completely off-the-wall question

[kaigou]

(No, this has nothing to do with any plans for world domination. JUST ASKIN', really.)

What happens if more than 50% of your country's tangible property -- land -- is purchased/owned/occupied by nationals of another country? I mean, is there any scenario in which you could visualize or rationalize or imagine buying out a country? Or maybe just causing significant political shifts (assuming it's a multi-party and/or non-authoritarian regime)? Or... what happens when refugees from another country completely overwhelm the existing population (numbers-wise)? Could you end up with such chaos that the country ends up in a state of quasi-claimant by the nationals of a second country?

Feel free to reference books, movies, other fiction that's addressed such ideas, or your own experience and/or theories, academic or just fantastical, or real-world political, economic, financial, etc.

[Consider it purely curiosity on my part, but probably a curiosity that's buttressed by my own culture's assumptions that a nation is made up of its people & its land, which is where the foregone conclusion resides that a massive paradigm shift of people & ownership would have to, therefore, affect the nation as a whole.]

Comments

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Well, I imagine there are situations where you could have something like your buyout. You'd have to set it up carefully, though, because the outcome will depend on a huge number of variables, or so I should think. How does the country in question treat property rights in land? (In Anglo-American law at least, land is very different from personal property.) What sorts of immigration rules are in place, and how well enforced are they? (Just because I own a bit of real estate in another country doesn't necessarily mean I can occupy it, or bring in fellow nationals to occupy it.) Technical ownership aside, who has physical control over the property? Is this country one where the existing population has a strong sense of national identity, that it would work to keep? Do the buyers think their home nation would use military force to secure what they consider to be their rights? And so on, and on, and on.

If a nation feels threatened enough, and isn't worried about the equivalent of the Marines swooping in to support the buyers, it can do anything from restrict the way foreign nationals can use or transfer real property to expropriating it back again, with or without reasonable compensation. Doing things like this would have consequences, of course, but so does defaulting on sovereign debt, and nations have been known to do that, or to threaten to do it when strategically necessary. On the other hand, if it doesn't feel threatened, or doesn't have enough power or protection from other powers to resist, I imagine eventually you could find a consensus in favor of some sort of merger with the country the buyers hail from. Or something less than consensus, but sufficient to force the affiliation -- although in that case I think you can expect that there's going to be a terrorism issue for rather a long time as a consequence.

[kaigou]

Lots of countries have limits on foreign ownership -- I had no idea that the US has among the most liberal of foreign-ownership allowances. But then, first-world versus third-world (where massive speculation would be an issue). But at least I picked some terms from your reply that led to another happy hour of googling, plus ended up reading up on possession versus "historical possession" (especially in the cases of several islands in the South Pacific). Thank you!