My Neighbour over the Border: Tales of towns and cities separated by borders and how they get along

By Paul Doe

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Sep 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839783708

Book preview

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

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

It 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 another, as a driver for a whole borderland renaissance.

Effectively we see a world where economics trumps everything, even it seems, Trump himself, as he sought to build a wall across the huge Mexican border. This economics-driven world comes hard up, in sharp fashion, with the world of boundaries we have drawn for ourselves. The international legal principle of sovereignty requires us to establish boundaries and borders to protect identity, political and legal frameworks and ultimately our sense of who we are and where we are from. The European ideal of open borders has done little to challenge these key fundamentals to our existence as nations.

So, a look at where these two principles crash together is a fascinating study in itself. What happens when the hard division of the border crunches a path through places where the residents of a city or town can quite literally look across at their neighbour, through a fence or over a river and where their prosperity may be dependent on each other to overcome their geographic or economic isolation?

Trans-border micro-diplomacy

Cooperation across a border is dependent on a wide variety of factors. The towns and cities we look at in this book provide a host of reasons why cooperation and collaboration work to a huge or limited extent. The factors at play run from macro to micro politics, regional decentralisation, local powers over decision-making and ethnic and linguistic similarities or differences.

Then there is each settlement’s history and place in its current nation or past history of conflict or cooperation, its development as an opportunity for trade and economic growth, or as a security bulwark between aggressive nations, or as a response to each town’s relative isolation from its capital or seat of power.

The opening of border restrictions can garner different responses too, with futures of opportunity built around shared objectives and a common purpose. Equally borders can bring cultural and social problems where cooperation is seen as the means to their resolution. In virtually every case though, we see to some extent or another, a degree of what Lawrence Herzog calls ‘trans-border micro-diplomacy’; the ability of border divided towns to find a way to get on and make things work between them. Problem solving at the local level, as Ekaterina Mikhailova found when studying towns on the Russian border, becomes the reason for coming together across, at times, seemingly insurmountable barriers.

We will also find that integration, cooperation and collaboration will happen at three levels and often through different dynamics. The first level is institutional, between various political and administrative organisations. At the second level are economic and infrastructural connections, bringing the economies and urban fabric of cities together. Third, we have the social connections, often more fraught and difficult to discern other than through family or friendship links. The overcoming of historical issues, stereotypes and national identities often seems far easier at the institutional level than the social level.

Life on the border

What are the issues for border town dwellers that need to be overcome? Like their solutions, they are many and varied. The Council of Europe’s 2006 Handbook of Transfrontier Cooperation identified many of them. What is clear is that states struggle to alter their tried and tested legal powers to aid and assuage the problems faced by border cities or towns. They have to learn to live with difference.

Let’s begin with the past historical reasons for divisions and border creation. Cities like Nicosia, or towns divided by what was once the Iron Curtain, carry years of division and conflict at their hearts and generations need to pass for these hard lines to be forgotten, even between the same ethnicities and people. Such divisions can be political and religious, creating stark differences in cities where everything else is seemingly shared.

Political and nationalistic policies can stiffen divisions too. Conflicting political standpoints and policies on movement and migration, coupled with past repeated flare-ups between nations, can see the border as the point where interference is resisted and everything stops, rather than flows through. Paasi and Prokkola point to the way in which the border can intensify nationalist sentiments through what they call ‘spatial socialisation’. This concept draws on history, memories and emotions that are bound into national identities often exacerbated by media and education. Discourse around us and them, the enemy outside and defence of the borders plays to these feelings.

Even at the softer borders, where two nations profess to get on well, there are the problems that flow from administrative, fiscal and banking obstacles that get in the way of many small and medium-sized businesses and individuals doing business across the border.

Then there are the different taxation, regulation and political regimes to negotiate. Wage and social welfare differences can attract or repel border crossers, along with protective or open contracting regimes that can equally attract or repel. Differing border control and visa regimes may make it difficult to cross the border too, even for frequent travellers.

Transport systems and infrastructure are unlikely to be linked up, with bus, taxi and train journeys stopping at border points. Major infrastructure projects such as sewerage systems or nuclear power plants may be built close to the border without consideration, consultation or benefits for those across the boundary. Indeed, border dwellers may consider that some projects that bring environmental issues such as pollution or traffic problems, have been deliberately placed right on the border to limit the protests in their own country.

Equally social, cultural or infrastructure projects may be built without collaboration or open access, leading to a replication of schemes such as hospitals on both sides of the border, just metres from each other.

Natural features, often contiguous with borders, bring their own issues. A lack of river bridges creates a natural divide. Even when in place they could become pinch-points, obstructing traffic flows or places where crossing can be temporarily or permanently stopped.

Police and security enforcement stop at the border and without intense cooperation, chases across the border line to pursue criminal suspects can lead to more problems than they solve. Whole TV programmes have been built around the issues the police face when dealing with cross-border crimes. The popular Swedish/Danish thriller The Bridge is an example, along with the German-French-Italian-American series, Crossing Lines and the Finnish Bordertown.

Borders can often be stark examples of the prevailing nationalism of states too. The shout to close the borders may reflect a political wish to show a nation’s population that the state can exert control over access and egress, whilst showing the neighbouring state who is in charge. These moves tend to be symbolic and short-lived however and usually manifest themselves in huge queues of lorries and local frustrations boiling over at the frontier. The attempted closure of the border with Kyrgyzstan by the Kazakh President in 2017, as a result of a spat with Kyrgyzstan, is an example. Ten-mile queues of traffic caused trade blockages into Russia and other central Asian countries. More recently, border closures as a result of coronavirus have hugely frustrated regular border crossers who need to access their work, friends or family. More recently, it was the closure of the French border to freight from Dover in December 2020, that stirred up the same frustrations and chaos.

The politics of the communist states that created the Iron Curtain across Europe, despite being defined by their governments as borders of peace, created situations of wholly divided cities split by the Curtain. Each town’s residents ended up, in Janczak’s words, ‘neighbouring the unknown’. The authoritarian regimes in the communist countries focused their efforts on controlling individual activities, beliefs and identities. The use of this power led to the marginalisation of border areas, unless they offered industrial or mineral benefits.

Border cities and towns felt this through isolation and a lack of resources, whilst the centre sought to use the border to repel, rather than attract trade or cooperation. Consequently, the old communist border towns tend to have a uniquely different feel and continue in many cases to struggle to overcome their past marginalisation.

Differing policies from the media, whether through radio, newspapers or television, often see little leakage between nations, with media outlets often being fiercely nationalistic in outlook and geographical coverage. The opposite policy, of deliberately using one nations media to set agendas in borderland towns where there is a common language, can provoke concern and stir up fears, as we will see in Narva in Estonia on the Russian border.

Consider too the geographic constraints of border cities and towns. They have constricted hinterlands reducing trade and accessibility options and are, by design, at the margins of their home nation, often some distance from the major population centres, their markets and transport systems.

Then there are the day-to-day administrative hurdles around residence and work permits, the differing treatment of road and traffic regulations and the range of technical interpretations applied to agricultural and industrial products.

But perhaps trumping them all are the national tax regimes, protected to the end by sovereign governments. Harmonisation seems beyond reach in dealing with direct and indirect taxes covering the full range of tax raising opportunities each country has.

A third space, a land between the home nations

With such a list of issues as this it’s perhaps no surprise that active policies, whether formal or informal, take time to manifest themselves in a way that makes the whole community, divided by a border, a better working and living environment. The actual process of building cooperation and collaboration across a border could be seen as developing a third space, a land that is different to the two core nations that each divided town or city is a part of.

What do I mean by this? As each divided town or city seeks to establish itself economically, culturally and socially within its historical setting, it realises that it cannot exist alone. For a variety of reasons, as we shall see in the places we visit, each divided community turns to its partner town or city. This is not of course to the exclusion of any integration into its own nation, but for more micro or local reasons that are historical, political, cultural, economic, social or purely geographical, as a way of combatting the towns own isolation from its national neighbours.

What this tends to do is create a community that feels different, neither firmly of one host nation or the other, but a third space, a real frontier zone where two nations mingle, cooperate, collaborate, inter-act, respond and work together to a far greater extent than the host countries can at a national level.

This idea is one much used in studies of the US-Mexican border cities. Gutierrez points to, ‘the ongoing demographic revolution unfolding in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States that has transformed the social and cultural landscape of the bi-national border zone in a manner that dwarfs anything that has occurred before. Replete with small businesses, thriving religious congregations, a vibrant and growing Spanish language press, and a rapidly expanding network of Spanish language radio and television outlets, these transformed social spaces have become part of what can only be described as a parallel Mexican society in the United States’.

We should also recognise that this cooperation and collaboration is often carried out with the direct support and encouragement of the home nations. Such support may come from larger institutions such as the European Union who see clear benefits in the breaking down of border obstacles to improve trade and accessibility. Or it may be the home nations themselves, who are prepared to see local governments and institutions relax formal rules and regulations or bring in changes to improve relations and develop a better quality of life for their residents. As some commentators have said, the border towns become laboratories of change.

So, what does this third space look and feel like? The languages you hear on the street may be more mixed than in the single home nation. Street and shop signs may carry the two languages of the neighbouring countries. Just proximity to a border without there being a sister or divided city close by can bring such changes. Kirkenes in Norway, close to the Russian border, has road and shop signs in Norwegian and Russian and you often hear Russian spoken in the streets.

Special benefits may be available to smooth border crossing. A special border certificate allows local Russians and Norwegians visa-free travel for up to fifteen days on the Norwegian border. Visa-free travel arrangements have similarly helped the Russians of Blagoveshchensk and Chinese of Heihe, two cities that are isolated from their own nations, but who face each other across the Amur River.

Depending on the differing economies or tax and regulation regimes you may find a strange mix of shops and goods for sale, more directed at visitors from the neighbouring city than at the home nation residents. Effectively the border city becomes a commercial zone, where trade between the two countries reflects the economic situation and policies in each place. Make alcohol more expensive in one country and bars appear in the neighbouring city selling alcohol. The same can apply to virtually all traded goods or services whether it is petrol in Russia, (cheaper than Norway) or dentists services in Mexico, (cheaper than the USA) or petrol in Luxembourg, (cheaper than surrounding nations).

Professional services may be offered in a border town that you don’t see elsewhere, providing information and advice on working in adjacent countries, ways to ease businesses into new trade or living in a new nation. Some services revolve around the laws and regulations of each nation. Prostitution, alcohol, pharmacies, dentistry and surgery may be cheaper and easier to access just over the border. Even sugary sweets, heavily taxed in Norway, can be found in candy