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The Conrad Press - Paul Doe

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136 pages

English

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How do towns and cities divided by the harsh reality of an international border manage to get on with each other when their closest neighbour lives just next door, but in another country? Are they thriving or surviving? Utterly dependent on each other or with backs turned, socially and economically? We visit towns and cities that you may not have heard of or know little about. Places like distant Blagoveshchensk and Heihe, Narva and Ivangorod and Gorlitz and Zgorzelec. But also the better known Nicosia, Europe's only divided capital, Detroit with its Canadian neighbour Windsor, Geneva and its French suburb Annemasse and the cities of Sarajevo and Mostar, divided not by international borders but ethnic divisions baked into everyday life.This is a fascinating and well-researched study of thirty-six towns and cities from across the world that are separated by borders. Paul Doe delves into the way in which these divisions came about and how the separated towns and cities manage to get along, or not, buffeted as they are by geopolitics, ethnic differences and historical animosities.

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Geography

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Publié par	The Conrad Press
Date de parution	09 septembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839783708
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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My neighbour over the border:
tales of towns and cities separated by borders and how they get along
Paul Doe

My neighbour over the border
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com   info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839783-70-8
Copyright © Paul Doe, 2021
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.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk
The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For Mandy
Love and patience

Chapter One
It all stops at the border
‘Whether the borders that divide us are picket fences or national boundaries, we are all neighbours in a global community’.
Jimmy Carter, past President of the United States
‘ The civilised states of Europe recognise each other definitely as members of a region, in which the exchange is necessary, and where adjacent states have to deal with each other even if they are enemies, that they only close their borders against dangerous plagues’.
Friedrich Ratzel, 1897
I t was when I was walking through the streets of Nicosia that the questions first came up. Nicosia is a divided city, split by a hard physical border, guarded by United Nations troops for over forty years. It is also divided by language, ethnicity, culture and religion. Whilst everyone is a Cypriot, they are either Greek Cypriots in the south of the city, or Turkish Cypriots in the north.
You can cross the border now, at certain well-defined, well-guarded and supremely over-managed border checkpoints, but the contrast between north and south Nicosia is stark. Immediately the language changes, the street names, the economic wealth, the very feel of each part of the city. All this was once one city of course; Nicosia was the unified capital of a united Cyprus until the mid 1970s and the Turkish invasion into the north of the island.
So, two questions hit me? How had this happened? What were the events that led to the division of the city and why? And then, how do these two bitterly divided halves get on together? Do they stand as two completely separate urban areas, back-to-back, ignoring each other, politically, administratively, culturally and socially, perhaps with occasional furtive and covetous glances to each other? Or is something else going on, something that bridges the divide, bringing people together to simply make the city work?
The border as an obstacle or an opportunity
It’s not only in Nicosia where these questions leap forward. Look across the world and there are many towns and cities divided or separated by international borders. Perhaps their division is not so stark or scarring in its effect. Perhaps the border has no effect at all. But in every case, there is a question; just how does the border affect how each divided town or city works, the everyday life of the inhabitants, the success or failure as a border town? Does being on the border bring isolation, a loss of identity, economic difficulty and stagnation? Or does its location offer the prospect of growth, through access to new and better markets, better paid employment and education and ease of passage to what may be a common linguistic and cultural neighbour? Perhaps it just makes for a more interesting town, with a mix of cultures reflecting two nations, rather than one. Or are they reflective of their location, marginalised and remote in their own country, with the look and feel of abandoned frontier towns?
There is also the story of how these divisions occurred. Were these places split asunder by war and ethnic violence like Nicosia, or was it a politician’s pen stroke that divided what was once a single town? Had two towns grown closer together over time right up to each borders edge, or were they deliberately built to live off each other, as gateways to each country and its markets?
Two stories in one
This book roams through our continents, seeking out cities and towns chopped through by borders. It looks at how they emerged as divided towns or twin cities, whatever they may be called. It asks the question how they work together, if at all, and how their relationship has evolved and what is driving it.
It tells two stories in one; firstly, how two places can emerge and then, secondly, co-exist and operate as one, or perhaps fail to do so. Sometimes in the teeth of wildly contrasting macro-political arrangements and deeply obstructive national regimes, a cooperative and mutually beneficial arrangement develops, or the two towns simply reflect and amplify the nationalist policies and identities. The direction each pair takes depends on a different set of responses to history, economics, geography, geopolitics, culture, language, religion and ethnicity. Above all we see how border communities become problem solvers, seeking practical solutions to the issues the border brings.
To seek out the answers to these questions we travel the world, to a series of exotic and little-known names; Narva in Estonia and Ivangorod in Russia, Kerkrade in the Netherlands and Herzogenrath in Germany, Heihe in China and Blagoveshchensk in Russia, Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nova Gorica in Slovenia and Gorizia in Italy. There are also the better-known twin cities of Niagara Falls and Detroit and Windsor on the United States-Canada border, the divided city of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus and the huge border conurbations of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez on the US-Mexican border. Then there are the less well known, but historically important places; Cieszyn in Poland paired with Cesky Tesin in the Czech Republic and Komarom in Hungary separated by the Danube from its other half, Komarno, now in Slovakia. There are distant neighbours too, on their country’s far frontiers where their closest town is over the border; Tornio and Haparanda on the Finland-Sweden border, Gorlitz and Zgorzelec on the Germany-Poland border. Finally, to the cities divided not by international borders but invisible lines, where ethnic identity rules the roost and divisions run deep; Sarajevo and Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Each chapter considers the effect the border has on pairs of neighbouring towns and cities. Hard borders like those that separate Russia from its western neighbours cutting communities in two. Borders formed through the aftermath of great wars that have split cities asunder, but now through the trade and economic common purpose of the European Union are now being opened again. Do these open borders render the differences between the neighbouring towns redundant? Have they learned to reunite lost ties and affiliations or build new ones with a view to a shared future? What of borders that have clumsily divided ethnic groups or those that have been formed deliberately to separate religious and ethnic groups from each other in the same city?
Then there are the borders with issues, where seemingly similar nations create problems either side of the border through differing political or economic policies. Or the cities so isolated that the closest place they have to turn for support and cooperation is next door to their neighbour, but across the border to a different nation.
Borderlands and buffer-zones
Cities and towns on a border are not the norm. They are quite rare when you look at the many hundreds of thousands of kilometres of borders that exist in the world today. This should not be that surprising when you consider what borders were and are, meant to do. The vast majority of the world’s borders run through mountains, deserts and uninhabitable terrain. This is of course entirely consistent with the way in which politicians and statesmen drew up the many treaties that settled the world’s borders over, in particular, the last two hundred years of nation building. Even the earliest border settlements such as those dividing France and Spain, or England and Scotland, sought to use the mountain tops and watersheds to demarcate boundary lines. Such places were not naturally the home of settlements.
This is for a number of reasons. Borders and borderlands or frontier areas were seen as buffers, protecting the nations core. They were part of the nation’s security shield, keeping others at bay. As a result, they would often be regarded as unstable and economically unreliable, subject to the cultural and ethnic differences of the neighbouring state. In general, as quoted by Lawrence Herzog, the borderlands ‘served as institutionalised buffer-zones where governments could monitor and regulate the trans-boundary flow of goods and people’. Consequently, border areas held little attraction for a nation’s residents unless they were engaged in the management of the border itself.
Janczak points out that this led to border towns exhibiting common phenomena of political, economic and social under-development and as a result, their marginalisation. They sat at the margins of the state, geographically and economically, with their hinterlands and markets cut through by the border.
After the Second World War this view of the border began to change, most clearly in North America and Europe. Large and growing city agglomerations spread through border regions, often tight up to the border itself. Urban areas such as Geneva, Lille and Strasbourg in Northern Europe, and El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, San Diego and Tijuana in the USA and Mexico convincingly bucked the historical trend. The reasons were radically different of course. In Europe the growing ease of trade, freedom of movement and political synergy removed the border as a restriction. In the USA and Mexico, the differing economic relationships saw one city effectively living off