Start Your Own Country Day

What the day is

Start Your Own Country Day is observed on November 22. It is a joke with a surprisingly well-developed body of law behind it.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

The standard legal test comes from the Montevideo Convention of 1933, which sets out four criteria for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. On paper this reads as a checklist. In practice the fourth item does all the work, because it depends entirely on whether existing states are willing to treat you as one of them.

That gap is the real subject. Under the declarative theory, a state exists once it meets the criteria, and recognition merely acknowledges a fact. Under the constitutive theory, recognition by other states is what brings it into being. Reality sits closer to the second, which is why entities with populations, borders and functioning governments can remain stateless in law for decades.

Micronations are where people test this for entertainment. The best known is Sealand, a wartime anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea occupied in 1967 and declared a principality, which briefly benefited from sitting outside British territorial waters as they were then drawn, and which survived an attempted coup in 1978. Hutt River, a farm in Western Australia that declared independence in 1970 during a dispute over wheat quotas, lasted fifty years before being wound up to settle a tax bill. Others have staked claims on unclaimed strips of riverbank between established borders.

None has achieved recognition. All of them are better understood as elaborate arguments about sovereignty than as countries.

How to take part

• Read the Montevideo criteria and test your favorite micronation against them.
• Look up Sealand's history, which is stranger than its reputation suggests.
• Design the flag, the constitution and the currency. This is the enjoyable part and it costs nothing.
• Understand that declaring independence does not alter your tax obligations. This has been tested repeatedly and has never once worked.
• Read about a real case of contested recognition to see what the stakes actually are.