"When I hear the world culture I reach for my gun" - Goering.
When I hear micronations talk about cultural values, I just think of artificial social engineering. How can a micronation decide to have or not have a "culture"? It just seems at odds with what I understand the concept of culture to mean.
Kieran, it is true that culture is, among other things, a collection traditions and symbols that may have evolved over time. However in the compressed timescale of a micro-nation, particularly one of the online variety or one that is mostly online (Lavalon, as we have seen in your pictures, is not online-only necessarily), there are fewer decades, score, centuries, millenniums, and epochs in which a culture can develop to the same extent as in nations that have had such lengthy periods of time in which to develop. Unless some sort of pre-planning and cultural design on the part of a micro-nation occurs, so that a lot of cultural elements are created in short amount of time, relative to those aforementioned lengthy perods, a micro-nation's culture is not likely to be very extensive, and thus, when compared to macro-nations, perhaps not very realistic, and at the very difficult hard to understand from a cultural anthropological point of view. So, like a skilled author for his or her work of epic work of fantasy that has a very detailed setting and historical background, Lavalon, during the period from 2004-2006, embarked upon a process of pre-planning and designing its own culture. This was done first both by committee and through a single appointed person, the Minister of Culture. During this time, the Minister of Culture (and later Regent and ceremonial Head-of-State), was Jon Christophe, a skilled artist and art student from a unique ancestral background: his father was a full-blooded Native American and his mother was of Jewish ethnicity. (I mention other interesting points of minutiae like this in the book.) Most of the time, during the creative process, the committee would come up with the requirements of the art, and Christophe would make the art. Some of the time Christophe took inspiration from the committee's general wishes, and devised art based on his own requirements. With his artistic skill and expert opinion, which also had an impact on the Lavalonian language, and with the contributions of other Lavalonian citizens during the same time, Lavalonian culture experienced an explosion of creativity and expansion.
Elements of that old culture may remain, but development of new cultural elements might not necessarily proceed along the same paths as before. There could be a more organic growth of culture, depending on what Kieran wants to achieve in the new provisional Republic of Lavalon. Differences in development would be only natural because Lavalon has indeed entered a new phase of its existence.
