Zaqistan: two acres of Utah desert, bought on eBay for $610

The Republic of Zaqistan occupies a patch of the Great Basin in Box Elder County, Utah. It was declared in 2005 by its self-appointed president, Zaq Landsberg, a sculptor who lives in Brooklyn and who acquired the territory the way one acquires most things: he won an auction.

The price was the minimum bid, $610, on eBay, in July 2005.

What is actually there

Nothing residential. No buildings, no inhabitants. What Landsberg and a rotating cast of volunteers have installed over the years are monuments and a border patrol gate — a gate in open scrubland, with nothing on either side of it to pass around.

The nearest settlement is Montello, Nevada, about 60 miles distant. That isolation is not incidental. A micronation established in a populated area immediately generates questions about jurisdiction, services and neighbours. One established in high desert with no water and no road generates none, because nothing about it is in anyone’s way.

The word that does the work

The single most revealing detail is a matter of vocabulary. Landsberg pays the State of Utah annually for the property, as any landowner must. He does not describe this as tax. He describes it as a tribute, paid to maintain peaceful foreign relations.

That is a joke, and it is also an unusually precise piece of political theatre. A tribute and a property tax are the same transaction seen from two different theories of sovereignty. In one, an authority levies a charge on land within its jurisdiction. In the other, a smaller polity pays a larger one to be left alone. The money moves identically either way. Only the story attached to it differs, and the story is the entire artistic content of the project.

Micronations generally live or die on whether they can sustain that kind of frame. Most cannot, because they claim something that a real state has an interest in contesting, at which point the frame collapses into a straightforward legal loss. Zaqistan avoids the collision by claiming something nobody wants and paying for it on time.

Citizens

Citizenship was, for a while, available. It was granted free to anyone who asked, with a passport offered at a suggested fee of $50, which is a very reasonable price for a passport that will not get you anywhere.

The state department has since stopped accepting applications. Nothing in the record explains why, and the most plausible reading is administrative: an artist running a bureaucracy as a one-person side project eventually stops running the bureaucracy.

The work has been shown as art rather than treated as geopolitics, including an exhibit at the Central Utah Art Center, and local television has covered visits to the site.

Why these projects keep appearing

Micronations are usually filed as eccentricity, and the more interesting reading is that they are cheap experiments in what a state consists of.

Strip away population, territory of any use, recognition and enforcement capacity, and what is left is symbols: a flag, a gate, a passport, a vocabulary for describing payments. Zaqistan has all of those and nothing else, which makes it a reasonably clean test of how much of the felt reality of a country is carried by its paperwork.

The answer appears to be quite a lot, and also not enough. People request passports. Utah still expects the cheque.

What a state needs that Zaqistan lacks

The conventional checklist for statehood in international practice asks for four things: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Zaqistan has the second, arguably has the third, and comprehensively fails the first and fourth.

That failure is not a design flaw, because recognition was never the objective. A project seeking recognition has to argue with somebody, and the argument is always lost. A project seeking to perform the vocabulary of statehood needs no counterparty at all, which is why the interesting micronations are the ones that never file a claim.

The work has been presented as art rather than as politics, including an exhibit at the Central Utah Art Center, and Utah television has covered visits to the site. That framing is the honest one. What is out there in Box Elder County is a sculpture park with a border post, maintained by a Brooklyn artist who pays his property bill on time and calls it something else.