Cracks in the Map

THE IDEA OF carving out territorial exceptions to, or escape zones from, the hand of the nation-state has long captured the imagination of free market enthusiasts. In the 1990s, I was involved in several organizations devoted to the idea, and I witnessed the movement's gradual shift from a pipe dream of libertarian theorists to something attracting serious interest, and investment capital, from entrepreneurs, as libertarian-oriented free ports, special economic zones, charter cities, and even floating maritime cities (seasteads), began to look more politically possible. In 1993, my “free nation” group was meeting in a local North Carolina hotel; by 2011, I was sipping cocktails at a rather swankier “free cities” conference on the resort island of Roatán, Honduras—which, not coincidentally, today boasts its own charter city, Próspera.

- RODERICK T. LONG

What looks exciting to libertarians may unsurprisingly seem less congenial to those not already sold on libertarian ideas. In The Hidden Globe, the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian turns a more skeptical eye on these developments, and on the broader trend for the conventional picture of “one land, one law, one people, and one government” to undergo “a kind of transfiguration” into “an accretion of cracks and concessions, suspensions and abstractions, carve-outs and free zones, and other places without nationality in the conventional sense.”

Abrahamian takes us on an engaging tour of a variety of communities that exist in, offer access to, or are entangled with this interstitial, postnational network, including Singapore, Mauritius, Shenzhen, Dubai, Svalbard, Boten, Luxembourg (an aggressive pioneer in laws pertaining to outer-space resources), Geneva (her childhood home), and the aforementioned Próspera.

Although Abrahamian’s understanding of libertarian ideas is somewhat superficial, her discussion is more nuanced and less hostile than the jacket copy for the book might lead one to expect; she sees potential for unjust exploitation in economic free zones, but liberatory potential as well. She also recognizes that the decoupling of jurisdiction from territory is not a new phenomenon and has not been a uniformly negative one. Where she is critical, much that she says deserves libertarian attention.