It seems that Nanostate (N) items, whatever their nature, in general need addresses. ("Items" includes images, works, notices, declarations of intent etc - everything within the meaning of "statement"). So - should N have an address book?
This point is not absolutely categorical, but may need addressing because of N's newness? (If N were long-established and very public, the addressing of statements would not be so urgent since the site would be regularly visited by individuals and agencies needing to know what N was up to.)
Some more immediately expected interactions/ communications will maybe be with other analogous formations ("micronations" - mns - I prefer my own expression "RPE").
I think it will be useful for ourselves and for their information if a classification or typology (these are better words than "critique" I think) of such entities based on available information (thanks Peter) could be outlined.
It strikes one, looking through the list, that N is distinct from most in critical respects, and analysis could well be productive for our own project. All cases including ours are based in some way on analogy with "real" countries. But taking three sets of polarities or axes defining mn/nation relationships ( transposition/mimicry; structure/element; real/virtual), N lies much nearer to the left-hand pole in each of these three than most (all) the other mns. Most mns mimic the elements (insignia etc) of actual countries (for real in most cases but there some fictitious/virtual variants.)
Some distinctions I'd like to see productively developed.
There's a lot of mileage in the theoretical angle of N-timespace. Not just for the sake of formal games playing (but I personally do find this interesting). But also because it sharply distinguishes the physical and ideological (hypo)localism of most mns from the universalism/globalism, more accurately hyperlocalism of N. This critically means for example politically that N is directly implicated in "global" facts of the kind: "the three richest people in the world own assets greater than the aggregate Gross Domestic Products of the 48 poorest countries (a quarter of all the States on Earth)".(United nations World Report on Human Development 1998). A lot of the mns have the look of a millenarian sect about them, whose sole concern is a small group of the "elect".
Most mns define themselves as having a particular a priori (and therefore static and fixed) form of governance or constitution (Principalities, People's Republics, Kingdoms, Empires etc). The implication generally thus is that the framework being fixed, "citizens" concern themselves with activities within it. N (I believe) needs to have theoretically and practically a more evolved relationship between work and framework, a bit like an artist whose work is always the shaping of the exhibition as well as the exhibit. I believe this doesn't at all imply amorphousness and the absence of "constitutional" statement; actually greater rigour is needed.
Most mns make the (usually implicit) assumption that the social and political space that they claim or incorporate is free from contradiction. N is theoretically constituted to make explicit the political and phenomenological fact of the necessary interpenetration of spaces (the model of the children's playground is suggestive), and the non-exemption of real persons who may in some way be active in Nanostate activities from the demands made on them by their surrounding institutional realities. In fact the stepwise, quantum-type movement of the Nanostate, embracing by turns all terrestrial locations, means that in every space there is constantly reenacted the interpenetration involved in the insertion/creation of a new entity into an "old" political space. This is a universal fact: every state is an overlay of some previous state - but generally the sense of it becomes atrophied. I actually think that interpenetration, far from being compromisist, will be a creatively fertile principle.
And there's "citizenship": - a plea for holding this space. Please don't fill it too quickly. Think that especially in this day and age of great mobility, the mapping of territory and person is very tenuous. Imagine the modern person shifting round the globe at great speed, leaving however the material traces constituting her citizenship - registrations and encryptions of all kinds - "engraved in the stone" of the "motherland".
Imagine also the basic non-locality of mind, and that space, rather than being something sure and positive out there, is a way the mind has of translating "certain objective relationships" (i.e. of the world out there), a kind of hint of a correspondence between something of our thinking and something out there. We can do better than passports, can't we (N-protocol Article 16, I don't know exactly what it means either, but...)?
['Bolzem' to Peter Dukes & James Hutchinson. 31.10.98]