Vít Jedlička talks Liberland to Libertarian Home

Last night I attended Libertarian Home’s first Thursday of the month meeting, at which the speaker was Vít Jedlička:

Jedlička is a libertarian politician. Maybe you think that’s a contradiction, but if we libertarians are to score any victories out there in the big wide world, we must have such people, and the very least we can do is listen to what they say, and, assuming we like the approximate sound of it, we should back them up and beat ours drums for them, even as we nitpick about details, tactics, principles, etc.

I did zero homework for this meeting, and have done extremely little since, so many of those reading this will know a lot more about this man than I do. All I can now offer is a few thoughts about how he came across to me last night, and about what he definitely is – but also probably is not – achieving.

Jedlička is trying to establish a small country, called Liberland. He has found a small chink in the armour of the state system, in the form of a small, unclaimed patch of territory between Serbia and Croatia. He and his collaborators have moved into it, and have declared it to be a state.

Jedlička is careful to call what is happening out there in Liberland a minimal rather than non-existent state. After all, if only to defend itself against the rest of the state system, most notably the state of Croatia, Liberland needs something very like a state apparatus itself. There’s a lot of ducking and weaving going on.

Jedlička struck me as a guy who, unlike some libertarians I could mention, including some who have become involved in schemes for new libertarian countries, well understands the difference between how the world ought to be, and how it actually is. When asked how he planned to stop this or that attack on Liberland, he did not descend into libertarian rant-mode about how such attacks would be wicked. Of course they’d be wicked. That wasn’t the question. Instead, he frankly acknowledged that this enterprise may not work. He presented it as very much a load-fire-take-aim, fear-the-worst-and-try-to-prepare-for-it but hope-for-the-best sort of an enterprise.

Why then, the air of breezy optimism that Jedlička exuded all evening? Why the sense that at least something was definitely being accomplished, even if Liberland itself soon or eventually gets snuffed out? One word answer: publicity.

Media people love a story. “Bunch of libertarians talking about libertarianism in a pub” is not much of a story, unless, like me, you particularly like that kind of thing. But: “Bunch of libertarians sets up a libertarian country, and hopes to make it survive against all the odds.” That’s a story. That is a “narrative”, of the sort that attracts attention, and television cameras, even if it’s only to see what happens when the snuffing out bit starts to get seriously organised by the world’s snuffing out tendency. Jedlička himself is very aware of all this. He knows that his main impact on history is likely to be lots of people hearing about libertarian ideas and some of them becoming libertarians, not that Liberland itself will necessarily get very far. But, as he says, you never know. And you definitely never know if you never even try.

So, the sad probability that Liberland will perish, soon or eventually, if only because all that publicity is liable sooner or later to attract entirely the wrong kind of attention, doesn’t mean that what Vít Jedlička and others with similar schemes are doing around the world should be discouraged. Yes, each libertarian tadpole of this sort faces bad odds. But the way to get libertarian frogs hopping about in the world is to give birth to as many libertarian tadpoles as we can. If the number of libertarians in the world keeps on increasing, as it is increasing, and if the intellectual self-confidence of those opposing libertarianism continues to fall, as I think it has been falling throughout my lifetime, then sooner or later, some of these tadpoles are going to become frogs. Some of them will even survive for a while, and procreate. Then the amount of libertarian publicity in the world will turn from a trickle into a tsunami, and the age of libertarianism may then get seriously under way.

Meanwhile, the way that actually doing libertarian things encourages libertarian discussion about doing more things had its effect on last night’s proceedings. The upstairs pub room in which Libertarian Home’s meetings happen, usually only about two thirds full, was, last night, packed out.

Vít Jedlička, being the publicist and politician that he is, suggested a big group photo at the end of the formal proceedings, which duly materialised, and which I duly joined in on, as a photographer, this being the least worst of my snaps at this point:

One of my technically less successful snaps of the same scene included no less than five other snappers in the foreground, the intended point being that I was absolutely not the only snapper present, and that by now, news of this event and of what was said at it and of how many people showed up at it, will already have travelled quite far, and quite wide.

I have been attending libertarian pub meetings, and other and bigger libertarian gatherings in London, for more than half of my life. Simon Gibbs, who organised this Libertarian Home meeting, often says that I “know everybody”, by which he means that I know every libertarian in London. Well, I do know a lot of London libertarians, but I definitely don’t know all of them, and this was proved to me with particular force last night. Aside from a very few familiar faces, such as Simon Gibbs himself at the back there, with his face in shadow next to where it says “Specials”, I knew almost nobody in the above picture. By the time I left I had only become acquainted with a very few of them. This cheered me up a lot.