BEIRUT — His hand adorned with silver rings, the self-proclaimed emperor of Nowheristan struck his slim iron cane firmly on the table, quieting a group of twentysomething Lebanese gathered around him.
"All great projects in history started this way," he said, casting a piercing look at his audience while toying with his cane. "Any new, extravagant idea is always considered at first a hallucination."
Half showman and half intellectual, Michel Elefteriades, 37, was describing his imaginary land of Nowheristan, where boundaries cease to exist and individual identities become scrambled.
"Nowheristan is not a sect," he said. "I am not some sort of a guru or prophet."
Over the last two years, Elefteriades, a poet, composer, painter and leftist activist of mixed Greek and Lebanese descent, has attracted more than 50,000 "citizens of Nowheristan" over the Internet.
He also has produced a record album bearing the name of his utopia and conducted a dozen workshops in Europe and the Middle East to convince young audiences that an all-embracing just and warless nation is conceivable.
According to Elefteriades' vision, decisions affecting the world should be made by hundreds of elites living in special villages. Politicians would be stripped of their powers everywhere.
Wealth would be redistributed, with Europeans able to enjoy revenue generated by Persian Gulf oil while Africans could benefit from the West's technological advancement.
One of the region's most acclaimed alternative music producers, he has plunked down $300,000 of his own money to finance Nowheristan, which even has a flag: a blue circle representing Earth, surrounded by a golden halo symbolizing affluence, on a black background that denotes his movement's anarchistic roots.
An international group of 25 musicians forms "a national orchestra of Nowheristan," playing fusions of Arab, Gypsy and a dozen other musical influences.
If he's a crackpot, he's keeping some high-powered company. He launched Nowheristan in 2005 in Beirut's UNESCO Palace at a ceremony attended by Lebanese Culture Minister Tarek Mitri and Geir Pedersen, the United Nations secretary-general's representative to Lebanon.
Elefteriades says he is scheduled to meet in spring with controversial Latin American leaders, including Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador.
