99% Invisible - 174- From the Sea, Freedom

Episode Date: July 29, 2015

In 1933, delegates from the United States and fourteen other countries met in Montevideo, Uruguay to define what it means to be a state. The resulting treaty from the Montevideo Convention established four basic criteria for statehood—essentially, what is required … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1933, several nation-states, including the US, got together in Montevideo, Uruguay, to define what it means to be a state. The treaty they came up with includes 16 articles, each of which lays out different rights and duties of statehood. That's producer Julia DeWitt. But the most famous article is number one, which sets out the four basic criteria of statehood. That's producer Julia DeWitt. But the most famous article is number one, which sets out the four basic criteria of statehood.

Basically, what it takes to be a country. The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications, a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states. I think a good flag is crucial too, but that's just me. Well, even if you toss in a flag, the criteria for becoming a state seem to some people

surprisingly simple. So simple, that a lot of people thought, hey, I could do that. And so, for a lot of people that just triggered, I suppose, an idea that that meant that they could just call their house an independent country. That's John Ryan. These are countries that might even just be somebody's backyard or it could be an area that they are claiming for one reason or another to be an independent country. John Ryan is the co-author of the guidebook, Micronesians, the Lonely Planet Guide to Homemade Nations. And yeah, this is the same Lonely Planet that publishes tourist guides to places like Mexico and France.

John says most of these micronations are just kind of for fun. They aren't expecting anyone to take them seriously, and they don't usually meet all for criteria laid out by the Montevideo Convention. Places like Molassia. Which is in Nevada, just in one guy's house. Such a lovely guy, President Kevin Bow and he runs this great little micro nation. He gets about in military regalia and reflective sunglasses. He looks totally like a central American dictator from the 70s or 80s.

Malacias' currency is pegged to the price of Pillsbury cookie dough. So they'll go up and down in value as cookie dough does. A few years ago, Malacias' President Bow started the micro-national Olympics where micro-nations compete against each other in events like checkers and the boomerang throw. Malassia is fairly easy to dismiss as just one dude's crazy projects. But then, there are places like Sea Land. Probably the world's most interesting and fascinating machination is Sea Land. And Sea Land cannot be dismissed so easily.

The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications, a defined territory. If you search for the principality of sea land on Google Maps, it comes up as a little red dot off the east coast of England. Zoom in for some photographs of the place and you'll see a metal platform sitting atop two concrete pillars. A stilted structure

in the ocean surrounded on all sides by the North Sea. The platform is about the size of a football field. So pretty small territory as countries go. So how did this platform and the sea become a micro nation? Well, you could say it all started with rock and roll. Good morning, everyone. Tony Blackburn here. Would you feel your little under the weather this morning? We've got about an eight-fourth gale out there,

so I'm strapped in the seat this morning. In the 1960s, the British government wasn't giving out enough licenses to accommodate all the music that the kids were suddenly demanding. So a bunch of DJs decided to take matters into their own hands. They set up pirate radio stations on ships and on abandoned British forts in the North Sea to broadcast rock music back to England. This is number one and they count down this week. From the Spencer Davis group, it's called Keep On Running. Keep on running. Keep on hiding.

One five day come on a p-girl. One two, make you wonder. Well, C-land is so physically as an old wartime fortress built in 1943. It was built in the North Sea to defend the United Kingdom against German aircraft that were following the river Thames up to London and bombing London. That's Michael Bates, Prince of Sea Land. Back in 1967, Michael's dad Roy was one of the DJs trying to turn these old abandoned forts in the sea into radio stations. But don't be fooled. Roy wasn't just a rock and roll love and hippie. He was a free market capitalist. Here he is being interviewed about his pirate radio ventures.

More and more business people and more and more businesses are becoming educated to use commercial radio. And this is as it should be. I would like to see radio used for every form of advertising, but there is use in every other media now. In any case, Bates and the other DJs kept getting slapped with big fines from the British government. So Michael Zadroy changed course. He scrapped the idea of a pirate radio station and decided to go for something even bigger. My man always liked the challenge.

I was talking to his lawyer friend one day. My father said, what if I declared independence? Roy Bates wanted to start his own country. And Lionel, his friend said, well, no, you can't do that. And I thought, well, why can't I do it? So my father went ahead and did it. Roy thought the fort was uniquely suited for independence because of its location. It was six miles off the coast of England, and at the time, England's territorial waters

only reached three miles offshore. Three miles because that is how far a cannonball can fly and break through a foot of oak. So it's sort of a dated law. It's been since changed to 12 miles. You know, we got better cannons now. But back then, with this 3 mile rule, Roy considered the fort, which again was just a platform perched on two concrete towers out in the ocean. Roy considered this claimable territory.

He didn't buy the platform, he didn't ask permission, just gathered up his family, and moved them there. The government might call this squatting, but for the bait's family, this was nation building. And so, on a blustery day in 1967, a nation was built. Celand has a national anthem. And they have a flag. It's actually a pretty good flag. It follows all the principles of good design. It's simple, has three flag. It follows all the principles of good design It's simple as three colors red, white and black Well the red is for Roy the black is for his days in part radio and the white line down the middle of it Is the path of purity that he travels today. I think he was slightly telling a cheek on that one the country's motto is

From the sea freedom on that one. The country's motto is, from the sea, freedom. The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications, a defined territory, a permanent population. The population of Cieland consisted for many years of four people, Roy Bates, founder, plus his wife Joan, his daughter Penelope, and his son, Michael. Roy named his son Michael Prince, and his daughter, Princess. He didn't call himself King now. I think he thought I was a bit over the top.

Before Michael was a prince, he was just a kid from England. He was 14 and in boarding school when his dad moved them all out to Celand. Michael didn't think it would last for long. I envisaged six months, a lot of it would have been an adventure for six months, and all of the same. That would be the end of it. Michael and his dad ended up living on Sea Land for about 25 years. For the most part, it was just Michael and his dad, mom, and sister out on the platform.

They built a house, set up a water gathering system, and filled some of the rooms in the towers with canned food. Nowadays, the rooms are fully furnished. There's a non-denominational chapel, generators for power, there's even a gym where you can work out. But back when they first started, the place was pretty bare bones. Sometimes when the weather got bad, and their resupply boat didn't show up they'd get a little hungry on those days They would eat fish that they caught and biscuits from a box when Michael would get sick of being on a metal platform out in the middle of the ocean He would hitch a ride on a boat back to the mainland to find kids his own age I mean I came back up he straight out into a night club or something like that. That was a good time They say let's do when they hit port, I suppose.

I hope there wasn't quite as bad as that. And sometimes he would even bring friends back to sealant. I just muggle women out there, and my tap wasn't too keen, but I just muggle women out there with that tele. Of course. I tried to lead a normal life, even though I was in an odd place. The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications,

a defined territory, a permanent population, a government. Sealand has various government posts apart from the monarchy. Their tax lawyer is their minister of foreign affairs, and the caretaker that stays out there when they're gone is head of Homeland Security. He's the one that issues visas and stamps your passport if you visit. Their legal code is pretty simple.

They basically have all the same laws as England. Well, almost all the same laws. Unlike England, C-LAND allows guns, Prince Michael loves guns. But they never really had to use them, except once. There aren't a lot of ways to make money on Sea Land, which meant the family was always trying to come up with money-making schemes. And sometimes these schemes got a little weird. In 1978, Roy, Michael's dad, started talking to some businessmen from Germany, Austria, and Belgium. They wanted to build a leisure island around

Celand and put a casino on it. And one day, Roy and his wife went to Austria to talk with some funders about this deal. Back at Celand, Michael, who was 25 at the time, was figuratively holding down the literal fort when a helicopter showed up and a group of men lowered themselves to the platform. The first man down a recognize. Michael knew some of these guys coming out of the helicopter as men his dad had worked with. One of them was part of Cielan's government, its minister of foreign affairs. A guy by the name of Alexander Aachenbach.

But according to Michael, Aachenbach was trying to shut Michael's family out of the casino deal. He was allegedly staging a coup. And so he says to Michael, Hey, I just met with your father, and he signed C-land over to me. It's mine now. And Michael in his head is like, no way. I don't believe you.

And I sit down and I think perhaps you'd better go back in the helicopter and bring my father out. Michael goes into the house to get everyone some drinks, and as he's doing this, Michael says Aachenbach and his goons slammed the front door and barricaded it, trapping Michael in his own home. And I was in the full rising tool until I was let out. After four long days, Michael's captors put him on a boat to Holland. Exiled in Holland, Michael gets in touch with his dad, who confirmed that of course he hadn't

signed Celand over to Aachenbach. And they made a plan to take their country back. They call up a friend who has a helicopter company. We explain the situation. They say, okay, I'll take you out there. Before they take off, they remove the doors from the helicopter and tie ropes to the runner so that when they get to Zeland, they can slide down the ropes, Navy Seal style, and storm the platform. They take off in the middle of the night.

If we fly out over the North Sea with no doors in this helicopter in the dark, they slid down the ropes onto the platform of Celia. We just slid down ropes and I was the first one down. As I hit the deck, I could see all the Germans running out the building. Everyone was shouting in German and running around. Michael climbed up onto the roof of the building. With a sauna shotgun by the way, I forgot to mention that. In case you didn't catch that, he said he had a sawdoth shotgun. And then I jumped off the roof as of that 12-foot-hine. He jumped off the roof and, according to Michael, the gun accidentally went off.

Boom, it went off. Boom, it went off. Every time it went up and down. That one shot was enough to scare the invaders into surrendering. Roy and Michael let all the non-citizens of Cilan go. But the minister of foreign affairs, Alexander Aachenbach, did not get off so easily. Aachenbach had betrayed the crown. They charged him with treason and brought him to trial. Well my father was a person I didn't judge, so it kind of might have been slightly biased. But they held Ackentbach prisoner until a German ambassador actually came out to

Sea Land to negotiate for his release. Eventually they let him go and with that all hostilities were ended. When the German government sent their ambassador out to negotiate the release of one of their citizens, this, says Michael, has them entering into formal relations with C.L.A.D. which fulfills the fourth and final criterion for being a state. The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications, a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states. They've ticked all of the boxes. There's very little that you can say to dissuade them from

legitimacy, really. Who are we to say that it's not a country? That's John Ryan again, who wrote the Lonely Planet Guide to Migrenations. While he might concede that Cieland fulfills the criteria for being a real state, most experts do not. Oh, definitely no, it is not a state, no. That is Yura Vidmar. Yura is a fellow at Oxford and an expert in international law. He's thought a lot about what makes a state the state.

C.L.A.L.A.N.T. is just an abandoned platform. It is not really a viable place to live and by explaining that incident as relations with another state. I mean, they are trying to fit their case within the convention, but I mean, it's the joke that was taken actually quite far. Which doesn't mean the Montevideo Convention is worthless. It's just not complete. What really matters, Yeri says, is recognition. The end of the day, it is political. If, say, 190 states of this world recognized sealant has been an independent state, I think there would be no doubt that it was an independent state. But

this would of course never happen. There are a lot of places that meet the Montevideo criteria that rightly or wrongly, the US does not consider nations. Palestine, for example, is recognized by 135 other countries, but not by the US. And then there's Taiwan. Taiwan meets all the criteria. It has a permanent population, a government, a defined territory, and they are able to enter into diplomatic relations with other countries. Taiwan is currently recognized by 22 countries, mostly small countries like Tuvalu and Burkina Faso. But China still considers Taiwan to be a Chinese province, and because we don't want to piss off China, we also don't recognize

Taiwan as a state. Although the US government does send ambassadors to Taiwan, we just technically make the ambassadors resign when we send them and then we reinstate them when they're transferred to another post. So if China says anything about it, we can be like ambassador, what ambassador? So maybe statehoods more a matter of degrees. Some states are recognized by 120 legitimate countries, whereas others are only recognized by 5 or 10 countries. As of this moment, no one formally recognizes C-land as a state, not even Tuvalu or Burkina Faso.

As for the population of C-land, as Roy Bates, the founder, got older, he found it easier to live on the mainland. He died in Essex and England in 2012. Michael got married and his new wife, Camp Blamer, didn't like life out on the platform, so he moved to mainland England too. These days, it's just the head of Homeland Security that lives out on the platform. But Prince Michael likes the idea that it's there if he ever wants to move back. Sealand will likely never have true sovereignty, but at the same time, England has never formally reclaimed it. Probably because doing so would be harder

than just letting it keep being what it is. So even though their little wind swept platform on the sea might not be much, it is theirs. And their flag still flies, at least for now. 99% invisible was produced this week by Julia DeWitt and Katie Mangle with Sam Green Span, Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW, San Francisco, and produce out of the offices of Arxine. Oakland's premiere, architecture, and interiors firm, and beautiful beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

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