There are no boarders without agreement
Pocket-3 and Gornja Siga lie on the bank of the Danube, neither in Croatia nor Serbia. So-called terra nullius now claimed. These spits left by the breakup of Yugoslavia have been flagged by a Czech and an Englishman. The self-declared Kingdom of Enclava, once north of the unpopulated Gornja Siga, may have also existed once - as they all may exist. Each trusts the river to substantiate their claim. The moment land spied by neither side becomes part of the water.
We step and do not step into the same river(s), its “fragments” passing through without returning. A boundary which is simultaneously stable and changing. As German Anthropogeographer Friedrich Ratzel said: “The border area is the reality, the border line the abstraction thereof.” But Ratzel dreamed of “Lebensraum“ or “living space”, the imagined convenience of boarder permeability, areas within which National Socialists would fuck the 20th century. Justifiably equivocated because of its use, as there are no borders without agreement and often no agreements without borders.
To form a micronation there must, somewhere, be a macronation, here, Macro-Serbia or Macro-Croatia. To live on the bank of a river there must have been a river, but we live on river(s). To settle land, the ground must be unsettled to only be disturbed by settlement.
A classical libertarian obsession saw a politician, from the Czech Party of Free Citizens, form the Free Republic of Liberland in the armpit of a wide meander in the Danube. The aspirant nation’s website states that “To live and let live” is thier motto, taken from the famous phraseology of Dutch Mercantilist Gerard de Malynes, found in Consuetudo, vel lex mercatoria. Croatia have symbolically legitimised the claim by recently agreeing to allow movement between their boarders.
Who legitimised the claim of Croatia? The Bahamas, Burundi, Bhutan, Djibouti, South Sudan, Liberia, Marshal Islands, Niger, Rwanda, Somalia, Central African Republic, Eswatini, Tonga, and Tuvalu have not. Is there only recognition in consensus? If so, what nation is universally legitimised? Agreements often require borders, and consensus has four walls, no windows, and a locked door. The United Nations is as illusory as its high school models. It is representative of little that is real, and yet claims to identify real nations or spy genuine sovereignty from far afar.
There’s no river over which the UN can point and say “there I am not” or vice versa. Perhaps a Phlegethontic fire wall between their intranet and the other internets of the world, across which screen-tired eyes glare and chapped lips pout, speaking: “stop founding micronations without the permission of our macronations.”
A paradox: “the United Nations Security Council has the power to use force for the maintenance of international peace and security, yet both the Council and Member States are also bound to act in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter when doing so—one of those being the very prohibition of force itself.”
A paradox: “The paradox is that those same [nationalist] theorists were taking nations for granted all the time. While ignoring or dismissing nationhood, they were relying on tacit assumptions about the ubiquity of nations to make their theories work.”
Once it was a nation. Cornwall was a founding Kingdom in Britain’s union; with time lost its status, The last speaker of the language supposedly died in 1777. Its subsequent reconstruction has thousands speaking it to some level today, hundreds fluent and a Kernewek nursery school has opened. When again will Kernow become a recognised nation? “Thank you, consensus” said Kernow.
The Tamar River splits England from Kernow despite West Devon being more Cornish than English. No motorway, no airport and one train line. Why is Exeter English? Here the river is the boundary between me and another place but the stretch beyond that river is me and another place. “The border area is the reality [abstracted], the border line the abstraction [realised] thereof.”
If an island in the Tamar were to reveal itself, pushed from the tidal pressure of Atlantic tides out of the silt, and I pierced it with a flag is that land mine? Unseen now claimed, can it be anyone’s? There’s a fish, dead on its rocky beach, there before me it lived and passed away. Can it have a claim? The trees in Pocket-3 and the rocks of Gornja Siga? An utterly meaningless question of terra nullius becoming conquered land becoming sovereign soil becoming someone’s home regardless the ‘there before’.
There are two fields, separated by a fence and in each field lives a flock of sheep which for all their lives have never mingled. Each flock lives on farmers land, two different farmers, two different fields, two different flocks. An eagle, flying above one field flies down and snatches a lamb. It lifts it up as best it can and drops it, right into the other field. The fence, permeated, means nothing as the lamb is raised in the other field.
The DMZ is one of the most biodiverse places in the Korean peninsula. A border unpeopled, full of life amongst the mines. At what point does a deer become a deserter. Born in the south and living in the north, where are its allegiances. A child, somehow, sheltered from the narrative is born in Pyeongyang and at 18 appears in Seoul. Who do they belong to, which side owns that person?
You are, trust me, the states. You are, trust me, taxonomised by a boarder. Trust me, you are. Maybe read something else.
Image generated using Dall-E 2
