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The Conrad Press - Paul Doe

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163 pages

English

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Have you ever thought about why a country's borders are where they are? 'Dividing up the World; the story of our international borders and why they are where they are', is an utterly fascinating study of how borders have come about and the stories behind them.As well as unearthing tales and anecdotes relating to more familiar borders, the author also examines less well-known ones including the Drummully Polyp, the Scots Dike, the Medicine Line, the Gadsden Purchase, Neutral Moresnet, the Green Line, the Sand Wall, the Gambian 'Ceded Mile', the Caprivi Strip and an island that changes nationality twice a year.The result is a highly entertaining, meticulously- researched book, full of accounts of geography, maps, politics, colonialism, power, aggression and negotiation. After reading 'Dividing up the World; the story of our international borders and why they are where they are', you will never think of borders in the same way again.

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Geography

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Publié par	The Conrad Press
Date de parution	01 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839780264
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Dividing up the world
The true story of our international borders and why they are where they are
Paul Doe

Dividing Up The World
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2020
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com   info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839780-26-4
Copyright © Paul Doe, 2020
The moral right of Paul Doe to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Plans all created by Katy Doe
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For my mum who sadly never got to read my book and for my wife Mandy, for her love and patience.

Chapter One
Why, when and how; a short history of borders
Imagine there’s no countries,
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace’.
John Lennon, ‘Imagine’, 1971
Y es, just imagine, no countries, no national boundaries, no borders. Nothing to separate us from them, no artificial divisions, fences or walls, nothing other than the seas, the mountains and the rivers between us. People over there might be different from us in how they speak or look but we would all be the same; people of the world? Unlikely, however. These differences have become too important to us. Our basic desire to establish our territory and protect what we have has driven us to draw lines around our homes, our farms, villages, towns and most importantly, our countries. Our governments draw up our borders, manage them day to day and we all live inside them. Our international borders are the way in which we divide up our world.
So, what’s the big deal with borders?
The borders we have constructed over hundreds of years help to define who and what we are today. Borders have become essential to the very existence of the nation state in which we all live. They determine the territory it controls, the scope of its autonomy and are a key part of each states security policy and identity.
A border has a psychological place too. In our own minds we have a concept of personal space and intrusion can be regarded as a provocation. As Malcolm Anderson points out, ‘governments show a similar sensitivity to unregulated intrusions across frontiers and to threats, real or imagined, to the territorial integrity of the state’. State borders can be seen as examples of human territoriality writ large; our home is our castle, challenge it at your own risk. Our home is private and well known. Outside is public, less ordered or understood. As with our own countries’ borders. Inside our identity is clearer and better understood. Cross the border and everything is different, new and unknown.
Over a hundred years ago Lord Curzon described international boundaries as being ‘the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace, or life and death to nations.’ That’s what a border is, a razor’s edge, a line in the sand, a fence, a line of posts, a road or a river, that marks out a nation or states territory. In today’s sophisticated world we still have disputes over our borders, frequently settled by negotiation or arbitration, sometimes through war, sometimes never settled, left to rumble on in a paralysed state as in Cyprus and Western Sahara, two divided lands in a later chapter.
Borders help to create borderlands where levels of interaction and permeability can be high in integrated areas but little or none where nations are alienated and divided. Where there is ethnic or cultural affinity, groups separated by borders can find ways to continue extensive relationships often in the teeth of government opposition. Borderlands can often feel remote and forgotten, a distance away from markets with difficult transport links. They can become different spaces where life may rely upon integration, if permissible over the border such as in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez on the US -Mexico border, or the end of the world where a hard border brings a nations everyday life to an abrupt end in a geographical cul-de-sac as in the Fergana Valley in Central Asia.
But haven’t we moved on? The age of the internet and open information transcend all borders. Bitcoin, social media, environmental pollution, climate change, corporatism and terrorism recognise no borders. The corporate behemoths of McDonalds, Google, Mercedes Benz and KFC are everywhere. Even sport is a great equaliser. The hardest border between intransigent states can be rolled away to create a sporting success. Just look at North and South Korea forming a united women’s ice hockey team for the 2018 Seoul Winter Olympics. Of course, it wasn’t just about sport, but a united team did much to persuade Koreans and other nations that there was hope ahead.
So, on the one hand we have our razor edge borders, at times feeling fuzzy and open, as in the EU, or hardening every day to repel refugees or economic migrants as in Hungary and the USA. On the other hand, the free rein of the Information Age, a shared world of Facebook, the internet, FaceTime, TV, cinema and telephony. Supporters of open borders know that the politics of their suggestions are perilous. We welcome free trade and free flowing goods that serve to promote economic trade. We welcome willing and hard-working people to fill jobs that no one wants or go unfilled by a shortage of skilled individuals. Up to a point it seems, as few politicians propose complete freedom of movement of people, shifting back to the need for control and security. At the end of the day open borders require a degree of trust between nations that is too often elusive and unobtainable.
That’s why borders continue to matter. Disputes still pop up on a regular basis, fences and walls are under construction, territory argued over and boundary commissions and legal adjudications set up. In most of the world our passports matter and we are recorded as we step in and out of different countries. Politicians of a nationalist inclination argue strongly for the defence of borders and build a manifesto around protectionism and security.
It is the still the case that at the very heart of each nation’s sovereignty is the need to provide a clear border and security against being attacked. We live in a bordered world where the lines we have drawn exist because we find them meaningful. Indeed, our borders are now enshrined in international law. As Anderson and Bort say, ‘the border is the basic political institution: no rule bound economic, social or political life in advanced societies could be organised without them’. Indeed, our borders can out-live even the death of a nation. The 1978 Vienna Convention on State Succession makes it clear that when a state collapses its borders remain in force.
Our borders are hardening around us too. Reece Jones, a commentator and author on borders, recently noted that over the last fifteen years two things were happening to our borders. Increasingly we are building more border infrastructure with new walls, border guards and surveillance spending. In the 1990s we had about fifteen border walls across the world. We now have over seventy. Shockingly, more people are dying at borders too. In the 1980s a few hundred people were reported as dying at borders, but in 2017 Reece Jones noted that a year before, over 7,500 died or disappeared trying to cross a border. As these figures get worse an increasingly hypocritical view develops around borders. Some cheer when the Berlin Wall falls, throw shame on the huge Israeli walls across the West Bank and heap ignominy on Trump and his Mexican wall obsession. But at the same time others seek new ways to stop refugees and asylum seekers accessing our shores and build walls around Calais roads to funnel travellers to the port. Politicians laud free trade and open access to markets whilst seeking to stop the free movement of labour. It seems we are to forever have a love-hate relationship with our very own borders and what they represent to each of us.
Why write a book about borders?
This book is all about my fascination with the world’s borders. My central question is how did they get THERE? Yes, THERE, that line, that wiggle, that fence running through a town, that border that has created an enclave, a country within a country, that straight line that ignores physical features and ethnic divisions, that border that runs through seemingly abandoned land of no value. Each border I have looked at tells a story. Often, it’s not just about a line on a map but the result of political struggles, endless war, ancient ownerships and in the case of the European powers, sheer arrogance and the misuse of colonial power. The identified borders are my choice and I have visited many of them, to see how things lie on the ground and absorb the sense of division the border can create. I have also looked around the border to pick out some local stories that have been shaped by the proximity of the border or its frontier zone.
I am not alone in having this fascination. The internet abounds with border fanatics. Groups who deliberately visit border tri-posts where three countries meet. People who gather records of boundary posts installed sometimes hundreds of years ago. Then there are the border professionals, the International Border Research Unit (IBRU), now the Centre for Borders Research at Durham University, the International Border Research Group, a non-governmental organisation based in Scandinavia, the Centre for International Borders Research at Queens University Belfast, and its Association for Borderlands Studies, the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research in the Netherlands, the EU’s very own EU Borderscapes project that tracks and interprets conceptual change in the