MicroCon 2023, Part I: The Kingdom of North Barchant
When tiny countries collide.
Before — or after — you read this dispatch, check out Thomas’s recap of MicroCon, including a deep dive into the virtues of Joliet, Illinois.
They say if you ask 100 people “What is a micronation?” you get 100 answers. Last weekend in Joliet, at MicroCon 2023, “The largest biennial gathering of micronationalists in the world,” you could’ve gotten 133 answers from people attached to 42 different micro-countries, including Grand Duke Travis of of Westarctica, President Kevin Baugh of Molossia, King Emmanuel of Amenothia and His Excellency, Randy “R Dub!” Williams, the Sultan of Slowjamastan.
Here’s the micro definition of a micronation: an unofficial state declaring sovereignty. Some exist in physical space. Some exist virtually. Obsidia, “the world’s only mobile feminist nation,” is a rock glued inside a suitcase. Most micronations create flags. Some mint money, print stamps and issue passports and citizenship papers. They engage in diplomacy, and sometimes skirmishes. Motivations vary. A micronation can be a political protest, a prank, an art project, a hobby, or a place where someone who feels out of step with the world can create a world where they belong (and make all the rules).
The Muruwari people, as part of the Australian Indigenous Sovereignty movement, founded the Murwarri Republic in 2013. Freetown Christiania, started in 1971, is a commune inside an old military base in Denmark; its first goal was to create a safe spot for hippies to smoke pot without getting thrown in jail. Now it’s one of Copenhagen’s most popular tourist attractions. The Republic of Kugelmugel began as a spherical house in Austria, but after its design caused friction with local government, Edwin Lipburger, the artist who built it, declared it an independent state. The Kingdom of EnenKio’s reason for being is — well, just read this. And Sealand, one of the oldest and best-known micronations, began as a pirate radio station on an old WWII sea fort. They still exist, and will sell you a royal title, starting at $33.
This year, at MicroCon, you got the full spectrum of micronational flavors, including paganish, whimsical, and unabashedly political.
MicroCon’s furthest-traveling group this year came from Latvia’s capital city, Riga, representing the Kingdom of North Barchant. As reported on this numismatics page featuring the 1 Barchant coin, it once held down a physical location on a floating series of barges “in the neutral waters of the Atlantic Ocean near the Canary Islands archipelago, 78 nautical miles to the west of Morocco.” In 2018, “as part of the reorganization of the Kingdom, it was decided to flood the barges. The creation on their basis the place for training divers. A new stage in the development of micro-state has begun.”
Now, eight years after its founding, North Barchant exists everywhere, a virtual state under the rule of Queen Anna Macco. It currently has 560 citizens in countries all over the world. On its website, the kingdom ecourages anyone interested to “join a friendly family of soul mates — people with a new worldview, who have become the first true citizens of a virtual state — the Kingdom of North Barchant voluntarily and by a twist of fate.” Anyone, anywhere, can apply for citizenship (though they don’t guaratee citizenship, which is generally the case for all micronations.)
The Kingdom identifies as libertarian in philosophy, operating as “a dualistic constitutional monarchy, similar in its nature to the political systems of such countries as Liechtenstein, Kuwait, Morocco and Bahrain.” (You can read its full Constitution here.)
Though it did away with its Parliament so that “each citizen got an opportunity to represent his interests directly,” North Barchant has several ministers, incliuding Minister of Sport, chess grandmaster Evgeny Sveshnikov; Minister of Culture, pianist Gleb Korolev; and Prime Minister Igor Beloff.
Beloff was part of the 2023 delegation to MicroCon, along with Honorary Consul for the USA, Igor Voznuk, and a North Barchantian citizen named Andrei. Beloff was also in Las Vegas for last year’s MicroCon, where he introduced a lecture on the kingdom’s economic policies (you can watch it here, starting at the 2:31:17 mark).
In 2023, Beloff said, the emphasis isn’t so much on economics, but ecology:
Appropriately enough, Beloff spoke about the kingdom’s new ecological focus while out in nature — or in the outdoors, at any rate, during the Nemean Games, MicroCon’s version of the Olympics. On Friday morning, micronationalists in matching team T-shirts drove to a woodsy subdivision, gathering on an abandoned tennis court facing a meandering creek. There, they competed in tennis ball shot-put, Frisbee discus throwing and a 50-yard dash.
After winning second place in the tennis ball shot-put, Beloff talked about North Barchant’s plan to address the environmental crisis: they’ll soon offer grants for for small, localized environmental projects. For instance, he said, everyone is talking about the wildfires in Canada. What can be done there?
“We don’t have any specific projects for ecology, right? It’s just the region, just the way any project could be accepted,” he said. “And anyone who knows the problem can come to us and try to help in some way. So maybe some of our citizens can join and help… negotiate small steps, but steps.”
He said that big crises must be solved through small, local efforts. In other words, solve macro problems with micro solutions — who could be better at implementing those than a micronation?
“It's our mission because we have citizens in all of the world,” he said. “All of them want to do something in place where they're living. And now we take this plan for the next five years.”
Though it aims to save the Earth, North Barchant doesn’t feel the need to be on Earth. Right before MicroCon, North Barchant announced on Facebook that it had stared working on “the metaverse of the Kingdom of North Barchant, or rather, on our virtual capital K-PAX!” K-PAX is also the name of the kingdom’s digital currency, which can “be used to make mutual settlements… Very soon we will tell you about the possibilities of obtaining K-PAX for active participation in the protection of the planet's ecosystem.” (You can use K-PAX in North Barchant’s online gift shop.)
North Barchant’s not the only micronation to exist in the imaginal, rather than the physical, but MicroCon is all about the exchange of objects: ribbons, medals, coins or, in the case at MicroCon 2022, homemade crabapple jelly. So on Saturday, North Barchant popped up a table at the Rock Run Conference Center, where the hallways were crowded with tables covered in brochures, postcards, photo displays, buttons, business cards, stickers, stamps, medals, one-sheeters, tiny flags, crowns, coozies, sample passports, citizenship applications, and in the case of Moontonia, the opportunity to take a tiny pinch of dirt from their country.
Some of this year’s leaders, like Hank of Hankland, were teens or tweens, so their tables had that middle-school science fair vibe. North Barchant’s table was laid out with professionally printed banknotes (one featuring Queen Anna), wooden stamps, regular sheet stamps, and enamel pins.
Some micronationalists are hobbyists who are in it for fun, but Beloff said that North Barchant’s big goal at MicroCon was aligning with other micronations, establishing diplomatic relations with them and collaborating with them on environmental projects. Sometimes micronationalists connect on Sunday during the bowling party, but the surest way to another micronationalist’s heart and mind is through the offering of honorary medals.
A good number of those medals get exchanged on Saturday, after an afternoon of presentations Apparently in years past the medal exchange lasted longer than the lectures. Queen Carolyn of Ladonia, this year’s conference host, wisely ruled that anyone presenting another nation with a medal had to do so prefacing it only with a haiku.
Some of the honor-and-medal-swapping took place offstage; North Barchant bestowed medals on Ladonia, Molossia, Westarctica and Slowjamastan “for protecting the environment, developing and preserving the traditions of the community of micronations.” And their nation ended up with the coveted Racoon of Friendship award from Slowjamastan.
In the next few weeks, Igor, Igor and Andrei will travel to Ypres, Belgium for the European MicroCon delegation, and then to the Micronational Summit in the Czech Republic.
“The most important thing is we are finding people who want to make the planet better, and now we want to do some ecological problems,” Beloff said. “We say for all people, we together can do something good.”
Some Micro-Housekeeping
First: enjoy this jubliant bit of rug-cutting from the Saturday MicroCon banquet. MicroCon Part II will post in the next few days, possibly with a podcast component. I talked to Queen Carolyn of Ladonia, who runs one of the longest-running and most storied micronations in the world.
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