Why Nobody Wants This Part of Europe

this video is made possible by morningbrew start your day by catching up on the top news in business finance and tech in five minutes by subscribing with the link that's down in the description these days in the 21st century it would be pretty reasonable to assume that every single piece of land and territory remaining on the planet is claimed by someone the whole world has been explored every corner of the map has been accurately filled out we've all known where everything is now for over a century but despite what you might think there are still three actual pieces of land still remaining that continue to be unclaimed by any modern country by far the largest of them is this huge piece of land on antarctica known as mary birdland but that's not really too interesting because well it's on antarctica and nobody lives or wants to live there anyway so another unclaimed chunk of land can be found here in africa wedged in between the countries of egypt and sudan deep in the middle of the sahara desert nobody lives here nobody wants it and so theoretically anybody can claim it for themselves and i already made a whole video about this one the other third remaining piece of unclaimed land left on the planet is the smallest of them but perhaps the most interesting of all because of all places it's located right in the center of europe a continent where you would naturally think that every square inch of land has already been claimed by someone and while yeah over thousands of years of history now it mostly has been there's somehow still a little chunk right here directly next to the danube river wedged in between of croatia and serbia that somehow everyone has missed and it currently remains unclaimed by any sovereign nation on earth and it's not a particularly small area either at about seven square kilometers of land it's about twice the size of central park in new york city and it's even larger than two other fully recognized sovereign nations that are in europe vatican city and monaco since no country in the world currently claims this bit of land for themselves and since nobody actually lives there it theoretically falls under the legal term known as terra nulius which means that theoretically anybody including you can claim it for yourself and start up a brand new country upon the territory but as with everything there are some catches and in order to understand them you've got to understand a bit of the history first as to why this whole bizarre situation even exists in the first place let's rewind a little bit back to the 19th century back then this area and the whole area around it was all controlled by the habsburgs and then the austro-hungarian empire which means that surprisingly the british are for once not actually to blame for this whole mess up today in the modern world back then as today the land on either side of the danube river here was inhabited by croats in the west and serbs in the east but it was the austro-hungarian government itself based in vienna and budapest that designed the municipal boundaries between them to be fair they did a pretty good job as these boundaries just simply followed the course of the danube river as it was back at the time the problems only began developing later when the austro-hungarian government decided to try and straighten up the danube through various hydraulic engineering projects in order to make the river more easily navigable while they succeeded in making the river easier to transport goods across they unwittingly created a territorial dispute between the future countries of croatia and serbia because eventually over the decades austria-hungary would collapse after the first world war and then croatia and serbia would both find themselves inside of yugoslavia which itself would eventually collapse in the 1990s and suddenly for pretty much the first time in centuries croatia and serbia found themselves as fully separate countries and over the past several decades the danube river up here that theoretically acted as the border had meandered and moved about to a different shape now while they were both part of the same country this didn't really matter too much but now that they were both independent of each other it suddenly did matter a lot you see as the danube meandered and straightened it gradually did so in a way that left 100 square kilometers of land over on the eastern side in what would theoretically be serbia in all of these locations well it only left somewhere between 10 and 30 square kilometers of land on the river's western bank concentrated in these three really insignificantly tiny pockets and the land that nobody claims up here which all theoretically belong to croatia so naturally serbia has insisted that the modern boundary between themselves and croatia is still the danube river itself as it is today meanwhile croatia insists that the boundary is the historical course of the danube river as it was more than a century ago back in the 19th century when the municipal boundaries were first drawn up regardless of how the river has changed today effectively this means that both sides claim all of these chunks of land to the east of the danube while no side claims the piece of land that's to the west of the danube because from serbia's standpoint the border is the danube river as it is today and the unclaimed piece of land to the west of the river therefore is rightfully a part of croatia but croatia doesn't claim it because if they ever did it would mean that they recognize the danube river as it exists today as the border between them just like serbia and it would mean forfeiting all of their much more valuable claims to the more plentiful land over to the east of the river so that's why neither croatia nor serbia claimed this piece of land and why no other country in the world does either making it a sword of no man's land in the middle of europe now unfortunately for you if you want to claim it for yourself and start your own little european kingdom there are a lot of issues to discuss first of all there isn't any infrastructure to speak of at all and the land lies directly on a flood plain second of all the entire area is surrounded by the croatian army and they don't allow anybody inside literally dozens of people have been arrested by the croatian authorities over the years who've tried to enter ever since all of this has come to light so don't go there third of all a lot of other people have already claimed it that you're going to have to struggle against like most notably this guy vit yadlika a czech libertarian politician who declared the free republic of liberland upon the territory back in 2015 after raising a flag within the territory ever since he's been arrested and detained multiple times by the croatian authorities for attempting to visit and more than 600 000 people from around the world have signed up to become future liberland citizens which anyone else including you can do right now by sending in an email now legally both serbia and croatia have stated that neither yedlika nor anyone else have any rights to the area as it is currently the subject of a dispute between two nations serbia has stated before that while they find the whole matter trivial the hypothetical new state of liberland does not infringe upon the serbian border which they say is delineated by the danube meanwhile croatia has stated that after international arbitration the land should be given to either serbia or croatia and not to any third party while they don't outright claim the land for themselves croatia likes to keep it neutral in order to continue using it as a bartering ship to serbia at the same time there was an article published in the chicago journal of international law back in 2016 that examined liberland's claimed nationhood based on the criteria that was laid out by the montevideo convention back in 1933 which generally defines the legal concept of statehood the article quotes the following croatia's insistence that liberland is a part of serbia could constitute a renunciation of croatia's own legal rights to liberland conversely if the territory that liberland claims as its own is serbian then the serbian government's renunciation of its title to that land could also be a situation that would transform the legal status of the land to terra nuleus in both of these instances the territory would belong to the first entity in this case liberland to claim it however because of the complicated history of the croatian serbian border region it may be difficult to ascertain who the land actually belongs to under international law okay so basically as it stands now there still aren't any countries who recognize the sovereignty of liberland but who knows how that could change in the future a lot of what's happening today is based on what happened yesterday last year or last century and beyond keeping up with current events is essential to 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 2,545,525

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, liberland, croatia serbia border, serbia croatia border

Id: L3cyJL_7GSk

Length: 9min 50sec (590 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 05 2022