Think ‘President of an unrecognised state’ and the image of a mild-mannered 20-year-old video game developer in Dover does not immediately spring to mind.
But when he’s not sitting at home creating virtual worlds on Roblox to pay the rent, Daniel Jackson is busy running his “government in exile”.
His adventures have even seen him detained in the Balkans before eventually being deported back to Britain.
“I think I’ve scared my parents half to death a lot of the time. I don’t doubt that because obviously you have to be completely nuts to try and do what we’re doing,” he tells me in the Market Square Kitchen in Dover town centre.
In 2019, he and a group of friends found out that the Serbia-Croatia border dispute had left some small patches of land on the banks of the Danube River unclaimed by either country.
On May 30 of that year, they declared one of those pockets the ‘Free Republic of Verdis’, with the then 15-year-old Mr Jackson as its inaugural president.
Nothing much seemed to happen with his fledgling micronation until October 12, 2023, when he and others attempted to “settle” the land.
“We were going to put some houseboats along the river,” he says.
“We had some prefabricated materials being produced in Serbia that we were going to get brought down on a barge from Apertin.
“The settlement only lasted a few days before Croatian authorities came in, and they were quite aggressive with us as well.”
Mr Jackson was deported, as were several of his colleagues. He was banned from Croatia for good, and several of his fellow ‘Verdisians’ got three-month bans.
“The official status we had was ‘threat to homeland security’. At the time I was 18 and I found that quite funny.”
He and his “government in exile” claim that Croatia is violating international law by refusing them the chance to live on the patch of land, which is about the size of the Vatican.
Thanks to post-Yugoslav War border drawing, there are numerous pockets of empty land in the area, which neither Croatia nor Serbia say belong to them. Mr Jackson and his ‘cabinet’ say that makes the land “terra nullius” under international law – open season for anyone who wants to proclaim the creation of a country there.
“There is no other entity that has previously claimed this land in over 20 years,” he says.
“We are the oldest active claimants; even if someone else did turn up there, we would still maintain that we are the legal authorities to be there.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there does not seem to have been any rush from other countries or organisations like the UN to back Verdis.
We didn’t try to land, but were chased off by Croatian authorities…
He frequently travels from Dover to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, trying to establish relationships with politicians and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) there.
“We’ve never had a problem with Serbia whatsoever,” he says – and adds that he has spoken to politicians of the ruling party.
Their most recent trip was only days before we met in Dover.
“We visited Verdis from Apertin, or at least, you know, hovered around the waters,” he says.
“We didn’t try to land, but were chased off by Croatian authorities. We don’t believe they had the right to do that because they shouldn’t be entering.
“Well, they can go through our waters because it’s an international waterway, but they shouldn’t have the right to chase us off or anything.”
He and his government have Verdisian passports and ID cards – written in the three official languages: Serbian, Croatian and English. Mr Jackson himself speaks only a bit of Serbian and Croatian. He claims he knows at least one person who managed to leave Greece on their Greek passport, and then successfully enter North Macedonia using their Verdisian ID.
However, he stresses that daring citizens who try to travel on their Verdis documentation do so “at their own risk”.
The Principality of Sealand, an unrecognised microstate on a platform off East Anglia, famously sells noble titles and citizenship on its website. Verdis is much more selective.
“We’ve had 15,000 applications for citizenship, but we’ve only accepted 400,” Mr Jackson says.
“We’re only slightly larger in the Vatican. There are a lot of in-demand skills, so we have to be very careful with what people are allowed.”
It sounds like Croatia is taking a heavy hand with a harmless crank…
Despite currently not being able to set foot on it, they have big plans for Verdis.
“The main goal there is to get a lot of temporary infrastructure down and to try to start building permanent infrastructure within the first few months,” the provisional president says.
“It obviously costs a lot in funding and so on – we do have some people that would be willing to help us.”
Being so small, he envisions the country as having a digitally-focused economy. They plan to use the Euro without agreement with the EU or Eurozone, much like Montenegro and Kosovo.
The project is not all talk, however. Mr Jackson and some of his newer countrymen met in an online Stand With Ukraine community, founded after the Russian invasion of that country in 2022. Several of them have teamed up in getting humanitarian aid to Ukraine: sending radios to Kyiv and helping deliver relief from Poland.
There is precedent for proclaiming new countries in unclaimed land – though none have been successful. A huge unpopulated area called Bir Tawil sits between Egypt and Sudan, unclaimed by either, and numerous people have declared competing states there.
Just up the river from Verdis is Liberland, founded by a Libertarian Czech politician in 2015, and using the very same border ambiguity to find terra nullius. Much like Verdis, it has no permanent population, and attempts to access it have resulted in prospective settlers being arrested.
Kent-based associate professor of International Relations at UCL, Dr Philip Cunliffe, says the proclamation of Verdis has “no basis in modern international law”.
“Given the long and complicated history of European state formation, stranger things have happened,” Dr Cunliffe said.
“He could do little worse in the region, given how the peoples of the region tore themselves apart only to try and rejoin the borderless EU as independent states.”
Obviously my parents worried when I got detained by the Croatian authorities…
However, the professor does think that the authorities have gone too far in banning Mr Jackson, adding: “It sounds like Croatia is taking a heavy hand with a harmless crank.”
Mr Jackson was born in Australia, but his parents and sister were all born in Britain. His mother is from Dover itself, as were her parents.
He says his family have always been “pretty supportive” of the Verdis project.
“Every parent worries and obviously my parents worried when I got detained by Croatian authorities,” he says.
“I wasn’t really worried; we sort of predicted that something like this could happen.
“I think my family, over the years, have seen I’m a bit unpredictable at times, when it comes to crazy decisions that probably a normal 20-year-old doesn’t make, and I think they’ve got used to that now.
“It’s unusual but the world would be boring without unusual.”
When he isn’t spending time on Verdisian activities, Mr Jackson is a self-employed video game designer, using Roblox as a platform to create other games – which he says pays his rent.
He confidently refers to his ‘government in exile’, his vice-President and ministers, and speaks fluently in the register of banished leaders and pretenders to defunct thrones. Somehow, it does not quite have the gravity of Charles de Gaulle in London in 1941.
Mr Jackson thinks his new nation’s success is “a when, not an if”, arguing that one day Serbia and Croatia will sort out their border dispute, and leave Verdis to it.
Verdis will almost certainly never be recognised by any other government. It is unlikely to ever have a permanent population, and the ‘Provisional Government’ will likely never exert any authority beyond the administration of their social media accounts.
Far from the ‘Verdisians’ representing some powerful new nationalism, their endeavour says more about the decay of nation-statehood everywhere else in the world.
A state has a definite territory and population, and is the supreme authority over that place and people, recognising equals but no superior. Verdis may claim the first two, whatever others may think, but in practice it has no authority.
But how many real governments can credibly claim this for themselves? They willingly cede their political authority to supranational organisations, regulators, the civil service and the judiciary. They even claim responsibility for potentially endless numbers of people outside their own borders through humanitarian obligations.
With the content of nation-statehood so diluted, is it any surprise there are some who now feel these things can be willed into existence by finding a blank space on a map?
Leaders of prospective new countries have a habit of staying in power for a long time after things get up and running. But the 20-year-old president has no desire to carry on for much longer if Verdis is established and has elections.
“I’m exhausted. I just want to be a normal citizen,” he adds.
The embassies of Croatia and Serbia did not respond to requests for comment.
