Ruritania is a fictional country, originally located in Central Europe as a setting for a trilogy of novels by Anthony Hope, beginning with The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).
Hope's setting lent its name to a literary genre involving fictional countries, which is known as Ruritanian romance.
Fictional country
Jurists specialising in international law and private international law use Ruritania and other fictional countries when describing a hypothetical case illustrating some legal point. Examples include:
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For example, writes in a legal textbook:
- : ″the question whether obtained good title to a camera which he bought in Ruritania is governed by Ruritanian law, even if the camera had been delivered on hire purchase terms, or under a conditional sale to s seller in England.″
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In another legal textbook, frequently use “Ruritania” as a placeholder-name when referring to a generic country in hypothetical scenarios in international law.
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Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer cited “Ruritania” as a fictional enemy when illustrating a security treaty between Australia and Indonesia signed on 8 November 2006:
- : "We do not need to have a security agreement with Indonesia so both of us will fight off the 'Ruritanians'. That's not what the relationship is about," he said. "It is all about working together on the threats that we have to deal with, which are different types of threats."
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A British court, when contemplating a publication ban relating to a childhood sexual assault case, referred to the country of origin of the child as “Ruritania”, further explaining, "The boy was described in the judgment as having 'dual British and “Ruritanian” nationality'."
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The well-known economist L. von Mises used “Ruritania” to discuss currency reform
[ (1998 ed.)]
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Murray Rothbard – a former student of von Mises – similarly used the fictional country in his own works.
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Polish politician Janusz Korwin-Mikke often uses "Poronia" and "Rurytania"
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BBC radio used “Ruritania” in 1956, as a euphemism for Egypt during the Suez Crisis for on-air discussions of the crisis, in order to circumvent the terms of an agreement with the British government that prevented broadcasting details of the events before they were discussed in parliament.
Central and southeastern Europe
Ruritania has also been used to describe the stereotypical development of
nationalism in 19th-century
Eastern Europe, by
Ernest Gellner in
Nations and Nationalism, in a
pastiche of the historical narratives of
nationalism movements among Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Romanians, etc. In this story, peasant Ruritanians living in the "Empire of " developed national consciousness through the elaboration of a Ruritanian
high culture by a small group of intellectuals responding to industrialization and labor migration.
Author and royal historian Theo Aronson, in his book Crowns in Conflict (1986), used the term to describe the semi-romantic and even tribal-like conditions of the Balkan and Romanian cultures before World War I. Walter Lippmann used the word to describe the stereotype that characterized the vision of international relations during and after the War.[ See Chapter X.]
Vesna Goldsworthy of Kingston University, in her book Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale University Press, 1998), addresses the question of the impact of the work of novelists and film-makers in shaping international perceptions of the Balkans in the framework of an anti-Western type of modernism which has received much criticism from other academics. Goldsworthy's theories consider stories and movies about Ruritania to be a form of "literary exploitation" or "narrative colonization" of the peoples of the Balkans.
While discussing how new revolutionary leadership consciously or unconsciously may inherit certain elements of the previous regime, Benedict Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities, mentions among other examples "Josip Broz's revival of Ruritanian pomp and ceremony."
Footnotes
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