Almost 10,000 Syrians have registered citizenship with a tiny libertarian country in Europe that may or may not exist

A magnifying glass and a globe.
(Image credit: iStock)

Earlier this year, a young Czech politician named Vít Jedlička staked his claim to a small piece of no-man's land on the border of Croatia and Serbia. He dubbed the 2.7-square-mile area "Liberland," and announced it as a new sovereign nation organized on libertarian principles.

Serbia and Croatia don't exactly agree with Jedlička as to whether or not his country exists, but that hasn't stopped nearly 10,000 Syrians looking to escape their war-torn country from applying for citizenship in Liberland. Residents of other troubled nations, like Libya, have also been over-represented among Liberland's 378,000 citizenship applications to date.

Unfortunately for Syrian applicants, only about 600 out of 10,000 have qualified so far — and the Croatian government isn't letting any would-be Liberlanders occupy their new country as of this time.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Continue reading for free

We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.

Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.

Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.