation of athletic competition, particularly the world’s most popular sport, has a rare ability to cut across national boundaries even as it incites national pride.

Because a national team is often seen as the proxy for a country’s ambitions on the world stage, events like the World Cup and the Olympics serve to reinforce the international community’s narrow definition of national legitimacy. Only real countries need apply. Whatever your views on the current borders of the Caucasus, central Europe, or the Middle East, ConIFA’s more open-minded approach is refreshing: an acknowledgment that most countries start out as a dream before they become widely acknowledged reality. Nations have been referred to as imagined communities for good reason. What countries aren’t self-proclaimed, after all?

There was also something undeniably poignant in the alternate history of the world that the event displayed. If a few battles, peace conferences, and revolutions had turned out differently, it’s not at all hard to imagine an alternate historical timeline in which Punjab, Padania, and Kurdistan are established countries with seats at the United Nations and teams in the Olympics while Pakistan, Italy, and Iraq are merely the fanciful notions of dreamers and fanatics. The event was a useful reminder that the map of the world we all know today is the product of a series of accidents and historical processes that could just as easily have gone another way.

That’s a useful truth to keep in mind in a world where the borders and countries we currently have increasingly seem permanent and immune from challenge or questioning.

When I was about ten, my prized possession was a five-hundred-page Encyclopedia of World Geography. It was an invaluable resource, the kind of item curious children depended on in the pre-Wikipedia era. Each of the world’s countries and a handful of territories and dependencies had a separate entry that included a capsule history and notes on geography, economy, culture, and political system. The world portrayed by this book was a tidy one, with every country falling into its place as a self-contained unit of information. The cultural, political, and historical entity that is Italy, to take one example, from Rome to the Risorgimento, da Vinci to Fellini, fits nicely in an illustrated five-page write-up in the Europe section between Ireland and Latvia.

The book still sits, gathering dust, in my childhood room. When I thumb through it today, I find it striking that although the encyclopedia is nearly two decades old, it really doesn’t feel that out of date. Yes, there are new heads of state in all but a few of the countries, new economic powers have risen, autocracies have become democracies and vice versa. But only three new UN-recognized countries have been created—South Sudan, Montenegro, and East Timor—and the rest are all essentially the same shape and size they were in the mid-1990s. By and large, a kid in 2018 could still easily depend on the book as a resource, so long as she wasn’t assigned a paper on East Timor.

This level of stability is a historical anomaly. Someone who bought such a book in 1960 would have found himself continually scribbling in the margins over the next decade, trying to keep up with the wave of newly independent African states shaking off European colonialism. The first half of the twentieth century, with two world-reshaping global wars, the rise of Communism, and the slow demise of European imperialism, was not kind to writers of geographical reference books. If I’d come into possession of the encyclopedia just a few years before I did—say, in 1990—it would have been useless to me within five years as the Soviet Union splintered into fifteen independent states and Yugoslavia exploded into five.

In the early 1990s, the world was in the midst of a new springtime of nations; at the time, it certainly would have been logical to believe that nascent nations would continue breaking up artificial states and what remained of multinational empires into units based on ethnic self-determination. It was a time when popular opinion in the West rallied around the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s independence struggle, when the Oslo Accords seemed to set in motion a process that would lead to a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians, when a new doctrine of humanitarian intervention was eroding traditional notions of sovereignty on behalf of threatened groups in places like Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, and when transnational human rights organizations were gaining in influence and power. While long-marginalized groups from Kurdistan to Abkhazia to Nagorno-Karabakh may have viewed these developments with excitement, for others, the emerging new world order was a cause for concern.

The creation of new states has been so common that it is increasingly difficult to counter demands for the establishment of yet other states, especially when the demands are pressed by peoples with a high international profile, wrote Gidon Gottlieb of the Council on Foreign Relations in his 1993 book Nation against State, lamenting, Many states that do not ‘deserve’ to be states have been created in the past few years. Going forward, he predicted a grim scenario: Granting self-rule or statehood in a given area to most of the nations and peoples that want it now, would result in scores of new sovereign states. While the creation of some new states may be necessary or inevitable, the fragmentation of international society into hundreds of independent territorial entities is a recipe for an even more dangerous and anarchic world.³

The popular culture of the era reflected this mindset as well. In the classic 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, author Neal Stephenson described a near future in which the United States had been balkanized to the point that the federal government’s authority extended only to its own headquarters building and most people lived in neighborhood-sized, politically autonomous, usually ethnically homogenous burbclaves with their own laws and security forces. (Oddly enough, Abkhazians make an appearance in Snow Crash, having apparently cornered the San Fernando Valley pizza delivery market in Stephenson’s dystopian future.)⁴

Today, these fears seem misplaced. For all the political tumult of the last quarter century, the number, shape, and arrangement of countries on the world map has remained remarkably unchanged.

What happened to slow the process of country creation down? Since the end of the Cold War, a global norm has prevailed enforcing cartographical stasis, a freezing in place of the map as it existed at the end of the twentieth century. This norm prevails even as ethnic and religious conflicts rage within the countries on the map.

In fact, we can even think of the map of the world itself as an institution, an exclusive club of countries, the majority of which were created over the course of the twentieth century. The club only rarely accepts new members. Its existing members are not always friendly with one another, but they tend to follow a certain set of rules. If we imagine the map as a club, its bylaws might read as follows:

Rule 1:A country is a territory defined by borders mutually agreed upon by all countries.

Rule 2:A country must have a state that controls (or at least seeks to control) the legitimate use of force within its territory, and a population of citizens.

Rule 3:Every spot on the earth’s landmass must be occupied by a country.

Rule 4:Every person on the planet must be a citizen of at least one country.

Rule 5:On paper, all countries have the same legal standing—Tuvalu has just as much right to its countryhood as China, Somalia just as much as Switzerland—even if they are politically and economically highly unequal.

Rule 6:Consent of the people within each country is preferred, but not required. Tyranny or de facto anarchy within a country is not grounds for loss of club membership.

Rule 7:Under some circumstances, one or more countries may invade or occupy another country, but not eliminate its countryhood or redraw its borders.

Rule 8:The currently existing set of countries and the borders between them should be left in place whenever possible—that is, the club prefers not to admit new members.

These bylaws are fairly durable and are backed to a great extent by the rules of our era’s most important multinational institution, the United Nations, and the foreign-policy stances of its preeminent superpower, the United States. An enormous amount of political and military capital is invested in preserving the world map’s current stasis. Sometimes, as in the First Gulf War, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, military force has been used to enforce the rules. But before we get to that, it’s worth spending a little more time nailing down just what we mean when we talk about countries.

One universal truth in the modern world is that wherever you are on the earth’s landmass, you are in a country. And while these countries differ significantly from each other, they all have fundamentally equal status as political units. The vast majority of humans are defined by citizenship to a particular country, whether due to an accident of birth or a conscious choice to seek naturalization.

What we’re not talking about when we talk about countries, or at least not precisely, are states or nations, though the three words are often used interchangeably and I will sometimes use the other two terms in this book when it’s more appropriate. A state, according to Max Weber’s famous definition in his essay Politics as a Vocation, is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.⁵ That’s a useful and durable definition, though minimal. The physical force component, expressed in some versions of the definition as violence, gets most of the attention, though the given territory part is equally important, making clear that a state’s political power, which grows out of the barrel of a gun, as Mao Zedong memorably put it, has limits in physical space.⁶

Statehood also has an international legal definition, set forth in an otherwise obscure treaty called the Montevideo Convention. In 1933, the U.S. government under Franklin Roosevelt signed a treaty with the governments of Peru and Brazil upholding the good-neighbor policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of Latin American nations. Among its other provisions, the treaty includes a definition of a state as an entity possessing (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.⁷ Though it was never originally intended as such, the Montevideo Convention has come to serve as international law’s go-to definition of statehood. It’s not a document that most Americans are likely to have heard of, but in interviews for this book, officials in aspiring states including Kurdistan, Somaliland, and Abkhazia referred to these criteria unprompted to argue their case for international recognition. In fact, a number of governments that meet the criteria are not internationally recognized, including several of the examples explored in this book, but the definition works for the vast majority of states in the world. Conversely, some states still enjoy international recognition despite violating one or more of the Montevideo rules. For instance, Ukraine’s government is not in full control of much of the country’s land area. Syria’s population has been displaced to the point that it can hardly still be considered permanent. For much of the last twenty-five years, Somalia had no central government. All are widely recognized as sovereign countries.

The idea of a state is easier to pin down than a nation, which is more a cultural than political concept. Weber wrote that a nation is a community of sentiment, which could find its adequate expression only in a state of its own, and which thus normally strives to create one.⁸ A community of sentiment can be defined by language, religion, ethnicity, or none of the above. The political theorist Benedict Anderson described nations as imagined communities in his classic book of that name. Anderson argues that the ancient cultural identities that bind nations together are in fact imaginary, in that they are often retroactively developed by elites for political or economic goals.⁹ Most of these identities are far more recently created than their adherents believe.

What separates a nation from a culture or ethnic group is the aspiration for political self-determination. A people becomes a nation when it achieves political sovereignty of some form. Catalonia and the Mohawk are nations, though not independent states. A nation need not necessarily have its own politically sovereign state, but it usually strives to. This striving we call nationalism, defined by the philosopher Ernest Gellner as the political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.¹⁰

When nationalism is successful, resulting in what sociologist Anthony Smith calls the conquest of the state by the nation, we refer to the resulting political form as a nation-state. But this commonly used term has its own flaws—namely, an implication that, as Smith puts it, a single ethnic and cultural population inhabits the boundaries of a state.¹¹ Only homogenous island nation-states like Iceland and Japan come close to fitting this bill, though not entirely, as the presence of the United Koreans of Japan team at ConIFA demonstrated.

The vast majority of countries have at least one significant minority group or immigrant population. Some European countries, particularly those in eastern Europe that until very recently had extremely low levels of immigration, are also fairly homogenous, though that may not last long if current rates of migration into Europe continue. Writing in the mid-1990s, Smith estimated that less than 10 percent of UN members are truly nation-states in the sense that they are overwhelmingly inhabited by a single cultural group.¹²

For the purposes of this book, I will usually call the entities we’re talking about countries. This is both for simplicity’s sake and because of the territorial connotations of the word. A country, fundamentally, is a piece of land that has been separated from the rest of the earth’s landmass by political boundaries agreed upon by the world’s countries as