W a y m a r k s ~: Borders - Lines, Minds, Maps & People

BORDER WARS: THE CONFLICTS OF THAT WILL DEFINE OUR FUTURE by Klaus Dodds (Ebury Press/Penguin, 2021)

I must have been seven years old when I first became aware of international borders. It was my first trip overseas, travelling by air from the UK to Portugal in the early 1980s. The idea that, having passed through immigration control, we were technically in neither one country nor the other. We were in this liminal space, a kind of limbo or no-man’s land, like something in science fiction. It seemed a little bit mind-blowing to me at the time. In later life, crossing international borders became a big part of my working life. Transporting international touring exhibitions for the British Museum – security protocols, identity checks, visa systems, customs paperwork – all these aspects which are part-and-parcel of crossing international borders became very familiar to me. But I have to confess, that early sense of fascination – first seeded when I was seven years old, probably by me asking what the words ‘duty free’ meant – has never really faded. Borders are curiously imaginary concepts made manifestly real.

Crossing the English Channel by Hovercraft

Even at the age of seven, I’d already studied a little bit of geography at school. I remember we spent a term learning about the countries of Europe. Focussing on a different country each week, alongside what each country’s flag looked like, we learnt certain salient cultural and economic facts: For instance, in France they made cheese and wine, their most famous landmark was the Eiffel Tower, and they all wore berets! – Similarly, Holland was full of tulips and windmills, everyone wore clogs, and vast areas of the country were the result of large-scale land reclamation projects from the sea. Rudimentary stuff like that. But it was actually a trip to Holland a few years later which gave me another early life insight into international borders. We travelled from London to Amsterdam by coach, crossing the English Channel on one of those enormous Hovercrafts which are now defunct. The coach motored through France and Belgium in order to get to the Netherlands, and at each border we had to stop and surrender our passports to the Police who boarded the coach and eyed everyone suspiciously (or perhaps, having watched a lot of James Bond movies, I only imagined the suspicion?). Aside from the fact that people in these places didn’t all wear berets or clogs, I remember I was most struck by the fact that the police officers had actual guns holstered on their belts, which was quite a novel thing to see coming from England, where Police Officers (back then) were mostly unarmed. This kind of security though was nothing in comparison to that which I witnessed several decades later while on a day trip to the DMZ a few miles north of Seoul in South Korea.

August 1961 - As the Berlin Walls goes up an East German soldier defects

In the early 1990s, two student exchange trips to the former West and East Germanies immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, opened up my mind even more to the active concept of borders – both cultural and political, as well as intra- and international. The fact that seemingly monolithic barriers such as the Iron Curtain could effectively melt away after decades of being told that they were insurmountable and eternal was equally, if not more mind-blowing once again. Several decades on from that first overland trip to Amsterdam, and around ten years on from those first trips to Germany, when I was making another overland journey, this time travelling back to the UK from Germany for the British Museum in 2000, I remembered those old borders as we now motored back through Belgium and France, crossing those lines on the map without even a change in gear as the Autobahn gently morphed into the Autoroute. But not all borders had vanished within the ‘New Europe.’ Even though we never saw the sea on this occasion, we still had to halt and show our passports before our trucks could board the train for the Channel Tunnel. A couple more decades on and there would famously be refugee camps at Calais, and now today boatloads of people are desperately trying to cross the English Channel. The past forty years in Europe alone have shown that borders, far from being static and immutable, can shift and realign much like the refractions viewed within a rotating kaleidoscope.

Crossing the English Channel by Train

Borders may well come and go, but they remain a constant factor of all our lives. Be they physical (mountains, rivers, seas) or human (national, regional, public-private), borders are conceptual divisions which signify ownership, identity, inclusion/exclusion. On the face of it, borders would seem to imply that we are on one or other side of them; but in reality, it is quite possible to fall into that narrow gap between them, and so find oneself in neither one place nor the other. Just like the thought which first astounded me on that flight to Portugal when I was seven years old, borders are both an idea and a reality. And there are liminal ‘no-man’s lands’ which are neither one place nor the other. We talk of crossing borders, of negotiating borders, of transcending borders, and we often think of them as being lines drawn on maps, but in truth, borders are more than simple territorial demarcations – not so much stark lines, they can be blurred zones where things meet, mingle, merge and become neither one nor the other. I first learnt about this idea at university when I studied the anthropology of the different societies living in highland Burma, a region now described by some academics as ‘Zomia’ – a multi-cultural zone which has long been beyond the full control of larger lowland nation state governments.

The Berlin Wall

Klaus Dodds recent book, Border Wars: The Conflicts That Will Define Our Future is a very timely examination of how the issue of borders is perhaps one of the most salient to our times. Generally speaking, all borders have a history, and that history can often be contentious. As such, borders are invested with a dynamic dimension which means that, as well as having a history, they have futures too, both aspects of which remain mutable. Even seemingly long stable and peaceable international borders can and will pose problems if they are adversely affected by the depredations of climate change. Environmental changes can alter the dynamics of rivers and glaciers, for example. Rivers can change course or dry up, just as glaciers can shrink and retreat. Climate change in many places is speeding up such changes, thus geographical boundaries are shifting or becoming more permeable, opening new regions up to resource exploitation, as well as new routes for commercial transportation in ways which might not have been possible before. Consequently, geography and geopolitics are altering the ways in which nation states view these areas, the regions in which they rub shoulders with their neighbours. The melting polar icesheets over Canada are a case in point, as the northwest passage is becoming increasingly open to navigation Canada is becoming all the more anxious to assert its claim to areas which it sees as being its territorial waters. But it is not just climate change which is precipitating a rise in such contentions. China’s efforts at land reclamation in the South China Sea, in which it has seized and sought to turn previously insubstantial coral atolls into solid concrete fortified islands with harbours and airstrips in order to bolster and consolidate its claims to the zone around the contentious ‘nine dash line’ has ruffled the feathers of its regional neighbours who resent what they see as strongarm tactics impinging upon their own territorial claims and zones of exclusive economic interest.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916

Borders are not simply arbitrary lines drawn on maps, relevant only to geographers and politicians. Borders affect our individual lives, our freedoms, and the flow of goods and commodities which we consume. As such, borders are intrinsic to all our lives whether we travel internationally or not. The cultural and political dynamics of borders are frequent rallying points during election campaigns. One only has to think of the most recent examples, such as Donald Trump’s determination to build his “big, beautiful wall” between the United States and Mexico, or the clamorous calls of the pro-Brexit lobby in the UK and their desire to restore Britain’s sovereignty by seceding from the European Union in 2016. Just as borders and cultural barriers seemed to come down at the close of the twentieth century, so the pendulum has swung full tilt in retrograde in the years since the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 in the USA and especially with the recent Covid-19 pandemic closing international borders completely during the last few years. These events having considerably bolstered claims by some governments for the increasing need for greater control through biometric surveillance systems and ‘vaccine passports’, alongside more stringent and expensive visa systems, in order to better regulate and more easily restrict the free movement of people. Migrant crises resulting from wars in politically unstable regions such as Afghanistan and the Middle East have had implications for neighbouring countries and regions such as the EU, which are seen as being more stable and prosperous, and so have become safe havens desperately sought out by refugees. The recent invasion of the Ukraine by Russia has likewise precipitated a massive displacement of people fleeing conflict zones, compelling them to cross borders and forcing neighbouring states such as Poland to accommodate huge numbers of civilians caught up in the crossfire of that particular war. Tragically, it seems as though borders are rooted at the heart and centre of almost every item featuring on the evening news bulletins which we watch on our TVs these days.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916

For many years I followed Klaus Dodds’ 'geopolitical hotspots' column in the Geographical Magazine. It was one of my most favourite features of the Royal Geographical Society’s monthly magazine because the column always managed to give the relevant background, elucidating specific events in current affairs which I might otherwise know very little or nothing about. Often it would furnish a new angle on an issue or a region which I was unaware of, or which I had not thought to consider before, looking at places such as Cyprus, Kashmir, Sudan, the Falklands/Malvinas, or the Antarctic. Dodds’ column also managed to make interesting connections or comparisons which either broadened or sharpened the focus on regional and global geopolitical matters. As such, I was really pleased to hear of the publication of this book and eagerly sought it out. And in reading it, I was not disappointed.

Abandoned Airliner at Nicosia Airport, Cyprus

Dodds uses this relatively compact tome to quite literally cover a lot of ground. He gives a comprehensive global overview of the key themes and issues affecting borders and borderland studies – as such, Border Wars is an excellent introduction which should appeal to students starting out on the study of geography and geopolitics as well as lay-persons, such as me, who have an interest in such matters. Dodds writes with a wonderfully clear and lucid style which seems to find and maintain an effortless balance between a deeply informed academic grounding and an open, horizon-scanning tone of commentary. Consequently, Border Wars is an eminently accessible and highly readable book which comes with handy ‘recommended reading’ suggestions accompanying the themes explored in each chapter (collected at the end of the book) which will certainly help launch the engaged reader onto deeper avenues of enquiry as seems only fitting for a book on such a dynamic and constantly changing topic as borders. My only quibble is that the reader’s eye is often tripped up by quite a few typos and copyediting errors, although happily these aren’t so bad as to disrupt or confuse the actual gist or meaning of the text itself – it’s a real shame though that so many of these errors have made it through to the final publication which I think has one of the most wonderful and characteristically-iconic cover designs that have long been the hallmark of Penguin paperbacks.

Dodds’ Border Wars is a snapshot in time. As much as it is a tool for us to look at and understand the ever-evolving geopolitics of our changing world – right now it should serve to give us pause to think and anticipate what directions the future might take, and how such changes will affect us individually and collectively. But, in the future it will be the sort of book which retains its value as a ‘history of the present.’ Border Wars shall undoubtedly become a document which will remind us of how we anticipated the future in the light of how such things eventually turned out. As such, I hope it helps to guide us today by its clarity and insight, because it speaks to an openness which borders and borderland issues are all too often used nowadays to deny us. Borders serve to manipulate and constrain us in ways which we might not see so readily or so clearly when we allow the parameters around us to be drawn in uncompromisingly straight lines, lines on maps which so often ignore the subtleties and complexities which genuinely define the natural and cultural contours that demarcate and differentiate our lives (especially those which were drawn all too hastily as part of the rapid process of recent post-colonial retreats following on from the end of WW2). Depending on whether we see borders as lines of division and separation, or borderlands as zones in which cultures meet, merge and exchange, the ways in which we perceive borders are the issues which ultimately define us.

The Berlin Wall, November 1991

As Dodds demonstrates systems of border surveillance are becoming increasingly sophisticated and as technology evolves and we become increasingly dependent upon it, so too we open ourselves up to systems of greater regulation, policing and control. In effect the border can now follow us and actively track us, and while this increased level of state surveillance may (or may not) contribute to the safety of national borders, it raises tricky questions concerning the right to privacy and personal data control. All human systems are fallible, and computer networks perhaps even moreso. Hence, the greater the sense of security then, so it follows, the greater the vulnerability when that system fails. The theft of such personal data and its subsequent use by third parties (be they nefarious or otherwise) means we are in effect increasingly being required and compelled to compromise our individuality at the behest of the larger collective. In this sense borders are not so clear cut as we might suppose, or as we might have been led to believe. There will always be a blurred gradation between transcending and transgressing when it comes to the physical act of crossing borders. Consequently, I still find the contemplation of the concept of borders just as beguiling as I did when I was seven years old. And sadly, coming from the optimistic generation which rejoiced at the disappearance of borders in the early 1990s, I feel sure that the subtitle of Dodds’ book will prove to be true – the more barriers nations seek to raise, then the more individual people will want to tear them down. It would serve us well to think about such things now, and genuinely ask ourselves: what kind of a future do we want to create for ourselves and for our descendants?