Before any of these questions could be addressed, however, he had to advance Part 1 of his plan for establishing Liberland as a sovereign state: namely, to gain physical control over the territory. This had already proved more perplexing than anticipated. The Croatians regarded Liberland as Serbian territory; if you crossed overland, from the Croatian side, you were thus performing an illegal international crossing outside an official border checkpoint. If you crossed by water from the Serbian side, the Croatian police were technically arresting someone for crossing from Serbia to Serbia. The L.S.A. decided that mass arrests would inevitably bring international attention to the Croatian infringement on Liberlandian sovereignty, but the President knew firsthand the discomfort of the Croatian prison, and he did not want any more of his future citizens to suffer there. His tactic would be diplomatic, and he had to that end sought an alliance with a Czech member of the European Parliament. If the Croatian police arrested the holder of a diplomatic passport upon debarkation, they would provoke an incident with global repercussions; Liberland was a voluntary signatory to various international treaties and charters, and the Croatian provocation would not go unnoticed. The diplomat, Tomas Zdechovsky, a Czech member of the European Parliament, had agreed to the mission, which was to be held on a weekend in early June. The diplomat would attempt a landing at Liberland — which for a month no Liberlandian citizen or supporter had done without immediate arrest — and see if the Croatian police were willing to subject themselves to the scrutiny of the international community.

3. The Diplomatic Mission

The first diplomatic mission to Liberland convened at the Prague airport’s old Terminal 1. The flight would be aboard AIR-Liberland, which was not a state asset but a private enterprise contracted to provide regular air service to the Croatian castle city of Osijek, about 20 miles overland from Liberland. Jedlicka had secured, by virtue of this arrangement, a lifetime of free personal transit on the airline. For him, the gesture comported with the dignity of his office, but to his detractors, it recalled the kind of crony capitalism that Liberland had been invented to circumvent.

Though not vain, the President is a man of probity, always conscious of the freshness and propriety of his appearance, and he wore a pressed azure suit with a slight shine; the diplomat wore a blazer with a sewn-in pocket square in maroon and blue. Zdechovsky describes himself as a politician, crisis manager, media analyst, author and poet; he is an acquaintance of Jedlicka’s from the bruising small-town politics of central Bohemia, where they campaigned against each other in the last European parliamentary elections.

The aircraft was given an approach to Osijek over Liberland itself, and the President took a series of selfies with the sandy beach of Liberty Island, a soft crescent in the waters just off Liberland proper, in the background. It was his personal favorite geographical feature of his country. When he thinks of its sucrose shores, which had been host to his early presidential cavorting and now lay just beyond his reach, he is often moved to comment that ‘‘Liberland is not just a tax paradise, it is also a paradise of a sort.’’

On the drive from Osijek to the Croatian border checkpoint, Jedlicka fielded more than two dozen calls, answering each one with the phrase, ‘‘Yes, this is the president.’’ Many of his contacts had never reached a head of state with so little intermediatory fuss. The President had more than a hundred messages via at least six apps to respond to and had to restart his phone more than once when its circuits needed cooling. He had left his own reserve battery on AIR-Liberland, so he borrowed a white power brick from a Canadian-Slovak named Vince Pillar, one of the President’s growing cadre of assistants, who moved through life in a cloud of sweet banana-chocolate vape exhaust; the cable was too short, so Jedlicka had to hold both the brick and his phone to his ear to talk. We drove by the land entrance to Liberland, which for weeks was blocked by a compact white police car.

After about an hour, Jedlicka’s entourage arrived at the Liberlandian base camp, a sagging military tarpaulin stretched into a tent over a little field half-cleared of brambles on the Serbian side, about two miles upstream from Liberland itself. There were engine problems with Liberland’s official boat, so the mission was delayed until another boat could be made available. On the far side of the river, 850 yards away, the peaks of squat orange-roofed Croatian houses crouched behind a large defensive embankment were visible. The thick berm had been built to protect against the river’s flood season, as well as the mosquitoes that bred without regulation in the bogs. As we waited, someone shooed one of the wild boars, a prodigious sow running impressively free of governance, back into the thick brush.

In the distance we could at last spy a small metal dinghy speeding north from Liberland toward the camp. The men and women from the boat hopped ashore, the tallest of the five waving a Liberland flag the size of a bedsheet. He was a tall man of considerable bulk, with long, thick hair swept back underneath a fraying straw cap and a Guy Fawkes beard. He wore a thin white short-sleeved dress shirt with an open collar and a Rolex tight around his wrist; at his collar’s notch he wore a gunmetal medallion, with bas-relief imagery of a skull wearing a top hat alongside a gun. This was Niklas Nikolajsen, the director of the Liberland Settlement Association.