BOOK REVIEW: Long ago, in a country far away, I once stumbled upon a deserted border post, guarded only by a sign forbidding unauthorised entry to the nation next door. Did I cross? Of course – after a nervous look around for hidden observers. And cross again, and back and forth a few more times just for the fun of it. Look – now I’m in one country, now I’m in another, now I’m back again, with just a step each time.
Maybe it’s a feeling heightened by growing up in New Zealand, far from the nearest international boundary, but there is something fascinating and forbidding about a border. It’s just a line, often invisible, but on one side we do things one way, on the other, very different rules may apply.
Political historian Lewis Baston feeds that fascination in this tour of European borders, starting in the west in the troubled margin between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and working his way east to the city of Chernivtsi – now in Ukraine, having previously bounced around between the USSR (twice), Romania (also twice) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
This could be just a touristic enterprise – a catalogue of quirky places where you can take a selfie with your right foot in one country and your left in another. Or, in a few places and with sufficient flexibility, three limbs in three separate nations.
There’s a bit of that, and Baston obviously relishes the sheer weirdness of some borders. In Ireland, for example, there’s the splendidly named Drummully Polyp, a bulge of the Republic that is almost totally surrounded by Northern Ireland, and thus inaccessible without taking a trip through the UK.
And how about the Belgian town of Baarle-Hertog, which is broken into 21 tiny enclaves, all surrounded by the Netherlands? Adding to the complexity, within the scattered fragments of Baarle-Hertog are seven more “counter-enclaves” belonging to the Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau.
This confusion of borders results in novelties such as the house with its entrance in Belgium but the front window in the Netherlands, the town hall with a border running through the council chamber, and police patrolling in pairs – one Dutch, one Belgian – so they can deal with offenders on either side of the border.
But beyond novelty value, what Baston is really after is the back story: how the lines on the map came to be drawn where they are today, and on that score he is a deeply knowledgeable guide. You could call it a travel book, but it’s one that travels through time as well as place.
If it does nothing else, it’s a reminder that for all their apparent permanence, borders can be remarkably mobile. In Europe’s recent history, that’s thanks largely to two key players: the victorious Allies after 1918 and Joseph Stalin three decades later.
Poland may be the ultimate example of how transient borders can be. The nation that emerged after World War II was smaller and further west of its prewar position. In the east, great chunks of territory were swallowed by the USSR. In the west, Poland gained areas that had long been German, culturally and politically. And so (German) Breslau became (Polish) Wroclaw, Danzig became Gdansk and millions of people were shunted around the map with no say in the matter.
After the murder of three million Polish Jews, the postwar border changes and ethnic cleansing removed nearly all of Poland’s Ukrainian, German and Belarussian populations. Eight million Germans alone were uprooted.
In the west of the country, the territory taken from Germany was resettled by Poles, some of whom had been pushed out of the eastern areas that were now occupied by the USSR.
For years afterwards, writes Baston, West German weather reports would forlornly include “lost” cities such as Breslau or Königsberg (now Russian Kaliningrad), as though they were only temporarily in the wrong country and would soon be coming home to their rightful nation.
Today, time has eased resentment over the redrawn German-Polish border, which both sides have learnt to live with.
In other places, though, cross-border relationships have grown frostier. Baston arrives at the line between Russia and Estonia in late 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine. At the Estonian town of Narva, the border crossing could have been invented by John le Carré – a bridge between two castles, across a river to Russian Ivangorod, on the way to St Petersburg. This was one place where a physical border was being reinforced, rather than erased as in most of Europe. “Estonia, with its population of 1.4 million people and its liberal society, felt very little and vulnerable. I felt glad that a fence was going up.”
Baston’s wanderings through the borderlands take in everything from deserted towns and cemeteries lost in the forest, to cross-border cigarette supermarkets, rumours of buried treasure, a neo-Nazi rock festival and a 17-century mass murderer (possibly).
Mostly, he finds acceptance of today’s borders, except in the case of Hungary, still unhappy with the limits imposed on it as one of the losers of World War I, and where the quest to regain areas lost to neighbouring countries remains a live political issue. Which helps explain why Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán seems to have found a soulmate in Vladimir Putin, another politician who has no time for the sanctity of borders.
Inevitably, looking back means dwelling on what has been lost. But this is also a celebration of what has been gained. For the most part, Europe’s nations have learnt to live with their existing borders, however brutally they were imposed, and given up on the fool’s errand of trying to win back old territory.
Yes, the anti-migrant barriers around the continent are being strengthened, but within Europe, more than 400 million people now enjoy peace and a freedom of movement that is a lot like it was before 1914 tore everything to pieces.
