For those of you who kept up with the COP15 and are familiar with Kiribati (you need to read Sex Lives of Cannibals if you are not), Tuvalu - the 193rd attendee of COP15, and the Marshall Islands, then this article will be of extreme interest to you: If seas swallow island state, is it still a nation?
It's clearly a play on the "if a tree falls in the forest" question, but the stakes are much higher - thousands of individuals at risk of losing their nationality. From what I can gather, there is no law for this kind of event. Asylum does not cover it. In fact, I imagine that bordering nations may opt to deny the Marshallese entrance to their countries because of linguistic barriers, employment issues, and one very obvious barrier to integration - they didn't come by choice. I have yet to formulate an opinion on the subject but decided to post something in case others had any input.
This is proof that Climate Change not only impacts our economics but also our national identities. Are the Marshallese entitled to keep their national identity? So far, no country, except for maybe Spain, has done well to integrate such extrastate populations as the Roma (commonly known by the offensive moniker as Gypsies) that maintain an entirely non-national identity. My head is spinning with comparisons to Yugoslavia, Palestinian Territories, and Australia. I am actually not sure what to say at the moment and will return with a hopefully cogent expressed opinion.
I think that perhaps the simplest answer is that these populations will simply lose their national identity. They will still be a cultural group, but I tend to think that there is a reason that nations so fiercely defend the right to rule in their own territory. Peoples need a territory over which their nation, their co-nationals, are sovereign. Unless other countries are willing to cede control of lands sufficient to support a new nation, it seems likely that the idea of a "citizen" of these nations will fade at precisely the same rate as the physical lands themselves.
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