Ruritania is a fictional country, originally located in Central Europe as a setting for novels by Anthony Hope, such as The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).[1] [2] Nowadays, the term connotes a quaint minor European country or is used as a placeholder name for an unspecified country in academic discussions. The first known use of the demonym Ruritanian was in 1896.[3]
Hope's setting lent its name to a literary genre involving fictional countries, which is known as Ruritanian romance.
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:
″[t]he 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.″[4]
"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."
M. Rothbard – a former student of von Mises – similarly used the fictional country in his own works.
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 nationalist movements among Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Romanians, etc. In this story, peasant Ruritanians living in the "Empire of Megalomania" 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.[10]
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."[11]