Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve19 | Hacker News Reader

Planting a flag is meaningless, as this article shows.

There are two ways to claim land.

The first is to conjure up some de jure rights (some way to justify legal ownership, such as 500 years ago your ancestors owned the land until someone illegally invaded or you inherited the title to the land from your great-great-great-* grandfather). It can be flimsy (or outright forged), but it needs to be recognized by other countries to be effective. Religious significance was once recognized as basis for de jure claims, but it is not anymore.

Then you have de facto control. If you can exert physical control of the territory, it's pretty much yours. There are companies you can pay who will do this. Reflex Responses might be one, but there are a number of them out there.

Of course having de jure rights without de facto control is pretty useless. It's a long game strategy. Spain one day hopes they will be able to take de facto control of the Gibraltar, but it won't be in the lifetime of anyone alive today.

There is actually only one way, and it is the second one.

The first one relies on other countries accepting your claim and responding with violence to anyone disputing it, or in other words it's really simply the second method by proxy.

The interesting thing is that exerting physical control of this place might not be that hard given the lack of anyone else trying to do the same. You'd probably just need to build a runway to be able to bring in supplies etc (no idea how hard that would be obviously).

Once you had control then maybe it would be possible to create a libertarian fantasy land of the kind envisioned by the sea-steading folks. Feels like controlling this desert will be easier than building a floating city.

From the long run perspective, this is worse than the floating city. As they describe it, Sudan and Egypt only avoid regulating it as part of a legal trick. Once that problem resolves, the special status evaporates. At least when you are on the high seas, the high seas aren't going to stop being the high seas in a few decades.

See: Canada and Denmark's epic battle for Hans Island.

Hans Island is the smallest of three islands not far from Greenland's coast, and Canada and Denmark have been fighting over it for years.

War ships from both sides patrol the area, and when they encounter each other they...show their flags. When the soldiers leave the ships they...take the other side's flag down and raise their own. Sometimes they leave a bottle of whiskey too.

Once you have built something more valuable than the triangle on the coast, either Sudan or Egypt may say "oh hey, yeah, the other party totally owns the triangle, Bir Tawil is ours". So there's still political risk there.

You need both. One without the other us called occupation.

Also, Spanish de jure claims to Gibraltar are pretty weak, at best. For one, to my knowledge, there is no international recognition?

> You need both. One without the other us called occupation.

That's not correct. Occupation is when the people who live there are not considered members of the country.

For example Israel: They have full historical claims to the West Bank, while the people who live there don't. Yet it's occupation because the people who live there now are not citizens.

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