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There’s just something about islands, especially as seen from the mainland. There they sit, harsher outlines softened by distance, beckoning our imaginations. Seen in the sunset, they fairly glow with a magical aura.
It’s a small wonder, then, that Anglo-European mythology was so often placed on the ‘Blessed Realms’ on islands in the West: Atlantis, Hy-Brasil, Avalon, Demar... In modern mythology, one of the foundational inspirations for Tolkien’s vast mythos was the vista of the early evening Western sky seen from the Cornish coast when the young British officer was stationed there in 1914. The sight inspired the “poem that launched Tolkien’s mythology”, as John Garth notes.
Islands have also long appealed to utopians, in both fiction and reality.
Ever wish you could escape from society to your own little island where you could run things your way? As artist and researcher Manar Moursi writes, people have been thinking about and sometimes acting on that idea for a long time. Moursi traces the notion of islands as utopias to Plato’s description of Atlantis, written around 360 BCE. For Plato, the Atlanteans’ isolation led to moral decay. But other writers soon adapted the legend of Atlantis, describing the island as a technologically and ethically advanced society offering a blueprint for real nations.
That same seductive promise persists today. Real estate developers flog utopian imagery with ruthless efficiency.
Today, real estate projects often use utopian imagery as a marketing strategy. In Dubai, for example, residential islands have become a refuge from a mainland where the exploitation of foreign workers is uncomfortably visible.
And there’s the rub: what looks magical and ethereal from the shore too often turns out to be a bug-infested swamp on closer inspection. Or, the island is a hypocritical sanctuary from the grim reality of the mainland. The brochures for Dubai’s residential islands sell paradise, while just across the water, the reality is sand, steel and servitude.
Moursi also traces the idea that islands are essentially anarchistic or libertarian. Eighteenth- and 19th-century fiction, including Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, represents islands as places where “natives” or international vagabonds live outside the reach of legal structures. And real, or partly real, stories of autonomous pirate islands emphasized the personal freedom, as well as the danger, to be found there.
Since then, libertarian-minded organizations have sometimes used islands as staging grounds for real-world political projects.
In 1964, pirate radio stations set up on an island off the Netherlands to dodge broadcasting bans. That effort was shut down quickly, but the idea spread (at least, until the Goodies towed the entire British island outside the Five Mile Limit in 1970). In 1967, Major Paddy Roy Bates declared the Principality of Sealand on an abandoned oil platform off England’s east coast so he could run his own radio station.
Later efforts got even more ambitious. And ended just as you’d expect.
In the early 1970s, for instance, soap company owner Werner Stiefel, inspired by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, tried to create a floating homestead in the Caribbean aboard a concrete-hulled ship named Freedom. It sank on the way. Not long after, real estate developer Michael Oliver and a band of fellow libertarians established the Republic of Minerva on the Minerva Reefs. Their vision was a nation without “taxation, welfare, subsidies, or any form of economic interventionism”. Tonga’s military annexed the territory in short order.
Today, the most prominent version of this tradition is the Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008. Funded by PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, the institute promised to create a variety of floating “oceanic city-states” as experiments in different political forms. These mini-governments would compete for citizens, who would be free to take their modular floating homes to a different micronation at any time.
Who wants to take bets on how it’ll work out?
The same impulse drives today’s coastal elites who lecture the rest of us about ‘systemic problems’ while quietly buying their own gated compounds or luxury bolt-holes. Islands, real or artificial, remain the ultimate symbol of escape for those who can afford it. The rest of us are left on the mainland, paying the bills and dealing with the consequences.
The pattern is depressingly consistent. Island utopias appeal to those who want to escape the messiness of mainland society without doing the hard work of fixing it. They imagine they can reset human nature by changing the postcode. Reality has other ideas. Stronger powers annex them, the sea swallows them or the dreamers discover that running a society, even a tiny one, requires rules, enforcement and, yes, compromise.
There’s a lesson here for the would-be nation-builders and seasteaders. Human nature doesn’t change just because you surround yourself with water. Utopias always look better from a distance. Up close, they tend to reveal the same old problems: only smaller, wetter and usually more expensive to maintain.
The Blessed Realms were always myths for a reason. The mainland may be messy, but it’s where the real work of civilisation happens. Better to roll up our sleeves here than chase another shining island that inevitably sinks beneath the waves.
