A country may keep its seat after losing its land

Under a continuity framework being modelled by officials of a small island state, the functions of government would be defined independently of the place where they are performed. The population registry, land titles, pensions, the company register, passports and the state's vote in international bodies would be maintained as a single legal and technical estate, replicated abroad under arrangements that give the servers roughly the protection an embassy building has.

The framework is written in the flat vocabulary of disaster recovery and reads exactly like it. Territory appears in the document as a dependency whose loss must be planned for, in the same sentence structure used for a power supply or a data centre. Officials involved would insist this is not coldness but method, and that the alternative — discussing the end of a homeland in the language of mourning — produces no annexes at all.

The legal question is the one lawyers enjoy and governments dread: whether a state can continue without the ground it was founded on. The traditional criteria include a permanent population, a defined territory and a government able to enter into relations with other states. Two of the three would survive comfortably. The third would become a matter of definition, and definitions are settled by whoever keeps turning up to the meetings.

“We are not proposing a country without a place,” an official attached to the continuity programme would say. “We are proposing that the place stops being the thing that proves the country. Our citizens would still be from somewhere. They would be from somewhere that is now underwater, which is a change in geography, not in nationality.”

The economic stake is larger than the symbolism. Fishing and seabed rights are measured outward from a coastline, and a state whose coastline disappears would, on a strict reading, lose the revenue that funds the very administration being preserved. The framework therefore treats permanently fixed maritime baselines as the load-bearing clause, with the registry, the passports and the seat resting on top of it.

The hard objections would come from operations rather than from the ministries. Somebody would have to decide what happens when the last physical counter closes. Who authenticates a citizen when there is no desk to walk up to? The answer consists of signing keys, an identity system and a helpdesk in another time zone, and behind all three sits the question of who runs them if the operator is incorporated in a third country and the contract is up for renewal.

The framework is a scenario, not a schedule, and its authors would be first to say that a state which never has to use it has been well served by everyone else. It has been written early deliberately, because a continuity plan produced after the outage is not a continuity plan. It is minutes.