A European country that may not be real is angling for good relations with Donald Trump

Christopher Woody

"There are many ties and shared ideas between Liberland and President Trump," the self-proclaimed president of Liberland, Vit Jedlicka, told The Washington Post this weekend.

Jedlicka declared sovereignty over a 3-square-mile spit of land on the Danube River in April 2015, taking advantage of a decades-long dispute between Croatia and Serbia over their border.

Jedlicka, a Czech citizen with libertarian leanings and a Euroskeptic, found out about the territory while reading about "terra nullius" — "nobody's land" in Latin — on Wikipedia.

See inside this unusual nation:

While Jedlicka is optimistic about relations between his country and the Trump administration, the nascent relationship faces a peculiar and significant hurdle: Neither the US nor any other country recognizes Liberland's existence.

Jedlicka has links with anti-establishment political movements elsewhere in Europe, and he recently appointed Thomas Walls, a US citizen, as Liberland's foreign minister.

Jedlicka told Business Insider in April 2015 that he was against most forms of government assistance and that taxes in his country would be voluntary.

"We don't really care that much, because the government will have very little expenditure," he said at the time. "We will have so much money that we will not know how to spend it."

Jedlicka also told The Post plans to attend Trump's inauguration in January were in the works, but he wouldn't say precisely who his connection to the US president-elect was.

"We can say we have a strong supporter of Liberland who is a close adviser to one of Trump's already announced cabinet picks and somewhat famous in his own right," Walls told The Post. "Another member of the Liberland team has just published one of Trump's books in Europe."

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