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1456 points pulisse | 3 comments | | HN request time: 2.016s | source
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qwerty456127 ◴[] No.21186647[source]
The whole "unrecognised country" nonsense should begone. Everybody knows Taiwan is a distinct country (and does a reasonable job of being a decent country for the people living in it, it obviously is a better country than a number of completely recognized ones) yet it still has "limited recognition". How about recognizing the facts rather than virtual reality of politicians' imagination? Banning an entire country is bullshit.
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IIAOPSW ◴[] No.21187153[source]
De Jure nationhood is a stupid game that ignores facts on the ground in favor of politicians vision. It is predicated on a fallacy that "legitimacy" is a vital resource and that those already in the nation club have a monopoly on it. At this point calling groups "countries" and calling other groups "terrorists" is better understood as the geopolitical equivalent of a curse word and/or a propaganda trope.

-Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era.

-Trasnistaria. Has population, land, flag, collects taxes. Only recognized by Russia. There's a few Russian backed puppets like this, I won't name them all.

-Taiwan. Already discussed.

-Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese media calls the protestors terrorists. Yet another example of "terrorist" meaning simply "whoever the establishment wants to de-legitimize". If you follow the CCP narrative, the thing they care about isn't Democracy but separatism. "One China" is about not recognizing Taiwan and HK as a matter of ethno-nationalist principal.

-Palestine. Recognized by majority of UN countries. Still not recognized by US, Israel, and associated power block. Why? Because of the stupid belief that recognition will somehow legitimate it.

-ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer.

This is why I subscribe to De Facto nationhood instead. A nation is a nation when it satisfies the following properties:

-A plot of land with well defined borders.

-A permanent population on said land.

-A Monopoly on violence over said land.

-An organization capable of credibly making peace, declaring war, and otherwise accepting agreements with other nations.

The last one is tricky as it only specifies the capability not the actualization. For example, if the organization agrees to peace but the individual factions of the army keep fighting then this condition is not satisfied and what you have is a stateless warlord situation. For another example, the ISIS situation clearly had an organization which was capable of agreeing to a surrender or appointing an ambassador, but they never wanted to or were allowed to. The condition is still satisfied even though they never did it.

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1. dragonwriter ◴[] No.21187272[source]
> Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era.

Almost no one, including the Order itself, considers the Sovereign Military Order of Malta a country; it's the usual textbook example of a sovereign entity that is not a state/country by those who see it as sovereign (a point on which there is considerable dispute, despite the claim in its name and it's wide diplomatic interactions and grants of extraterritoriality, and, for it's headquarters, concurrent sovereignty with Italy.)

It's basically a NGO with a sui generis diplomatic status and disputed (among scholars) international legal status.

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2. djsumdog ◴[] No.21187552[source]
How would the breakaway province of Transnistria in Moldova be classified in this context?
3. qwerty456127 ◴[] No.21190032[source]
I actually wish there were more sovereign orders like that. Any group of people sharing common values and resources sufficient to make sense this way should have a right for sovereignty even if they don't own any land whatsoever, let alone when they have legitimately bought some. Sure there should be limits on what they are allowed to do (e.g. they should probably not be allowed to assemble nukes at a member's farm) but these should be applied by means of the same procedures like with recognized nations.