The women of Liberland may be free, but they most certainly will not be equal. "Equality rights—don't be alarmed," Kacper Zajac, Liberland's Minister of Justice and the author of its constitution, says by way of introduction of this contentious topic. "It’s equality before the law and before the law only." A PowerPoint presentation drives this home with the word "ONLY!" in all caps. "No other equality is acceptable, obviously."
It’s a vague introduction to a theme that hangs heavy in the air, a reminder that women are not men, blacks are not whites, refugees aren’t citizens, and the poor aren’t rich. Zajac just wants to cut the crap. Political correctness has no place in Liberland, everyone—all five dozen white men—can agree.
We are in Novi Sad, Serbia, just a short trip from Liberland, the unrecognized, unpopulated Libertarian microstate and the subject of this three-day conference. We won't actually get to Liberland, which was the original plan, and we won't take a boat along the Danube and see it in the distance, which was the backup plan. We will eat fried fish near a patch of land that the President of Liberland will assure us looks a lot like Liberland, and those of us who fly home via Air Liberland will ooh and aah at Liberland from above. But Liberland is going through a couple of legal issues, and its neighbors are pretty pissed, so we're not actually going to set foot in the freest country in the world, which aside from not actually being a country is also beginning to seem not all that free.
On April 13 of last year, Vít Jedlička, a Libertarian politician from the Czech Republic's Free Citizens Party, ventured into some unclaimed swampland he discovered on Wikipedia, planted a flag, and called it Liberland. He, his girlfriend, and another friend unanimously voted him president of the muddy patch of land and alerted the media to the birth of a nation. Since then, Jedlička and his friends and followers have failed to make a definitive legal claim on the territory, which Croatia, in particular, is reluctant to concede (border disputes are kind of a "thing" in this part of the world, you may recall), and much of the media attention Jedlička received has written the whole thing off as a lark, a fantasy.
But Liberland is only a fantasy for Vít Jedlička inasmuch as an immigrant-free Hungary is a fantasy for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, both nations nestled in the belly of a right-leaning Central Europe. It's only an impossibility as much as a win for UKIP's Brexiteers was an impossibility: once a fringe movement, later an (inter)national nightmare. And it's only as unfeasible as a Trump presidency—funny how that worked out—fueled by “straight talk” in the service of white men of means, and just about no one else.
The actuality of a country of Liberland—with residents and infrastructure and global recognition—hardly even matters. Over 103,000 fully registered citizens are willing to suspend their disbelief that the overgrown, three-square-mile land mass could become Libertarian utopia. Liberland has distended beyond the realm of fantasy into a living, growing, big-spending movement, with a massive following and a few off-brand splinter groups. And for an organization driven by xenophobic, Eurosceptic, tax-avoidant white men, the timing couldn’t be better.
Okay, but back to Serbia, where Zajac is working this room. At 23, he holds a law degree and a master's from the London School of Economics and various other qualifying bullet points on his resume, which he cooly enumerated at the beginning of his presentation. “I can tell by your faces that you think I’m too young for this job. I don’t blame you,” he said with a smile.
Zajac wrote Liberland's constitution in just three days, the president has told us, as if this lends credence to the document. Other greatest hits in the lengthy constitution include a sort of don't-ask, don't tell policy on prostitution ("I would not enforce those services for a reason which is probably hard to explain in simple terms and with reason, without a glass of wine," Zajac says), a provision for the private prosecution of public officials ("government agencies are not very eager to prosecute public officials—we saw that with the FBI and Hillary Clinton"), and the right to offend ("something that is missing in the world of political correctness").
During a coffee break at the end of Zajac's lecture, a Liberlander who raised his hackles at the prostitution law approaches me. "Are you a journalist?" he asks. He says he figures I must be either a journalist or somebody's girlfriend. Because why else would I be here?
And to be fair, women, the disabled, and ethnic and religious minorities generally aren't alarmed by equality rights. We can also be real drags about political correctness. Which reminds me: There will be "no public quotas" in Liberland, "No 20% of women within the judiciary branch because it is politically correct. Nothing of this nonsense." Refugees aren’t yet an issue, of course, but the president has expressed his gratitude that Croatia’s border protections would serve Liberland in keeping migrants out. When the EU proposed tighter restrictions on the use of virtual currencies like Bitcoin, Liberland’s leadership tweeted: “Maybe it would be more helpful to stop inviting terrorists to Europe.”
There's also a preponderance of white faces, most of which belong to Central and Western Europeans and North Americans. Conspicuously absent are Asians or Middle Easterners, who account for a vast proportion of the applications for citizenship. The one exception is Rehan Allahwala, a Pakistani entrepreneur whose plan to provide the country with universal wi-fi recently landed him the title of Minister of Communication, maybe. “I proposed that, you know, I can be the Minister of Communication, and [Jedlička] introduced me to people as the Minister of Communication,” Allahwala told me. “I was like, ‘What, seriously, is that how it’s done?’” At breakfast one morning, I have the pleasure of watching Allahwala, a Muslim, listen respectfully as a guy from Monaco mansplains Sharia law to him.
Looking around the room of 60-some conference attendees, I count four other women, all of whom do appear to be paired off with men. Monika Chlumská, Liberland’s Foreign Minister, also serves as its secretary and general coordinator; she moves through the weekend in an anxious blur, squabbling with the president over logistical matters. She later says with a laugh that going to work for Jedlička was a mistake, and while it’s clear this is not a joke, I can’t tell whether I should pretend it is or not.
Then there's the matter of whether or not Liberland will have a central bank and what currencies will be at play in the micronation. This is a rich man’s SimCity, after all: Interested persons who earn 10,000 “merits,” for the equivalent of $10,000, receive citizenship to this country with no taxes, but also without public healthcare, education, or criminal defense. A couple of people I met at the conference later cited concerns about the lack of transparency regarding Liberland spending; one of them, a former volunteer for the Liberland Settlement Association, has left the project altogether.
Liberland receives $10,000 monthly from Bitcoin's angel investor Roger Ver, and the President has repeatedly vowed his commitment to keeping the cryptocurrency as the basis of the nation's economy. At the conference, however, Herve Lacorne, founder and CEO of Trade Solutions Group, introduces a proposal for a central bank that will also deal in fiat currencies. A few attendees seem caught unawares. George, a Hungarian wearing an "I (Heart) Bitcoin" t-shirt, wants to know whether a central bank dealing with fiat will decrease the large percentage of donations to the country that now come in via Bitcoin.
George’s entire life is Bitcoin. The previous evening, he had told me that the whole idea of Liberland had begun with Bitcoin, and he knew that, he said, because he “made Bitcoin." “Maybe I’m Satoshi Nakamoto,” he said, referencing the pseudonym of the currency’s mysterious inventor. He later walked this back, calling Bitcoin simply "the love of [his] life.”
Lacorne is less enthusiastic. Sure, Bitcoin is a fine currency for anonymous trading, but it doesn’t look great to the outside world. But switching to a Liberland bank might be an aid to tax evasion, one audience member points out.
"Not tax evasion, tax management," Lacorne says, shaking one finger in the air.
I spoke with Bitcoin George by phone after the conference to probe a little further into his background. George keeps his last name under wraps; on Facebook, where so much intra-Liberland communication takes place, he's known simply as "Happy George," and this is how he identifies himself to me. "There're tax havens, there's a lot of offshore places, there's a lot of free countries, there's a lot of free places,” he said, “but there isn't the place that is really a kind of bastion or… testing pad or testing track to see what happens when a government is limited—not by goals, not by some weird constitution, but by Bitcoin."
I ask him whether he'll take part in Liberland events going forward. "I want to do Liberland yoni massage conferences," he tells me. He describes this as a “special, very powerful love-centric massage.” Later, via Facebook, he offers me a free yoni massage. He follows up with a GIF of one fox kneading another fox's back, a red heart rising above them and then bursting like a bubble.
Just before noon on the second day of the conference, Jedlička announces that anyone who hasn't yet checked out of the hotel needs to do so immediately. This comes as a surprise to many of us, who did not know that the second leg of the conference was to take place not in Novi Sad, as stated on the registration website, but in the town of Sombor, closer to the Croatian border and to Liberland.
In Sombor, chaos ensues because Team Liberland apparently has not confirmed the hotel reservations for the conference attendees. While we wait on the street with our bags, I introduce myself to an American woman, here with her husband, who wears precisely the facial expression of someone whose spouse has flown her out to small-town Serbia to attend a poorly organized conference for a nonexistent country populated by men exercising their right to offend.
I think we could be friends. Not a lot of estrogen around here, I remark. Her husband steps in to explain: Men are more adventurous, and they're the ones who like to conquer the world. Women, he says, prefer the security of the home.
It's already dark by the time we're all checked in and on our way to a party the president has set up for us at a restaurant in Croatia. After one too many altercations with the Croatian police, Jedlička himself was served with a ban from the country, so he won't be joining us. As our bus arrives at the border, a member of the group instructs us not to mention Liberland.
Everyone gets a stamp in their passport except for a young Austrian man with a mane of tangled hair. I’d met him that morning over breakfast, and when I asked his name, he’d quietly pulled my hand to his lips. But when Allahwala suggested that Trump’s candidacy had mobilized the Ku Klux Klan, he said that the KKK had come out of the Democratic Party. And besides, the KKK hasn't had nearly the influence that the Black Lives Matter people have had.
Border police interrogate the Austrian while the rest of us wait hungrily. This is not his first rodeo with the Croatians, I later learn. In the year after the country was founded, the Liberland Settlement Association regularly sent groups of activists to the area knowing that they would be arrested, and then spent thousands of Euros’ worth of governmental funds to bail them out of jail. Border officials recognize the Austrian, our passports are collected again, and our cover is blown.
Time inches towards midnight as we wait for him to be released. Men begin to smoke on the dark bottom floor of the bus. Jim Turney, former Chair of the Libertarian National Committee, tells several hours’ worth of American political stories to a captive audience. A guy in his early twenties who has longboarded to the conference all the way from the Netherlands says, gleefully, that we are all going to jail. (He also boasts that he hasn't changed his clothes for the past six weeks.) We're forced to leave the bus and not allowed to bring anything except cigarettes with us. It strikes me as oddly Serbo-Croatian that cigarettes are allowed.
Don't worry, says one guy to our group: our Croatian bus driver has “fixed it.” Nothing appears fixed.
After four hours at the border, the police send us back to Serbia, and those of us from outside the European Union are forced to sign documents confirming that we were refused entry to Croatia. And this is when something changes for me. At one in the morning, exhausted and hungry, and with a bus full of men who are thrilled to be in conflict with an establishment, I, who have nearly every privilege in the world, feel stifled, ripped off, and unfree. I’m pissed at a president for leading me astray, mentally calculating who else is to blame, and indignant on behalf of my gender about the baseless enthusiasm of the men on the bus, including the guy next to me, who continues to ask probing questions about my sex life. This is the closest I’ve felt to being a Liberlander. But it doesn’t ignite a revolutionary fire beneath me. It just makes me want to take a nap.
I’ll need to hire a lawyer to appeal the Croatians’ decision, and maybe that's why I'm invited to fly back to Prague in Air Liberland. Over the roar of the six-seater’s engine, I ask Jedlička about his ragtag group of supporters. “I’m happy that Liberland has brought together such a great group of people,” he says. “I had to tell only one person so far to stop representing Liberland.” He tells me it would be nice if I could write about the people of Liberland. “It’s so many people I tend to forget some of the important ones.”
“But no women,” I say.
“No, no—we’ve got Monika,” he replies. (Chlumská has since left her role as Foreign Minister. She was replaced by an Ecuadorian-Italian man named José Miguel Maschietto, the subject of music-world scandal and an entertaining YouTube video accusing him of Catch Me If You Can-style international deception. Maschietto was swiftly dismissed after a journalist for the BBC shared this information with Jedlička. He was replaced by Thomas Walls, an American, who recently told The Washington Post that a prominent supporter of the Liberland movement was a close adviser to a Trump cabinet member.)
We fly over the micronation, and Jedlička smiles down at his country. I wonder if he fears that those three square miles could someday disappear, or be taken from him, and that's why he feels the need to check in on them so often, as if to make sure they're still there, still unpopulated. This pet project of Jedlička’s strikes me as something akin to buying and naming your own star: an investment that manages to shine regardless of the fact that it isn’t, technically, even yours, and that it may have fizzled out a long time ago.
But surely that star is still rising. Breathless coverage in the Russian propaganda vehicle Sputnik News would certainly have you think so. Secessionist factions in Texas and California—another idea Moscow is all-too-willing to nurture—make Jedlička’s proposition look downright reasonable. And cartoonish as he believes Trump to be, Jedlička took to Facebook to express his excitement over the president-elect, saying, “I believe it opens up great relations between our countries” and calling it “significant” that the two men spoke at the same festival fifteen months ago. If ever there was a moment for the freest people in the world to stage a large-scale freakout over the loss of their liberty, this is most certainly it. Liberland’s anti-establishment, pro-freedom movement is progressing in tandem not only with Trump’s America, Orbán’s Hungary, and a Britain post-Brexit, but also with the Eurosceptic nationalism behind Kaczyński’s Poland, Fico’s Slovakia, Radev’s Bulgaria, Dodon’s Moldova, and perhaps soon Wilders’ Netherlands, Le Pen’s France and who-knows-whose Italy—to say nothing of the minority parties swaying parliaments and public opinion across the continent.
Back in the Czech Republic, Jedlička, Chlumská, and a Czech photographer traveling with us glide through immigration without any trouble. But the passport agent stops me. I see you were denied entry into Croatia yesterday, he says.
We're from Liberland, Jedlička replies in Czech, handing the agent a glossy brochure and explaining that the country of Croatia doesn’t recognize Liberland’s legitimacy.
Ah, the agent says, flipping through the brochure, “that fictitious country.”
To není fictivní, Jedlička responds. “It isn't fictitious.” It isn't fictitious at all.
