Borders - The TLS, May 15, 2020

THE ATLAS OF UNUSUAL BORDERS

Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities 

ZORAN NOKOLIĆ 

255pp. 

HarperCollins. £14.99. 

Given that Russia, the US and the UK have extended or threatened to harden their borders in recent years, while the EU has simultaneously sought to render its internal borders increasingly irrelevant, the matter of national boundaries remains as pertinent as ever. Although they often shift conspicuously, there have always been esoteric anomalies, and Zoran Nikolić’s engrossing guide takes readers into some truly strange territories. 

Nikolić mentions a few curiosities that the general reader might already be familiar with: the artificial Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania; the Armenian enclave of Nagorn-Karabakh, situated in Azerbaijan; and the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, on the Moroccan coast. But these examples are positively conventional compared to other geographic peculiarities on parade here. These include counterenclaves such as the UAE village of Nahwa, located inside the Oman enclave of Madha, which is itself inside the UAE. Perhaps the bestknown such instance is the collection of Belgian enclaves inside the Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau, which themselves contain ten Dutch counter-enclaves. Here it is possible to cross a national border by moving from one end of a restaurant to the other. 

While boundary anomalies and enclaves are problematic in Cyprus, which contains pieces of land that remain part of the UK, they are less a problem in the Schengen area of Europe, where what belongs to which country increasingly doesn’t matter. The twin towns of Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany and Słubice in Poland, and Tornio in Finland and Haparanda in Sweden, are increasingly merging. The latter two reside in different time zones; as a result, it is possible for a ball to leave the ground on the border golf course in one hour and land an hour earlier. 

The reasons for such curiosities are manifold. The situation in Baarle-Nassau was the result of an accumulation of divisions, contracts and exchanges. The two islands of Big Diomede and Little Diomede, separated by less than four kilometres, are a day apart because they sit on either side of the International Date Line. Pheasant Island in the Moselle River between France and Spain has changed hands more than 700 times, because a late-seventeenth century peace treaty between the countries decrees that France should own it for one half of the year and Spain for the other half. 

The book isn’t entirely satisfactory, however. The origins of the oddities often remain unclear – the reader is left in the dark as to why, for example, the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the Newfoundland coast should be sovereign French territory. Nonetheless, it is on the whole a fascinating achievement from (fittingly) a former Yugoslav national.

Patrick West