Micronation

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A tiny territory whose self-proclaimed government claims independence but is not recognized as a sovereign nation by other countries
2. A very small political entity set up by a group or individual who declares it an independent state without international acknowledgment
3. An unrecognized micro-state, typically a small piece of land, that asserts its own sovereignty and laws outside the accepted framework of nations

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "micronation" is that it was not coined by a political theorist or a micronation enthusiast but by newspaper editors. In March 1973, the editors of The State Journal in Lansing, Michigan, published an article that rewrote a piece by the American journalist Philip J. Hilts. Hilts had written for Potomac Magazine, the Sunday supplement to The Washington Post, in January 1973 about the unrecognised political entities listed in the Ephemeral States file, a collection of records kept by the United States Department of State's Office of the Geographer, begun in 1933. Hilts's original never used the word; it appeared only in the Lansing version. The word is a straightforward compound. "Micro-" comes from the Greek "mikros", meaning "small", and it was attached to "nation" in English, which came through Old French and Latin ("natio", "birth, race, people") and was in use in English by the Middle Ages. The new term described an entity that claimed sovereignty without being recognised as a sovereign state.

Synonyms: microstate, micro-state