Municipality serving as a temporary seat of government
Atemporary capital or aprovisional capital is a city or town chosen by agovernment as an interim base of operations due to some difficulty in retaining or establishing control of a different metropolitan area. The most common circumstances leading to this are either acivil war, where control of the capital is contested, or during aninvasion, where the designated capital is taken or threatened.
By definition, a temporary capital is located somewhere on the country's territory, as opposed to acapital-in-exile located on the territory of a different country. However, a country's capital may move in and out of exile over the course of a conflict.
The following list is sorted by the most recent date the temporary capital's status existed.
Palestine has its provisional capital as the city ofRamallah due to the currentIsraeli occupation ofEast Jerusalem. Although, officially supposed to be a provisional set up, the role of Ramallah as administrative capital of Palestine has not changed since the year 1993 when thePalestinian authority was created.[2]
Due to the Russo-Ukrainian War, the capital ofDonetsk Oblast wasde facto moved fromDonetsk toMariupol in June 2014, then toKramatorsk in October 2014, where it currently is.
Brades acts as thede facto temporary capital ofMontserrat since 1998, after thede jure capital of Montserrat atPlymouth in the south of the island was abandoned in 1997 after it was buried by the eruptions of theSoufriere Hills volcano in 1995. Interim government buildings have since been built at Brades, becoming the new temporary capital in 1998. The move is intended to be temporary, but it has remained the island'sde facto capital ever since. A new official capital is now being constructed in theLittle Bay area.[5]
Germany after 1945 consideredBerlin to remain the German capital. But due to the onset of the Cold War Berlin itself was divided and 161 kilometers (100 miles) beyond theInner German Border within the Soviet-controlled zone that would soon become theGerman Democratic Republic. As a result,Bonn was established as a temporary capital for theFederal Republic of Germany until the two countriesreunited in 1990. TheFederal Republic of Germany's government and the bulk of its offices has since moved to Berlin, but a large portion of its offices remain in Bonn. (TheGerman Basic Law has only mentioned the capital since 2008.)
TheConstitution of the Republic of China does not mention ade jure capital, leaving the issue to other official texts, which were inconsistent initially. For example, an official text in 1967 declared Taipei to be the "wartime capital", one from 1969 and one from 1975 declared Taipei to be the "capital", and one from 1979 declared Nanjing to be the "national capital". From 1982 onward, official documents have consistently declared Taipei to be the capital. Textbooks published byTaiwan's Ministry of Education stopped describing Nanjing as the capital in 2002.[10][circular reference]
By contrast, theBelgian government in exile continued to operate out of London while administering theBelgian Congo, and did not set up a temporary capital in the Belgian Congo.
