Liberland, Europe’s tiniest, newest country, has no intention of joining the EU, NATO or any other political or military alliances, but eyes joining some free trade zone as a full-fledged member of the international community, Vít Jedlicka, the President of the state, shared his thoughts on the country’s future with Radio Sputnik.
The president envisages his country as something like Hong Kong; he thinks he and his team are able to turn a piece of rock into something miraculous in about 20-40 years: a place of prosperity and great wealth.
“No way we will join the EU or NATO, it would not allow us to have our own taxes and law regulation because the EU sets minimum standards for taxes and they are pretty high at the moment,” he added.
“With regards to NATO, we are not considering it at all, as our dream is to be a neutral country, just like Switzerland or Austria,” Jedlicka said.However, the head of state is very keen to apply to the European Free Trade agreement, which he finds a much better solution. That will give the state totally open borders to goods from everywhere in the world.
The head of the state confirmed that 250, 000 people have registered for citizenship in the country.
“We are not a micronation any longer,” he stated. “We will be ten times larger, if we let all the citizens in there, than, for example, Monaco.”
“Micronations might be the factor which will make this world a little bit more free,” he said. “Micronations are going to challenge this establishment of things at the moment and there might be a solution to an ever-growing government and ever-increasing state.”
The president also shared some of the hurdles he and his team are trying to overcome.
“We are starting this country from scratch,” he said.“So, we ‘ve go a team of lawyers who are thinking of all the important treaties we need to sign to be part of the international community. We are solving the problems with the borders; we need to find a way to trade freely with our neighbors and [settle] other important law issues.”
Our president 
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He also shared how he’d come up with the idea of creating a new country.
“We couldn’t change the political climate in Czech Republic, where we have very high taxes and lots of regulations and also a lot of misuse of public money,” he said. “For example, a golf course is being built [with] public money from European [contributions], private hotels are being built from public money, we are also forced to pay for it. We are paying direct taxes, indirect taxes — it is all over your life, it is more than 60% of what you actually make if you a regular employee in Czech Republic.”
“But I won’t be a taxpayer in Czech Republic because I would stay more than half of a year in Liberland,” he added.
President Jedlicka also explained how the registration process works.“[My] first idea was to let people send their registration forms by e-mail, which was not a really great idea, we got overflowed with e-mails. So, we stopped that and today we are going to release an official form. You can apply for citizenship, but the registration process will take some time. You can register but if you don’t have the means to help us directly right now, then you have to wait a long time before you get in line.”
He also mentioned that some companies are already waiting in line to get into Liberland, such as, for example information business that want to move in at the very beginning, or a telecom company which wants to make a fast internet here.
For now, he said, “the official languages are Czech and English, but we would like to include Serbian and Croatian later on.”
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