In declaring independence, drafting a constitution, regulating citizenship and issuing passports, micronations position themselves as rival sites of authority. In this chapter, we explore the different ways that internationally recognised states respond to micronations’ claims to sovereignty. This chapter reveals that even though micronations are largely ignored in the international relations, political science and legal literature, in practice states must take notice and consider appropriate ways to engage. In some cases, perceiving their existence as a provocation or threat to their own claims of authority and to jurisdiction, states act in swift and decisive ways to foreclose micronations’ scope of action. In other cases, states determine to ignore micronations, considering them to be unserious or unthreatening. In all circumstances, however, states deny the international legal personality of micronations and ensure that any encounter occurs entirely within and according to domestic law.

In 1967, Roy Bates, a former major in the British Army, declared himself the ruler of a decommissioned offshore naval fort outside the United Kingdom’s territorial waters in an effort to bypass legal restrictions on radio broadcasting. In 1977, Leonard Casley of the Principality of Hutt River, a 75-square-kilometre wheat farm, cabled a telegram to the Governor-General of Australia declaring war in an attempt to force his larger neighbour to recognise the Principality’s sovereignty. In 1992, Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and ruler of the Kingdom of North Dumpling, a three-acre island off the coast of Connecticut, convinced his friend, President George HW Bush, to sign a faux non-aggression pact between their two countries. Micronations challenge and seek to engage with recognised states in diverse ways. Although none of these micronations achieved legal recognition, they considered their efforts a success. In compelling the state to respond, they considered that the state treated them – if only for a moment – as an equal.