Dividing up the World: The true story of our international borders and why they are where they are

By Paul Doe

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839780264

Book preview

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: [phone] www.theconradpress.com 
[e-mail]

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

Yes, 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 study of borders and a host of Twitter sites and email groups for border fans. There are also the boundary commissions set up to arbitrate on national borders, with perhaps the most interesting of all being the International Boundary Commission between the United States and Canada, still going strong after it was set up in 1908. It’s even possible to do a course in Border Studies. Unfortunately for border fanatics like me it’s based in Finland and focuses on the border regions of Finland and Russia, mainly taking students from each country. But hey, all power to them. In the UK you can do an MA in Geopolitics, Territory and Security that focuses on borders and inter-state relations. I was tempted but at £10,000 a pop I turned back to my book.

There are also considerable numbers of academic texts on the politics of borders, borderlands and frontiers out there. Certain names kept cropping up where other writers cite particular authors with reverence as the leading specialists in the analysis of the geopolitical, cultural and even psychological effects of borders.

This book does not follow that course. I am not an academic and I can’t try to be one. I have an interest in borders that stems from my past as a geography graduate, a love of maps and travel and a desire to understand why and how these hard lines were drawn just THERE. What became clear to me as I looked into the why and how was that our borders are a phenomenon of history. Each case resonates with historical events that cannot be replicated and each tells a story of intrigue, aggression, power and arrogance. The settled border is often just the final checkmate move in a chess game where he who blinks first, loses out.

Getting the border language right

One important distinction that became clear to me when researching this book was to be specific about the difference between a border and a frontier. Academics seem to want to emphasise this distinction when to many lay people they may mean the same thing. To be as clear as I can, the border is the boundary line whilst the frontier may, and I emphasise may, as terminology flits about in many books, be more about a zone near the border, or even a state of mind such as the frontier of the American West for example. The word ‘frontier’ actually comes from the Latin ‘frons’ or ‘frontis’, the fore part of something. In French it became ‘frontiere’ or borderland, a region that faces on to another country. What is clear is that frontiers have existed for many centuries, whilst borders are a more recent innovation. Frontiers contained the fortifications and defensive forces to defend the state and protect its citizens. They were the ‘fuzzy’ areas where two different tribes, cultures, jurisdictions or feudal allegiances met or intertwined.

We must also define three other words used in settling borders; allocation, demarcation and delimitation. Allocation is what we see in early border settlements. Without accurate mapping from on the ground surveys a border may be ‘allocated’ in an arbitrary way, as the crest of a mountain range, the middle of a river or as a straight line between two known points. ‘Delimitation’ is the next stage where a written description describes in more specific terms where a border should lie. This is then followed by ‘demarcation’ with surveys and exact references and mapping to points on the ground to avoid historically ambiguous and contradictory confusions. Even clarity over place-names is needed. Mellor noted that the 1944 allocation of territory from Germany to Poland was confused by the Russians and Anglo-American allies because there are two Neisse rivers. The Russians won the argument and the Polish frontier moved west by 200 km.

So, to borders, the why, when and how

To begin I wanted to understand how our worlds borders developed. The history of how we got here is for the most part a recent one, but with ancient foundations based on the fundamental principles of defining territory, marking conquest and settling scores between nations, states and developing kingdoms. Plug in ‘the world’s oldest border’ into a search on the internet and Wikipedia will give you a dated list of the establishment of today’s borders between countries. In Europe it’s said that the borders of Andorra could be the oldest extant and unchanged border dating back to 1278. But what is clear is that the mere concept of a clear borderline between countries or nations didn’t really exist until the 1600’s with the development of the nation state and clarity over international boundary recognition.

To find the earliest records of borders we need to go much further back. Possibly the oldest known border conflict, according to Diener and Hagen, arose back in 2600-2350 BC in Mesopotamia. A monument, now in the Louvre in Paris, known as the Stèle of the Vultures records a victory of the city state of Lagash over its neighbour Umma. The Stèle provides a synopsis of a land dispute. After what appears to be an arbitration over the borderline between Lagash and Umma settled with an inscribed Stèle setting out the decision, the two sides quarrelled and the leader of Umma removed the Stèle and took control of the border lands. Eventually Lagash fought back, retook the land, restored the original boundary Stèle and dug an irrigation ditch as a border. A second Stèle set out the peace terms and land ownership. As recently as 2018 the British Museum finally translated its own 4,500-year-old pillar that had been used as a boundary marker in this conflict. The Smithsonian believes that it also appears to contain the very first use of the term ‘no man’s land’.

So, the establishment of territorial borders had begun. This move didn’t lead to the quick development of clear borders. At this time the settlements of Mesopotamia ebbed and flowed in size and land holding. Military victories led to land control without clear border lines being established. Internal rebellions, new chiefdoms emerging, migratory tribe attacks and short-lived alliances were the norm.

In fact, we can see from these earliest times the emergence of the borderland, or frontier zone rather than a clear border. Such areas were often called ‘marches’ in later times and we will return to this. Control exerted by city states or developing empires had ‘fuzzy’ edges where jurisdiction over inhabitants of the ‘march’ may be brought to bear by two or more overlords who themselves fought over territory at the edges of their heartlands, something we can see having a clear and modern day effect on the establishment of the borders of Northern Ireland in a later chapter. Such frontier areas were often heavily wooded or marsh lands with poor means of communication and little population.

As time passed the growing empires sought to control their territories and their boundaries. This didn’t lead to clarity over borders, however. In some ways it is easy to be fooled into thinking that the great Roman and Chinese empires were the first to make their border lines hard and clear with the building of Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China. But these walls acted not as the limits of empire control but as statements of power and a base for forays into enemy territory whilst using the wall as a sanctuary of safety. Maps that we see marking the extent of control of the empires of Rome, Greece or Alexander the Great show clear lines that were never in fact in place. Rather there existed zones of increasingly limited control where allegiances waxed and waned dependent on the proximity of enforced power.

The presence of these ‘borderlands’ continued for many centuries. They were worldwide phenomena during the modern era where cultures intermingled, languages evolved and different social, ethnic and national groups claimed and delineated their territories. This is not to say that attempts to establish clear borders did not exist. The Romans used stone border markers to demarcate boundaries. The Roman god, Terminus, was worshipped as the god of boundary markers and more locally boundary stones were set around private property. In Greece boundary stones, known as ‘horos’ were frequently used even in violation of the Greek principle of communal land ownership. In China the oldest known boundary stone dates from 12 AD in Jiangsu province. It has an inscription with sixty-two characters defining the boundary of a local shire.

From feudalism to the exercise of control and power over territory

The Middle Ages brought two great political forces into play that began to shape our modern-day states, Christianity and feudalism. Local people owed their allegiance to their feudal ruler or their church rather than clearly defined places. Thierry Baudet points to ‘the power of the stones of the Middle Ages, the cathedral and the castle’ being replaced over time by the ‘paperwork of bureaucratic central administrations’. The slow change to feudalism and reduction of the power of the church in favour of political power whether through monarchs or republics brought the next great change as nation states were formed.

Whilst the modern state developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it wasn’t until later that states began to acquire the means and ability to administer central political power. What we saw in the Middle Ages was the reinforcement of the Christian parish as a means of control with local people assigned to one parish and expected to practice within it. Feudal systems were more chaotic. Land owned by feudal lords was often scattered and allegiances unclear and changeable. To implement some control over this we saw the earliest record keeping of land ownership in the Domesday Book completed in 1086 on the orders of William the Conqueror. Such record keeping was revolutionary at the time and the concept spread throughout Europe.

The difficulty of fixing borders created many problems in early European history. Mapping areas of ownership just didn’t exist or was extremely limited in scope. Frontier zones were tense with overlapping jurisdictions and divided sovereignty. These zones were known as ‘marches’, the word itself coming from ‘margins’ in Latin. In old English the word meant ‘mark of a boundary’ or boundary. An example of a ‘march’ in Europe is the Hispanic march established as a buffer zone of influence and control by Charlemagne’s son Louis in 801 AD. The area south of the Pyrenees and north of Barcelona owed its fealty to Charlemagne but control was weak due to distance and poor communication.

Establishing borders in these early years remained difficult. The boundary setting of the empire of Charlemagne in AD 800 to 814 is an example of this. In 806 Charlemagne attempted to divide his empire amongst his three sons in descriptive terms that could at best be described as unspecific. For example, from PD Kings source, one clause reads,

‘To our beloved son Pippin: Italy, which is also called Langobardia; and Bavaria as Tassilo held it, except for the two villae called Ingoldstadt and Lauterhofen, which we once bestowed in benefice on Tassilo and which belong to the district called the Nordgau; and that part of Alemannia which lies on the southern bank of the river Danube and the boundary of which runs from the source of the Danube to where the districts of the Klettgau and Hegau meet on the river Rhine at the place called Enge and thence along the river Rhine, upstream to the Alps- whatever lies within these bounds and extends southwards or eastwards, together with the duchy of Chur and the district of the Thurgau’

This descriptive form of property division and boundary definition continued for many years in the absence of accurate mapping and surveying and as a result led to disputes over border placement and interpretation for hundreds of years. Contemporary international frontiers and borders developed as a result of the need for states to exert clearer control and sovereignty.

Malcolm Anderson gives us an example of how the modern state borders developed by looking at France. In the Middle Ages the area we know as France faced the problems of many emerging states; develop central control or fracture into lots of local jurisdictions. The French kingdom grew around a clear centre, the Ile de France, through a series of conquests and marriages into the shape we roughly see today. The notion of a clear French territory goes back to 1244 when the King forbade his supporters to own land in the neighbouring Holy Roman Empire. By the end of the thirteenth century the royal focus was on establishing clarity over the frontier areas especially for customs and tax purposes. In 1564 the then King Charles IX, toured all his known frontiers, but the absence of accurate maps still led to uncertainty over where borders lay.

The use of accurate mapping played an important part in the settlement of borders in the future. In France, the first map drawn of the kingdom is attributed to Oronce Fine in 1525. Lines drawn on such a map could not be said to be accurate in defining the exact positions of borders. Indeed, in the sixteenth century France began to revive the image of the country having a natural set of borders, the Pyrenees, the Rhine, the Alps and the sea rather than older medieval territory, to justify expansion. Actually, many borders had been roughly settled through the reigns and annexations of Louis XI, Henry IV, Louis XIV and after the Revolution but there remained a belief that France had natural rather than political borders.

Elsewhere in Europe as the nation states sought to impose control over their territories the only way to maintain peace was through an acceptance of a balance of power and size between the independent countries. To do this the countries had to establish round after round of treaties and negotiated settlements as land was shunted around from one nation to another. To keep the balance of power in place the nations began to play by a set of rules which effectively regulated conflict and settlement. Often ignored at first, over time they formed the basis of international law. In addition, following, in particular the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it became the practice for Heads of State to meet and settle terms, in negotiation or after wars. The need to define the position of borders to prevent further conflicts over territory and sovereignty led to a series of treaties that continued right through to the twenty-first century.

Early border agreements

Two of the earliest agreements struck to settle borders are still extant today. These were the settlements that created Andorra in 1278 and the Treaty of Alcañices, between Portugal and Spain in 1297.

Andorra has owed its survival in most part to its isolation in the centre of the Pyrenees. Uncommonly its borders were settled not by conflict at times when war and grudges shifted land between powers, but by a negotiated agreement between the Bishop of Urgell and his opponent the Count of Foix. Effectively the two agreed to share sovereignty through a ‘pareage’, a feudal agreement that recognised equality of rights by two rulers. This formed what became known as a ‘condominium’ where ownership is shared. Although Andorra is today a parliamentary democracy it has retained the principle of the ‘pareage’ with the current French President and current Bishop of Urgell as ‘co-princes’ with much reduced powers. The borders of Andorra probably go back further however, to the time of Charlemagne, who declared Andorra as an independent nation, albeit a buffer state against the southern Arab invaders. His son Louis the Pious settled the borders after winning a victory over the Moors. He subsequently passed the bordered land on to the Count d’ Urgell and thence the Bishop of Urgell.

The Treaty of Alcañices was signed by King Dinis of Portugal and Fernando IV, King of Castile and Leon. It settled the border between Portugal and what became Spain. The treaty document remains the oldest stable border agreement in the world. You can still see the Portuguese version at the archives of Torre do Tombo in Lisbon. The local context for this treaty was an interesting one for its time in the thirteenth century. Relations between the two kingdoms were often close and familiar with many matrimonial alliances. Palenzuela points to the fact that despite an inability to completely unite the kingdoms, diplomatic relations were strong and longstanding. But at the time of the treaty Portugal was in a position of strength and as a result Castile gave up territory previously taken from Portugal in earlier treaties, including a number of fortified towns and villages in the Badajoz area. Portugal symbolically gave up a smaller amount of territory but also promised not to intervene in Castilian matters in the future.

So, as history states, that was that and the border settled. But not necessarily. What this type of treaty didn’t do was formally delimit the border on the ground. As Grundy-Warr and Sidaway showed, the actual demarcation or on the ground marking of the border, had to follow from two further treaties in 1824 and 1926 as a result of anomalous common ownerships from both states on the ‘borderline’ and in the frontier areas. In other words, the border hadn’t been settled exactly THERE by the Treaty of Alcañices. In what we will see as a common process the Treaty in 1297 saw what political geographers call the ‘allocation’ of the boundary. Two further stages of delimitation and demarcation followed before the clear border we have today was established.

Moving on 160 years and Spain sought to stabilise its northern boundary with France. The Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 saw a further ‘allocation’ of the boundary. Interestingly the location site of this Treaty was to become a ‘condominium ‘for the two countries and this reappears in my final chapter. Delimitation and demarcation followed in 1854 at the Treaty of Bayonne. The two governments agreed to install border stones across the whole of the Pyrenees to mark the agreed border. Clarity over border positioning became a key determinant of the sovereignty of the state. But in 1659 France and Spain agreed that the Pyrenees mountains would form the border and it was left to administrators to meet and define more precisely where the exact border line would fall. According to Sahlins the administrators used ‘the word ‘delimitation’ and claimed to seek ‘the line of division’ but they resorted to ideas of jurisdiction and dependency when dividing up the villages of the Cerdanya region’. It took until 1868 for the boundary to be clearly demarcated by boundary stones. This was not without difficulty, however. The act of allocating a border meant that decisions were taken over the placement of villages and towns by decree over the top of fundamentally local, often isolated communities with historically long ties to land and common ownership as we found in Spain earlier. Little attention was paid to local life, connections and communications in the borderland. The Treaty of the Pyrenees allocated Roussillon to France, but as Sahlins states together with Cerdanya, Roussillon was part of Catalonia, and Catalonia was part of Spain. Disputes over whether Roussillon was part of Spain or France had rumbled on for centuries. The Treaty settled that the Pyrenees in fact divided Roussillon and Cerdanya and placed Roussillon in France. As the administrators battled to settle where the border should lie following this decision, Spain was forced to cede around half the villages in Cerdanya to France as it was viewed that they lay north of the Pyrenees with Roussillon.

However, an interesting and long living mistake in the agreement declared that it was the ‘villages’ that should be ceded, leaving the ‘town’ of Llivia in Spanish territory where it remains as a Spanish enclave today. Llivia now has its own set of forty-five border markers encircling it, connected by a neutral road to Spain.

Westphalian Order brings a new impetus

Just eleven years earlier, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia was to bring in a modern political order built around sovereignty and clarity over borders. A series of treaties ended the long running religious wars between western nations that had, it is estimated, killed over eight million people. In particular it ended the Thirty Years War that had seen conflict between protestants and Catholics, France and the Holy Roman Empire, German princes and their Emperor, the Swedes, the Danes, Poles, Russians, and the Swiss. The peace involved no less than 194 feudal or existing states. Through diplomatic process, the agreement of a new system of political order and the recognition of nation states, saw, amongst a raft of other measures, a territorial reallocation of lands and the recognition of states such as Switzerland and the Dutch Republic, together with a series of border changes that shaped a new Western Europe. Westphalian principles set out self- determination for nation states, sovereignty, overpowers like the Catholic Church and non-intervention in the matters of other states. Such states needed borders to mark these new territories. Some wars rumbled on, but treaties that followed like the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees operated in part to settle borders and preserve a peaceful balance of power.

Two further events before the World Wars were to have a major impact on Europe’s borders. The first, the Congress of Vienna