specialising in international law and private international law use Ruritania and other fictional countries when describing a hypothetical case illustrating some legal point. Australian foreign ministerAlexander Downer cited Ruritania as a fictional enemy when illustrating a security treaty between Australia and Indonesia signed on 8 November 2006: "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". Similarly a British Court when contemplating a publication ban relating to a childhood sexual assault case, referred to the country of origin of the child as "Ruritania", further explaining "The boy was described in the judgment as having 'dual British and Ruritanian nationality'." Author and royal historian Theo Aronson, in his book Crowns in Conflict used the term to describe the semi-romantic and even tribal-like conditions of the Balkan and Romanian cultures prior to the Great War. Walter Lippmann used the word to describe the stereotype that characterized the vision of international relations during and after the First World War. 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 humor theorist Isaac Asimov, when telling ethnic jokes that were based entirely on ethnic slurs, would transplant them to Ruritania, e.g., Author J. G. Ballard, in refusing a CBE, described the British Honours System as a "Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy". Economist Ludwig von Mises discussed currency reform for Ruritania and its "rurs" in the expanded edition of The Theory of Money and Credit, chapter 23. He also references it in Human Action. Murray Rothbard, a former student of von Mises, also mentions the fictional country in his own works. Author and mathematician Vernor Vinge discusses the "Ruritania of the mind" in his space operaA Deepness in the Sky. Vesna Goldsworthy of Kingston University, in her book Inventing Ruritania: the imperialism of the imagination, 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. Hope's setting lent its name to a literary genre involving fictional countries, which is known as Ruritanian romance.
