When I visited the Free Republic of Liberland in April 2023, on its eighth anniversary, there was little to indicate that the tiny proto-nation—which had no permanent residents, barely any buildings, and a tendency to flood—was on track to fulfill its goal of becoming “the freest country on the planet.” But these days, Liberland has friends in high places.
Liberland was founded in 2015 by Vít Jedlička, a euro-skeptic politician from Czechia who had come to view European democracies as blighted by stringent regulation and overtaxation. In search of somewhere to start afresh, Jedlička came across a rare plot of land that seemed to belong to no country—a terra nullius,
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