"실제로 존재하지 않는 나라들"- 분명한것은, 여행객들은 무심코 그나라들을 구경했다는점이다.

둥근 지구를 들여다 보면 독립국가인데로 지도상에는 나타나지 않은 은둔의 나라들이 있다. 그나라들은 분명히 국가 구성요건인, 국민, 정부들이 있고, 축구리그경기도 치른다. 실제로 여행객인 당신은 그러한 내용을 모른체 그나라들을 여행 했을수도 있다는 점이다.

Nick Middleton을 처음 만났을때 그는 지구라는 물체위에서 가장 화려한 곳을 표시해주고 있는 지구본과 전세계 지도들로 휩싸여 있었음을 기억한다. London에서 여행객들을 상대로 가장 많은 책들을 판매하고 있는 Stanford서점의 지하 전시실에서 서점을 둘러 보고 있다.  이서점은 Florence Nightingale, Ernest Shackleton,그리고 Ranulph Fiennes 같은 두려움을 모르는 탐험가들이 방문했었던 서점이다.  

Middleton씨의 주장에 따르면, 그자신은 여행자를 위한 책과 지도에서 거의다 빠져있는 여러나라들에 대한 얘기를 하기위해 이곳을 방문했다고 설명한다.  그의 설명에 따르면, 지도상에서 빠져있는 나라를 "이들 나라들은 지도상에 표시되여 있는 않은 나라들"이라고 표현한다.  그러나 Atlantium, Christiania, Elgaland-Vargaland 같은 유명세를 타고 있는 나라들은 실제로 존재하는 지역이며, 애국심이 강한 시민들이 거주하고 있는 곳이다.  실제로 많은 여행객들이 대부분 알게 모르게 이들 지역중 한곳을 분명히 방문했었을 것이다.  

Oxford 대학에서 지리학 교수로 근무하고 있는 Middleton은 그의 새로 저술한 책 "지도상에 표시되지 않은 여러나라들(Macmillan,2015)"에서 이렇게 숨겨진 지역을 표시해 놓았다.  책속에 표시해 둔것을 보면서, 당신은 역사적으로, 또자체문화적으로 잊혀져 있지만 실제로 그이상으로 그안에서 여행을 즐기고 있다는 것이다.  잊혀져 있지만 실제로는 그이상으로 존재감을 갖고 있는 이세상이라는것을 국제적으로 즐기고 있는 축구리그에 그들의 나라를 나타내고 참가한다는 점이다.  

그안을 들여다 보면, 이지구촌은 이렇게 존재한 조그만 지역(합당한 인구, 정부, 국기와 화폐)으로 꽉차있는 행성이다.   그들중 어떤 나라들은 생체학적 측정이 가능한 여권까지 발급한다.
그러나 여러가지 이유로 그들은 UN에 대표자를 파견하는게 허용돼지 않는다.  그리고 또한 세계지도에서 표기가 묵살돼고 있다.  

Christiania는 도시국가이다.

Middleton’s quest began, appropriately enough, with Narnia. He was reading CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe with his six-year-old daughter, and the main character Lucy had just passed through the mothballs and fur coats into a magical land. Something about the whimsy appealed to Middleton. As a geographer, he realised that you don’t have to use magic to visit a country that “doesn’t exist” in the eyes of most other states. Even so, he didn’t expect them to be quite so widespread. “Once I started looking into them, I was amazed by how many there are,” he says. “I could have filled the book several times over.”

The problem, he says, is that we don’t have a watertight definition of what a country is. “Which as a geographer, is kind of shocking,” he says. Some cite a treaty signed in 1933, during the International Conference of American States in Montevideo, Uruguay. The “Montevideo Convention” declares that to become a country, a region needs the following features: a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and “the capacity to enter into relations with other states”.

By one criterion, England itself is a country that doesn’t exist

Yet many countries that meet these criteria aren‘t members of the United Nations (commonly accepted as the final seal of a country’s statehood). Consider Taiwan – which held a seat in the General Assembly until 1971, until mainland China entered and took over its position. Even the United Kingdom is a somewhat strange case, Middleton says. Within our law, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are considered individual states. We have our own sports teams and compete against each other – but we only have one shared seat in the UN. “So is England a country? By this criterion, no,” says Middleton. (Such questions came to a head with Scotland’s recent referendum.)

In the end, England and Scotland didn’t make it into the pages of his Atlas. For his shortlist, Middleton focused on the countries that meet the Montevideo convention, with a fixed territory, population, and government, but which have no representation in the General Assembly. (Although many of them are instead members of the “Unrepresented United Nations – an alternative body to champion their rights.) 

 A handful of the names will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: territories such as Taiwan, Tibet, Greenland, and Northern Cyprus. The others are less famous, but they are by no means less serious; Middleton discusses many examples of indigenous populations hoping to reassert their sovereignty. One of the most troubling histories, he says, concerns the Republic of Lakotah (with a population of 100,000). Bang in the centre of the United States of America (just east of the Rocky Mountains), the republic is an attempt to reclaim the sacred Black Hills for the Lakota Sioux tribe.

The US judge concluded that ‘a more ripe and rank case of dishonest dealings may never be found in our history’

Their plight began in the 18th Century, and by 1868 they had finally signed a deal with the US government that promised the right to live on the Black Hills. Unfortunately, they hadn’t accounted for a gold rush – and the government soon forgot about its deal as prospectors swarmed over the sacred land. The Lakota would have to wait more than a century for an apology, when, in 1998, a judge at the Supreme Court concluded that “a more ripe and rank case of dishonest dealings may never be found in our history”. The Court decided to compensate the Lakota Sioux (in nearly $600m) but they have refused to take the cash. “They say if we take the money, it’ll be like saying the crime was alright,” says Middleton.  Instead, in 2007 a delegation marched to Washington to declare their formal withdrawal from the US, and they continue to mount a legal battle for their independence.

 Similar battles are being fought across every continent. There’s Barotseland, an African kingdom with a population of 3.5 million that has mounted a case to leave Zambia, and Ogoniland, which is attempting to disengage from Nigeria; both declared independence in 2012. In Australia, meanwhile, the Republic of Murrawarri was founded in 2013, after the indigenous tribe wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth II asking her to prove her legitimacy to govern their land. The Murrawarri gave her 30 days to reply – and with nothing but a deafening silence, they formallyreasserted their claim to rule their ancient homeland.

Not all the countries featured in Middleton’s book have such deep historical roots – often, they are established by rather eccentric individuals hoping to set up a new, fairer state. Middleton points to Hutt River, in Australia, a small “principality” set up by a family of farmers hoping to escape the government’s strict grain quotas; they soon developed their own royal titles, currency and postal service. “They have a thriving stamp business,” says Middleton (although initially, letters had to be flown through Canada). After decades of struggle, the government gave up the fight and the family no longer have to pay Australian taxes.

 In Europe, you can find Forvik, a tiny Shetland Isle founded by an Englishman (from Kent) to promote transparent governance, Sealand, off the British coast, andChristiania, an enclave in the heart of Copenhagen. The latter country was formed by a group of squatters occupying a former army barracks in 1971. On 26 September that year, they declared it independent, with its own “direct democracy”, in which each of the inhabitants (now numbering 850) could vote on any important matter. So far, the Danish government has turned something of a blind eye to the activities; smoking cannabis, for instance, is legal in Christiania, but outlawed in the rest of the Denmark (though the Christianians themselves have decided to ban harder drugs).

Despite these more eccentric examples, Middleton wouldn’t consider trying to set up a country himself. “Having trawled through so many serious stories of yearning and oppression, I don’t think it’s appropriate to take it too light heartedly,” he says. “For so many people it’s a matter of life or death.” Despite their efforts, he suspects that only a very few will eventually gain wider recognition. “If I had to plump for any, it would be Greenland,” he says – the autonomous region of Denmark that already has self-rule, often considered the first step to formal recognition.

But given our difficulties even defining what a country is, perhaps we need to rethink the concept of the nation-state altogether? He points to Antarctica, a continent shared peacefully among the international community, as a sign that we don’t necessarily have to slice up land as if it were a giant pizza.

Anyone, anywhere, can become a citizen of Atlantium

Perhaps this is just the start. The last pages of Middleton’s Atlas contain two radical examples that question everything we think we mean by the word ‘country’.

Consider Atlantium. Its capital, Concordia, for instance, is based in a remote rural province of Australia – it is occupied by more kangaroos than people. But that’s just its administrative quarters – Atlantium is “non-territorial”, meaning that anyone, anywhere, can become a citizen. As its website proclaims: “In an age where people increasingly are unified by common interests and purposes across – rather than within – traditional national boundaries, Atlantium offers an alternative to the discriminatory historic practice of assigning nationality to individuals on the basis of accidents of birth or circumstance.”

Any time you have travelled abroad, you have passed through Elgaland-Vargaland

Then there’s Elgaland-Vargaland, which was thought up by two Swedish artists – and is meant to consist of all the areas of “No Man’s Land” across the world, including the land marking the borders between other nations and any bits of the sea outside another country’s territorial waters; any time you have travelled abroad, you have passed through Elgaland-Vargaland. In fact, of all the countries Middleton has looked at, this is the closest to his starting point, Narnia – since the artists claim that any time you enter a dream, or let your mind wander, you have also crossed a border and temporarily taken a trip into Elgaland-Vargaland.

Atlantium and Elgaland-Vargaland may be a little too fanciful for most people to take very seriously – Middleton admires them more as an attempt to provoke wider debate on international relations. “They all raise the possibility that countries as we know them are not the only legitimate basis for ordering the planet,” he wrote in his book.

"한가지 분명한것은 세계는 지속적으로 변화하고 있다는 점이다.  "나의 세대에 살고 있는 사람들은 그 어느 누구도 쏘연방이 그렇게 산산조각이 날줄은 상상도 못했었다. 현재 우리에게는 예상치 않았던 변화들이 매우 크게 일어나고 있다."라고 그는 설명한다. 새로운 나라들은 계속해서 탄생하고 있는반면에 존재하고 있던 나라들은 사라지고 있다.  앞으로 우리가 알고 있는 영토들은 결국에는 존재하지 않는 하나의 나라가 될것이라는 것을 우리는 알고있다. 

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151103-the-countries-that-dont-exist