As an example, think of the Reichsbürger in Germany.
They are so far detached from reality that it is hard to even comprehend them, but it typically involves some kind of delusional belief that the government of the country in question does not exist or is owned more like the way that a company is literally owned by a select group of people, that the country’s change to that status by some kind of esoteric wordplay, and that individuals can basically take a red pill (like the Matrix) so as to regain liberties and often financial resources that they think that they are owed by virtue of being human as opposed to fake citizens of this false government. They also usually have unhealthy obsessions with this part of their beliefs and whatever event they say changed society, or have pretty much no understanding of how societies change, like how Reichsbürger claim that the legitimate government is that of the Hohenzollen, even though if that was suddenly brought back, that probably still ends up with a mundane constitutional monarchy like what Norway has and hardly anyone complains about the king in Norway, along with a bunch of annoyed Poles who have to get new passports.
Many are American but not all, some idiot named Didulo declared herself, from the Philippines, to have been appointed by the king of America to be the queen of Canada, that they had Elizabeth II shot or hanged, that all COVID distributors will see the same fate, that all debts are cancelled, and has now set up a Waco compound in Saskatchewan and the town residents are besieging her group with noisemakers and whatever they can to get them to leave, oh, and as the cherry on top, Romana Didulo claims to be in contact with aliens. Seriously, I can hardly make a fake claim about what she believes that is more ridiculous than what she actually does believe.
It is not even anarchism, which doesn’t focus on the technicalities of legislation or the idea that just saying words in the right way will get them what they want but more so appeals to deliberate choices of a community to associate, and during any war like what happened after Franco’s coup to take up weapons as a militia, without a class of wealth or political or social power, like the Spanish left wing in Catalonia in 1936 or Nestor Mankho in Ukraine in the First World War.
If you are good at hearing English, then some of the videos on r/amibeingdetained might be an example of these people and the amount of methamphetamine they seem capable of consuming.
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You already mentioned Germany, so about Cyprus:
Not yet, as far as I know. Not in the same spirit as those other movements.
Obviously you have secessionist movements (the Greek-Cypriot one died out in 1974, the Turkish-Cypriot one had a qualified success in 1974) and their thing was “Republic of Cyprus is a sham forced on us by the British, we have the right to declare our own state under the principle of self-determination of nations” and “your laws and documents mean nothing to me, your monopoly of the state apparatus is not legitimate”, but there’s no esotericism to it and it’s straight-up nationalist state-building.
During the pandemic, some other QAnon ideas found purchase in Cyprus though, so maybe there’s going to be something soon. I especially suspect that in the Greek-Cypriot society it will be related to the recently introduced speeding cameras, the fines which they issue are now being challenged in courts en masse. Usually sovereign citizens originate from a desire to get out of fees and taxes, so it’s the space to watch.
Not a big movement, but there are some lunatics who believe “Ukraine is sold to american corporation” and staff. But their lore is not as elaborated as sovereign citizens’ as far as I know.
In Russia they have “USSR citizens” who believe that USSR’s dissolution was illegal, russia is illegal country, don’t want to show passport when crossing border of other post-soviet states, don’t pay taxes, have own “president”, make some “soviet news” on YouTube, issue own “soviet passport” etc. Also fight with police sometimes.
Seems ±similar to sovereign citizens.
Yes, we have the same gobshites in Ireland. Usually call themselves “Freemen of the land”, though sometimes sovereign citizens.
They come to attention every couple of months when one of them appears in court charged with failing to pay some kind of fee or licence. They declare themselves to be free, claim to not recognise the authority of the court, demand the judge recuse himself, refuse to be called by their “legal” name, and all sorts of other shit.
They often bang on about the “magna carta” and how laws from medieval times are still in force and modern laws don’t have any powers. Like you say, they seem to think the law is a kind of witchcraft – if they say a specific sequence of words in a specific way, like an incantation, then the whole court will just disband and they will have super legal powers.
There’s also often a hodgepodge of various legal concepts from around the world thrown in for good measure. “consent of the governed”, “First amanedment”, etc.
We have one particular guy who thinks there’s a special ceremony that the government are required to carry out every year in order to continue being the government. They have to “turn a seal” or something like that, in a specific place, at sunrise on a specific day every year. Failure to do so means the government have no power. It comes from some old Celtic traditions.
This one guy goes and does this every year and declares himself the leader of Ireland. No, really, like some weird game of capture the flag, he thinks that being in charge of a country is about who manages to say the magic words first at the right time and place.
We, thankfully, do not. I’m sure you can find some looney out there somewhere, but it isn’t a movement or a school of thought you’ll really find here
Yep, the movement of the ‘autonomen’ is getting bigger. They believe the Dutch government doesn’t exist anymore since 1940.
Fines, taxes etc are not being paid by them, but they’re ready there to take their social payment. Only take it, not give/deliver.
There are a couple of ‘important’ persons (Youri Plate is one of them) in this movement, and they usually have a living by giving courses ‘how to become autonomous’ for like €1000 or more. Or by selling ‘autonomous passports’, front door stickers and the likes for crazy amounts..
The people say they live by the common law, which has no value at all over here. Many of their texts are from the USA, and many of their ideas like ‘a wet (hand written) signature is only valid’, are bollocks.
Usually they believe there is a birth-trust set up, and everything they do wrong (fines etc) should be paid from this trust. The bank number of this trust ought to be hidden in a number series on your passport or id-card.
They believe their government identity is a ‘dead entity’ just meant for that birth trust. They themselves are a ‘living person‘.
Often the autonomen get into problems after a while, when they don’t pay for heating/water/electricity and eventually things of value will be taken from their houses (but usually they stretch this a little bit by saying many of these people are ‘not authorized’ or whatever.
And eventually there’s the cliff they’ll fall off..
A small peek into these autonomen is given by Twitter user Guus Disselkoen who has infiltrated in many Telegram groups. This guy is not an autonomous person, he’s more like a whistleblower..
https://x.com/gdisselkoen?s=21
It’s all in Dutch of course.
There is some group in Hungary which believes that Hungary is only an Israeli company with a headquarters in New York, and Hungary as a country ceased to exist in 2012, so because of this they don’t have to obey laws, and even tried to organize their own police force.
I remember seeing a video where one of their members was pulled over by the police and he tried to use some kind of fake ID to identify himself.
I’m not originally form Ireland but I live here and I think yes, this country have them.
There are some anti-vaxxer types who go in a similar direction about general conspiracy theories of being oppressed by evil elites and stuff. But it seems less prevalent than most places, because our political system of direct democracy just leaves less room for these kinds of theories to grow.
We do however have quite a few german Reichsbürger moving here. To avoid the “oppression” of the “corporation Deutschland”. So there are sometimes news about Reichsbürger meetings, where allegedly armed revolts and such are discussed. However these are usually almost all german citizens, talking about germany.
There is however some concern, that some of them buy guns here, as we have less strict gun laws than germany and our intelligence services are not nearly as concerned with putting them on blacklists for gun purchases, compared to the german intelligence. So my biggest worry is that one of those idiots might one day commit crimes in germany with a legally bought gun from switzerland and get us swiss gun owners in trouble.
Some do exist and pop up sometimes here and there but luckily they aren’t that common.
The few ones whose videos made it up online refer to themselves as “subjects of international law” and “true citizens”, but what they believe in is basically the same as those from other countries with the main exception being that they mostly use international laws as a way to confirm their “status”.
You’re making them sound much too coherent. Reichsbürger don’t really agree on anything except that current Germany “doesn’t exist”. Since when it doesn’t exist is something they absolutely don’t agree on, let alone who should technically be in charge, or why the current German state is illegitimate.
AFAIK this movement does not exist in Spain, buy maybe someone can correct me if I am wrong. People who don’t recognize the authority of the State are usually independentist who want some region to separate from the rest of Spain, but not individualist who don’t recognize the existence of the State.
We have nutjobs in France, but never heard of something quite similar to this. But it will not take long until they appear here as well as the french are very receptive to that type of crap.
There are people who don’t recognize dissolution of Czechoslovakia.
“Sovereign citizen” don’t outlaw themselves, do they?
I hadn’t even ever heard the term before a few months ago when Tiktok’s algorithm decided I could enjoy those U.S. traffic stop videos where these sovereign citizens argue they don’t need a driver’s license and telling the cops they need to educate themselves. The algorithm was right, I have been thoroughly entertained.
To my knowledge the whole concept of sovereign citizenship is completely unknown here.
I’m not aware of a big movement but occassionally we also have a few Reichsbürger here coming to the “south of the Reich”
Not really as a movement but, as a Latvian Swede, there’s one person who has been fun to watch, in a train wreck sense. A middle-aged Latvian woman who splits her time between Sweden and Latvia, she combines the most insane conspiracies of the two countries and causes problems in both. Her basic idea is similar to the sovereign citizens, she calls herself indigenous and means that indigenous Latvians are the only legitimate power in Latvia. She says she’s the queen of indigenous Latvians and of course denies other authorities, so in Latvia she’s pulled moves like trying to pay speeding fines with wooden tokens that are meant to be indigenous money.
In Sweden she’s been doing similar stuff, she runs a small fringe group with a Swedish man who is her king, and together they alternate between threatening Swedish politicians or trying to persuade them to move Sweden to “native” currency, indigenous courts, etc. They demand that world leaders capitulate and dismantle the illegitimate world order.
Of course every new conspiracy gets woven into that strange worldview. First it was about the Rotschilds and other Jews controlling all governments via American corporations, then 5G towers were built for mind control, then covid was an operation to sterilize undesirable people, etc.
We have issues with them in the sense such people exists. Sooner or later, they find themselves in court (whether they appear in person or not) for not paying taxes, fines or for just breaking the law. So far, judges aren’t impressed by their logic.
I had to look it up, and apparently there’s something called ‘Freemen on the land’ which is a version of ‘Sovereign Citizen’ for commonwealth countries, including the UK. I’d never heard of them before actively looking today, though.
No. There were a couple of them on tv a couple of years ago (somewhere preCOVID) with their irregular license plates. But in general, no, they are not a thing.
Yes! It’s a group of people who believe that Czechoslovakia still exists and refuse to recognize the Czech Republic and its institutions. From time to time, a few losers show up at a ministry and tell the poor receptionist that they have the right to seize the institution. I’ve seen a video of a guy who refused to communicate with the police because he thought the Czech Republic and the police were a corporation.
Edit: I forgot to add that they even make their own ID cards.
A few years ago we had a couple of nut-jobs in Romania who literally called themselves sovereign citizens (Cetateni suverani). They made it into mainstream media for a few days after one of them was stopped in traffic because he had a homemade licence plate and a fake ID. This ‘special’ identity card didn’t have their personal identification number, because they think the state can track them using it. They refuse to recognize official documents or any type of ID and see them as a way for the government to enslave people.
Fun fact, some of them were working in the public sector or for the local council.
Have you read [*Meads v. Meads*](https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html)? It’s a Canadian legal case, but it’s been referenced by [many other court cases in many countries](https://www.canlii.org/en/commentary/doc/2019CanLIIDocs2094) (including European ones), because it’s essentially [a treatise on how Sovereign Citizens work](https://law.stackexchange.com/q/85723/372). (It’s legacy is, though, [somewhat controversial](https://ablawg.ca/2013/04/08/what-has-meads-v-meads-wrought/).)
Apparently, enough of these people exist to make it into the news (Tagesanzeiger, 08.01.2023). I did not know that.
Something only tangentially related, but kinda funny: Every time the Swiss Constitution had a general revision and had to be ratified by popular vote, the “founding states” were against it. That’s like the EU would revise the Maastricht Treaty or even introduce a new Constitution but France, Germany or Nederland are against it. Like, this whole operation was your idea! … so, anyway. The founding states of Switzerland never actually agreed to “join” any new contract and were always forced by the majority of other cantons to tag along. This observation led some politicians/media-bros to (half?-)jokingly ask why they not simply secede or have themselves kicked out.
Not really.
The worst we have is dumb tech bros and moronic businessmen spouting libertarian drivel and pinky swearing that the next time a tax or minimum wage is increased they’ll totally move to Czechia and we’re all be sorry.
We have a good number of nutheads in France, but no “sovereign citizens”. I was believing it was a US phenomenon only, due to the very history of how the US was born.
Not widespread or even common, as far as I know. But a couple of months ago my wife (who works as a public servant for the town where we live) told me that they had started receiving some strange requests for birth certificates by a never before seen “association”. The language used in these requests was amusingly similar to the one used by american sovereign/freemen groups (amusingly because Italy is not even a common law country, so whatever vague legal ground they could have for their bullshit is even *less* valid here than in the USA….)
I have encountered a couple of them online but never heard of them making problems in real life.
Oh yeah we have quite the cult here in northern California/southern Oregon. They have wanted to create the State of Jefferson for many, many years, pay no taxes and just live “sovereignly” it is a fairly large contingent, goes hand in hand with the general political climate of the area.
I don’t think so. At least I’ve never heard of that here
Yes, in lithuanian we have some of these. Most of them are prorussian bastards. One guy have kidnaped his child from mother and ran to russia.
Another family, had thier kids taken by child care servises, so they kidnnaped them and tries to cross the border to belarus.
Sick bastards.
A lot of Albanian majority regions act as independent entities here. They have virtually no interactions with the authorities. Most of the time it isn’t harmful, as these villages are getting smaller year by year as people move to the cities and they are very isolated. But there are some funny cases.
We recently found out that Aracinovo, a village near the capital hasn’t been paying taxes and bills for 20 years now and nobody batted an eye.
Then there is Slupcane, a small village, which got its electricity turned off for not paying the electricity bills. They went and turned on the electricity by themselves, the next time EVN (electricity provider company) workers came in to turn it off, the entrance to the village was blockaded by tractors and the villagers were armed with what they could find and ordered the EVN workers to leave.
I am not trying to be Anti-Albanian here!