The Free Republic of Liberland, referred to casually as Liberland, is an unrecognised micronation which claims an uninhabited and disputed territory of 7 km2 (2.7 square miles) on the western bank of the Danube, between Croatia and Serbia. The sovereignty movement began in April 2015 and is continuing to this day under the leadership of Vít Jedlička — a Czech right-libertarian politician.
Liberland’s official website highlights that the micronation was birthed after the Croatian-Serbian border dispute. Jedlička emphasises that this dispute led to a legal loophole which left a small parcel of land west of the Danube river unclaimed by either country. This unclaimed territory was then claimed by Jedlička in the name of Liberland under the Terra Nullius doctrine.
As aforementioned, the Liberlandian territory only spans a small 7 kilometres square, making it approximately the same size as Gibraltar. Not a single country in the world recognises Liberland and — internally — it is almost completely undeveloped. The micronation has a population of 0 people (as even Jedlička doesn’t live in Liberland, despite being its self-proclaimed president). Interestingly, the currency of the micronation is the Liberland Merit — a cryptocurrency.
In 2015, 30 people signed up for Liberlandian citizenship on the micronation’s website, yet none of them managed to enter the territory as they were initially detained by Croatian police officers. These people were later on also denied by Serbian fishermen who refused to take them across the Danube by boat.
Crazily enough, Liberland received 200 thousand citizenship applications in a single week in 2015, during the European refugee crisis. The vast majority of these applicants were Libyan and Syrian individuals. This motivated Jedlička to host a Liberlandian recruitment programme in Istanbul that same year.
Evidently, numerous journalists and reporters who have covered the Liberlandian cause esteem that Jedlička is simply conducting a publicity stunt and that his claims are not genuine. However, the micronation’s self-proclaimed leader re-assured that he was very serious about his motives and that he esteemed Liberland to be the ultimate example of ‘peak libertarianism’.
NOTE: This article will be updated soon.
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