Skeezix on History
How to Found a Nation
How do you build a nation? It’s a deceptively simple question, one which many thousands of philosophers and political theorists have struggled with over the millennia. Unfortunately, they made one crucial mistake: Not asking me. I have all the answers, and so, without further ado, I will reveal to you the secrets of planting your flag in some far-flung corner of the world.
Step one: Find a nation to build
This sounds a lot easier than it is. All of the good nations, such as Norway, already exist, so you will likely have to settle for a second-rate pick. There is very little (but not no, as I’ll outline in a moment) unclaimed land in the world, which means that it will be much easier to carve a chunk out of a country that already exists.
The best place to look is likely going to be Africa. The continent’s borders were drawn in 1952 as a piece of modern art, so they are almost entirely meaningless. This means that you are free to go ahead and draw a random shape somewhere in the middle of the Congo, then fly there and see who your new citizens are. You can hardly do a worse job than the Belgians at governing them!
Nowadays, though, following the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the general consensus is that most nations must exist to represent an ethnic group within their borders. There are exceptions to this rule, i.e. the United States and India, but even those countries find some common value amongst their citizens to stand for. So, for example, India represents the notion of unity in diversity and many different groups coming together towards a common goal, while the United States represents the interests of 630 billionaires.
But if you want to found a nation, you might have to fudge things a little. Europe’s nations largely already represent the continent’s ethnicities, as do Asia’s, and while there are certainly some unrepresented minorities, these are usually too small and unimportant to constitute their own political entity. Instead, you should create an ethnic group. This is probably easier than you are expecting. The ideas of “ethnicity” and “nationality” date only from the nineteenth century, after all. It’s not as if who belongs in which group is set in stone. For example (and with apologies to Ukrainians), while the Ukrainian language has existed for a millennium or more, the idea that there was a Ukrainian nationality originated largely with Taras Shevchenko, a poet who died in 1861. Similarly, the idea of Pakistan (that the Muslim-majority areas of what was then India should be independent) was percolating for a few decades late in the 1800s, but the name was coined only in 1933, fourteen years before nationhood. This is not to say that Ukraine and Pakistan are somehow illegitimate, just that the concept of nationality is fluid.
This means that if you pick a group of people who don’t form an ethnic group per se, but differ from the majority culture of their nation in a few distinct ways, and occupy a geographically defined area, you can make them into a nation with a few decades of cultural pressure and intellectual debate. For example, Minnesotans share an awful accent and a love of the disgusting “hot dish” tater tot casserole. These would seem to be thin grounds for nationhood, but then so are $3 cheeseburgers and a callous disregard for intrinsic human worth, and that’s what the rest of the country is running on right now. You could go to Minnesota and found, say, an Institute for Minnesotan Studies, and describe how the Minnesotan language differed from American English, and promote Minnesotan literature. Once you’ve converted the literati, the rest of the population will naturally follow — America is famous for its respect for intellectuals. (Ha ha)
If you don’t want to follow this difficult path (after all, other people are involved, and other people make everything more difficult), you could also just go to the one spot of unclaimed land on Earth. Due to a complex border dispute between Egypt and Sudan, claiming Bir Tawil (meaning “water well,” clearly an Arabic joke since there is no water there, or anything else) would mean losing the Hala’ib triangle, a much larger and more populous piece of land nearby. Neither nation wants to lose Hala’ib, so Bir Tawil is the only land in the world that no flag flies over. It also looks like Tatooine and regularly bakes at a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, but don’t let that stop you. Just be warned that many other intrepid individuals have claimed the territory over the Internet — so when you do get there, be ready for a fight.
Step two: Name your nation (and design its flag)
Bear in mind that most nations don’t get to name themselves. You may never have heard the name “Sakartvelo,” but you probably have heard of the country — we in English use the easier-to-pronounce and very natural short form, “Georgia.” (Anger at this injustice is known to have produced Stalin and Beria).
So you won’t get to choose what your country is called. People in Belgium or Thailand or someplace will give it an insulting nickname, and you’ll just have to grin and bear it (alternatively, refer to Step Three, “Start a war”). You can give them a nudge, though. Pick a really snappy name that everyone can get behind. For example, Comoros is called “Comoros” or something very similar in nearly every language, because the name is short and sweet and sounds like a wizard in a fantasy novel or something. A good rule of thumb is, the fewer people have heard of your country, the fewer silly nicknames it will collect.
Another way to give everyone a nudge is to change up your country’s flag. Some may see it as a bit too on-the-nose, but really, as a way of preventing errors, it’s hard to beat. The great state of Illinois understands this perfectly:
See? Perfectly clear. In case you wanted more writing, the ribbon coming from the eagle’s mouth has random words on it, and the dates on the rock and the setting sun (which looks like it was drawn by a kindergarten student) really complete the picture. It’s sort of an official state mood board for Illinois. Really, you can’t go wrong with American state flags. Take Delaware’s:
There is a cow. There is a ship floating above a mysterious blue bar. There are two clones of the same man, representing the two people who live in Delaware (the Bidens). There is a date, prominently displayed in Times New Roman font, that leaves an unanswered question for the casual viewer: What could it mean? It is, in fact, the date on which Delaware ratified the United States Constitution, the first state to do so. Another more important question the flag fails to answer is: Why should we care?
Step three: Start a war
The bloody business of, well, bloodshed is a subject that everyone would like to gloss over, but no serious student of state-building can afford to skip this step. The fact is, all successful nations (and many unsuccessful ones as well, but that’s a matter for another day) have had wars — big, bloody wars — within a few years of independence. Often, the cause was the declaration of independence. If this is the case for you, congratulations! You’ve skipped a lot of difficult details (i.e., who to declare war on, where you’ll acquire arms and munitions, how you’ll convince a few thousand random Minnesotans to fight and die for you), and you can get straight to the fun part of winning the war and writing a national anthem about it.
Wars are crucial for nation-building. They contribute to a national myth, convince your citizens that they are special, and have worth, and dignity, and don’t have to keep going back to their toxic ex, god dammit, and can provide a cover for getting rid of your state’s undesirable elements (i.e. French persons). New regimes in existing states must rely on this tactic as well. For example, the Iran-Iraq war of the 80s provided the Islamic regime in Teheran with a rock-solid argument for why the Iranian people should get behind them: Saddam Hussein was clearly far crazier. Similarly, the Mexican War of Independence has provided common ground for Mexicans of all political leanings, even though the only other thing they could agree on, for a solid hundred years following independence and intermittently after that, was wearing large hats and shooting each other with rifles.
So if you have a war (provided that you win), you’re set. The problem is when (heavens forbid) you come to power peacefully. Without a war, your people will begin to question their nationhood, and their system of government, and maybe even why they agreed to have a rando from the Internet as their first president at all. You’ll be inundated by a sea of problems that you can’t solve (i.e. how to tax people without making them angry, how to run a government without drowning in debt, how to choose a National Tree and National Flowering Shrub), and soon you’ll be overthrown, your fledgling nation most likely reincorporated into the country it split off from. That would be a crushing blow to Minnesotan nationalism.
No, you have to start a war. The trouble is that it can be difficult to pick a target. A neighbor makes a good choice; it’s easier for people to get behind a war if they feel personally threatened by the nation you choose to attack. But sometimes your options are limited. For example, in the case of Minnesota, the new nation would be surrounded by just two sovereign neighbors, the United States and Canada. The United States is too big to fight and even Canada (and I’m sorry to say this, because it’s pretty sad) would beat the hell out of them. Fortunately, Minnesota would have access to the sea via the Great Lakes, expanding the list of potential targets to practically every nation on Earth. Unfortunately, many of the easiest victims (such as Bolivia) are landlocked and therefore invulnerable to aquatic invasion, but the selection is still quite wide. The people of Minnesota would simply need to pick somewhere reasonably close by — Grenada will do nicely, a fact first discovered by the U.S. Marines — and go to town. A few thousand dead later, and you’ll probably have some nice poetry and patriotic songs written, as well as quite a bit of practice for your nation’s health service.
Step four: Build your government
The hardest question to answer, when it comes to creating a government for your nation, is who should be in charge. Just kidding! That’s easy: YOU, of course! Who could be more qualified to run a country than you, a random person with no experience who may not even be from the place you’re trying to govern? Of course, the country will not actually be run by you; it will be run by lizard people. But you’ll have some say in some things.
One of those things is economic policy. The lizard people will probably push for a free-trade approach, and for good reason; practically the entire world follows such a policy, and you must admit that some select parts of it are quite rich as a result. However, if you are in charge of a newly-independent developing country (i.e. Wales), you would do well to note that the success rate of this strategy in bringing wealth to poor countries is, well…mixed. In fact, you could say it was actually fairly low. Okay, fine, it’s zero percent. Maybe the lizard people know something we don’t?
Alternatively, you could go for protectionism. Every single developed economy, except for Switzerland and Singapore, which don’t count because they are tiny and easy to confuse for one another, pursued protectionism until they were fairly well-off, when they switched to free trade. This decision will, however, make you internationally unpopular, because it won’t be quite as easy for Firestone Rubber to enslave your nation’s children, and you will make the World Bank pretty angry. The choice is yours.
Another action item is figuring out what rights your citizens will have. It’s easiest if you simply don’t give them any, since then you can do whatever you want, including making them dress up in costumes and do the Fortnite default dance for four hours every Friday night (not that I would know anything about this). But if you do that, people will probably try to leave, and policing the borders is difficult when the guards break and run at any opportunity as well. Instead, you should guarantee some basic freedoms (speech, press, religion, and assembly), then erode those freedoms through confusingly-named bills that you will push through the legislature. One word of advice: You should be very careful with LGBTQ+ rights. If you let these people be themselves, your nation’s children will probably catch The Gay. Be especially oppressive to trans people, who have an unfortunate tendency to write irreverent satire on the Internet.
Lastly, it’s good to figure out what form your government will take. Will you be a monarch? A president? A prime minister under another monarch who lives in a country on the other side of the world and has visited your nation precisely twice (hello, Papua New Guinea)? And the legislature as well. Should it be organized under the English model, where a bunch of men with ridiculous accents yell at each other, or the American model, which also has the men with ridiculous accents, except now they’re split up into just two parties? Both ways are absolutely terrible, but you get bonus points if you have an unelected or indirectly-elected upper house that can invalidate everything that the lower house does. Now that’s efficiency.
Step five: Celebrate!
Yay! You founded your nation, designed your flag, won your war, and built your government. Now you can take it easy! The day-to-day running of your country can be left to your bureaucracy and the lizard people, leaving you free to explore your interests, such as collecting thousands of luxury cars (as in Brunei) or forcing all of the schoolchildren in your nation to weed your fields (as in eSwatini). Being president (or king, whatever) of a country is basically the best thing that can happen to a person. All you need to do is make sure that none of your subjects get angry enough that they actually rise up to overthrow you. People forget that things were ever good if they weren’t alive at that point, so simply wait twenty or thirty years before doing anything overly oppressive. Just sit back and enjoy your new life of sending the waitress to federal prison if your food is late at a restaurant!
Oh, and watch out for budding nationalist movements in the far-flung corners of your domain. Those can be pretty dangerous.
Originally published at http://skeezixblogs.wordpress.com on July 22, 2020.
