Anti-UN
There are always nations who take an Anti-UN position in NationStates. These nations have decided that the potential benefits gained from UN membership (such as invasion play, proposal submitting and approving, etc.) are not worth the costs.
The costs associated with UN membership include threats to sovereignty, undesired changes to national statistics (as imposed by the Compliance Ministry), and a wide variety of philosophical differences. Others choose not to be members of the UN for Roleplaying reasons such as in the case of GCON.
Some see the UN as an attempt to impose a world government over the entire collection of NationStates. This theory is dismissed by its opponents by pointing to the statistics that show that only about one-third of all nations are in fact UN members. (The number of puppets ineligible for UN membership probably skews this figure significantly.) Various attempts to form a credible competitor organisation to the UN have never had very much success, however, partly because of the difficulty of attracting enough players into such alliances, but mostly because (unlike the UN) these alliances are unable to directly affect national statistics.
Others do not dislike the UN, but instead view it as a pointless and redundant body that deals with issues that they view as meaningless, irrelevent or when something important is discussed, the only 'action' taken is to advise governments on a course of action. Whether or not the UN would be more popular if it took an active and aggressive role in major issues usually debated in national parliaments remains to be seen, but all indications suggest that such an occurance would lead to many nations leaving the UN because of aforementioned national sovereignty concerns.
A distinct variety of anti-UN sentiment originates from n00bs who join the UN thinking it will be much like the real-life United Nations or without reading the list of past resolutions. The n00bishness of this variety of anti-UN sentiment has led many UN members to dismiss more serious anti-UN concerns.
Some regions take an openly anti-UN stance, most notably Gatesville, Lesser Antilles and The Meritocracy.
