I had a dream when I was a child – and this dream remained my obsession to this very day. Namely, I always wanted to create a sort of a country, which would completely fit my view of a fair world: Centered around the individual, protecting his individual rights and his freedom. And on other hand, giving him support to achieve his own self-realization and personal happiness. This is of course Utopian view at its finest, but why say no to the opportunity to have a try? If you say no before you even try, the result will surely be negative. But where to start anyway? I am shuffling this idea around since 1992, actually. With the advent of the Internet at that time, I came to realize we have a brand new world developing in front of our eyes – namely the Cyberspace! And since Cyberspace allows us to upload and handle data, interact with each other, just like it was in the RL (real life), I came to think: “we could just as well have a country, based in the Cyberspace?”
The question here poses itself: “what is a country, state, anyway?” Supposedly it’s an organized political community, living under a government of sort. If we blatantly ignore the requirement for territorial sovereignty, then we find all other definitions fully adaptable to the Cyberspace environment. We cannot enable people to physically live in the context of Cyberspace, but we can surely allow them to interact with others using information technologies. Therefore, the free will of an individual is the one that either gives or takes away sovereignty as such. Through history, we were able to see different definitions of “sovereignty”. Hobbes for instance, says that sovereignty has always necessitated a moral imperative on the entity exercising it. The definitions of state sovereignty contain four different aspects:
Domestic sovereignty – actual control over a state exercised by an authority organized within this state,
Interdependence sovereignty – actual control of movement across state’s borders, assuming the borders exist,
International legal sovereignty – formal recognition by other sovereign states,
Westphalian sovereignty – lack of other authority over the state than the domestic authority (examples of such other authorities could be a non-domestic church, a non-domestic political organization, or any other external agent).
Often we saw these four aspects appear together, but this is not necessarily the case – they are not affected by one another, and we have historical examples of states that had no sovereignty in one aspect while at the same time being sovereign in another aspect. So what happens with those 4 aspects, once we view them through statehood on Cyberspace? Oh, and what is Cyberspace while we are at it?
According to Chip Morningstar and F. R. Farmer, Cyberspace is defined more by the social interactions involved rather than its technical implementation. In their view, the computational medium in cyberspace is an augmentation of the communication channel between real people; the core characteristic of cyberspace is that it offers an environment that consists of many participants with the ability to affect and influence each other. They derive this concept from the observation that people seek richness, complexity, and depth within a virtual world. (had to put in italic and had it underlined due to the importance of the definition for future use)
Domestic sovereignty: We can hardly speak about “domestic” when it comes to Cyberspace. Especially the arrival of cloud computing makes it impossible to truly determine the actual location of the “state”, if it was located on Cyberspace as such. And if we bring in the need to “own” land in order to be recognized as a state with sovereignty, then we quickly assume, that “Domestic sovereignty” surely lacks in the context of a Cyberspace (internet) state.
Interdependence sovereignty: What sort of control of movement could enforce the Cyber state? In Cyberspace we don’t see borders in classical terms. There is only one, common Cyberspace, and users (nominally) should have no problem accessing all of it. Controlling the traffic would be a different thing. This is (probably) successfully done nowadays by governments using technical means, hence should not really be a problem to do the same for a state existing solely on Cyberspace. So let’s say we got it half-way here.
International legal sovereignty: This is wishful thinking by all the Cyberspace based “micro-nations“. Having one, well several countries to establish diplomatic ties with a micro-nation of such type is light-years away. This is, commonly understood condition for a state to achieve this aspect of sovereignty.
Westphalian sovereignty: This is a tricky field, a point of collision between actual states and Cyberspace based states. Namely, people, even those who “claim” citizenship of one of the latter states, still (most likely) hold citizenship of one of the actual states. There is no way near “lack” of other authorities, that can intervene at any given moment. Interestingly might become, when Cyberspace based states develop methods on how to influence decisions made by individuals, which would, being citizens of actual states, affect their behavior.
