Ever wish you could escape from society to your own little island where you could run things your way? As artist and researcher Manar Moursi writes, people have been thinking about and sometimes acting on that idea for a long time.
Moursi traces the notion of islands as utopias to Plato’s description of Atlantis, written around 360 BCE. For Plato, the Atlanteans’ isolation led to moral decay. But other writers soon adapted the legend of Atlantis, describing the island as a technologically and ethically advanced society offering a blueprint for real nations.
Today, real estate projects often use utopian imagery as a marketing strategy. In Dubai, for example, residential islands have become a refuge from a mainland where the exploitation of foreign workers is uncomfortably visible.
Moursi also traces the idea that islands are essentially anarchistic or libertarian. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, including Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, represents islands as places where “natives” or international vagabonds live outside the reach of legal structures. And real, or partly real, stories of autonomous pirate islands emphasized the personal freedom, as well as the danger, to be found there.
Since then, libertarian-minded organizations have sometimes used islands as staging grounds for real-world political projects. In 1964, pirate radio stations began setting up operations on an island off the coast of the Netherlands, which at the time forbade commercial broadcasting. That effort was shut down fairly quickly, but the pirate station concept spread. In 1967, Major Paddy Roy Bates established what he called the Principality of Sealand on an oil platform off the east coast of England in order to set up a station there.
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Later, in 1999, Dutch physician Rebecca Gomberts created the Women on Waves project to offer abortions in international waters for people in countries with restrictive laws.
Meanwhile, some libertarians embraced the idea of autonomous ocean-based micronations as a haven from taxes and regulation—though not from the power wielded by the world’s wealthiest people.
Moursi writes that in the early 1970s, Werner Stiefel, a soap company owner inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, attempted to create a homestead in the Caribbean in the form of a concrete-hulled ship named Freedom. On its way to its intended destination, the ship sank.
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Shortly after that, another set of libertarians led by real estate developer Michael Oliver established the Republic of Minerva on the Minerva Reefs, envisioning it as a nation without “taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism.” However, their territory was quickly annexed by the Tonga military.
Today, the most prominent version of this tradition is the Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008. Funded by PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, the institute promised to create a variety of floating “oceanic city-states” as experiments in different political forms. These mini-governments would compete for citizens, who would be free to take their modular floating homes to a different micronation at any time.
Whether that’s a utopian or dystopian vision is a matter of perspective.
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