5.4 — Odd Borders, Tiny Nations and Disputed Lines

Almost every strange border on Earth is the fossil of a treaty, a river that moved, or somebody drawing on a map with a ruler and no local knowledge.

Lines drawn badly

Why is the US-Canada border a straight line, and why does it wobble?

Because it was agreed as the 49th parallel of latitude in treaties of 1818 and 1846, and then surveyed on the ground by people with imperfect instruments.

The surveyed line does not exactly follow the parallel. Nineteenth-century survey teams working through forest and mountain made small errors, and the two countries agreed that the monuments they placed — rather than the abstract line of latitude — would define the border. So it drifts by up to a few hundred metres in places, and the agreed border is a chain of straight segments between markers.

The border also requires a cleared strip about six metres wide along its whole length, over 8,800 kilometres, maintained by both countries. You can see it from the air as a line cut through forest.

Its oddest product is the Northwest Angle, a piece of Minnesota that can only be reached from the rest of the United States by crossing into Canada or over a lake. It exists because the 1783 treaty referred to a source of the Mississippi that turned out to be in the wrong place.

Point Roberts is the same problem in reverse: a small piece of Washington state hanging below the 49th parallel on a peninsula attached to Canada. Its children cross an international border twice a day to attend high school.

What is the Durand Line, and why does it still cause trouble?

A border drawn across the Pashtun homeland in 1893 by Sir Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat, and the Emir of Afghanistan, splitting the region between British India and Afghanistan.

It divided the Pashtun population roughly in half, cutting through tribal territories, valleys and in some places villages. Britain's motive was strategic — a buffer against Russian expansion — not ethnographic.

When Pakistan became independent in 1947 it inherited the line as its western border. Afghanistan has never formally recognised it, and it remains one of the most consequential unresolved boundaries in the world, running about 2,600 kilometres through some of the most difficult terrain on the planet.

Why does Africa have a border with a right-angled dogleg?

Several do, and the most famous is the Caprivi Strip — a narrow finger of Namibia about 450 kilometres long and as little as 30 wide, reaching east towards the Zambezi.

Germany negotiated it in 1890 in a swap with Britain, wanting access from German South West Africa to the Zambezi and so, it was assumed, to the Indian Ocean and German East Africa. Nobody involved appears to have checked that Victoria Falls sits downstream, making the river unnavigable in exactly the direction they wanted to go. The strip is named after the German chancellor who agreed it.

The Gambia is the most extreme case of a border following a river: a country that is essentially the banks of the Gambia River, between 25 and 50 kilometres wide and 480 long, entirely surrounded by Senegal apart from its short coast. The shape came from a negotiation between Britain and France in which the boundary was reportedly set by how far a gunboat's cannon could fire from the river.

What happens when a river moves?

This is a real and recurring problem, because a great many borders are defined by rivers and rivers do not stay put.

The legal distinction is between accretion, gradual movement of a channel by deposition and erosion, and avulsion, a sudden jump during a flood. Under customary international law the border follows gradual change and does not follow a sudden one, which means a border can end up on dry land on the wrong side of the current river.

The India-Bangladesh border along the Ganges and Brahmaputra deals with this constantly, since those rivers shift channels enormously and create and destroy islands — chars — whose ownership then has to be settled.

The Chamizal dispute between the United States and Mexico ran for a century over about 250 hectares that the Rio Grande moved across, and was only settled in 1963 by concreting the river into a fixed channel and transferring the land.

Very small places

What is the smallest country, and what are the odd ones?

The Vatican, at 0.49 square kilometres, covered in 5.1.

The genuinely strange one is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which has diplomatic relations with over a hundred countries, issues its own passports, stamps and currency, has permanent observer status at the UN — and has essentially no territory at all. It holds two buildings in Rome under extraterritorial status. It is a sovereign entity without a country, a survival of the medieval crusading orders, and it is now principally a large humanitarian organisation.

Monaco is about two square kilometres and has been ruled by the Grimaldi family since 1297. San Marino claims to be the world's oldest surviving republic, founded by tradition in 301, and is entirely surrounded by Italy. Liechtenstein is doubly landlocked, has no army, and famously sent 80 soldiers to a war in 1866 and had 81 return, having acquired a friend on the way — a story that is charming and probably embellished.

Are micronations real countries?

No, and the interesting part is exactly why not.

Statehood requires recognition by other states, as set out in 5.1. A person declaring their house a sovereign nation has a population, a territory and a government, and no recognition at all.

Sealand is the best-known case: a Second World War anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, occupied in 1967 by a former British major who declared it a principality. It issues passports and stamps, and in 1978 there was an attempted coup involving a hostage and a helicopter. A British court ruled in 1968 that it lay outside territorial waters and was therefore outside British jurisdiction, which is often cited as recognition and is not — it was a statement about British law, not about Sealand's status.

Bir Tawil is the more interesting case: a genuinely unclaimed piece of land, about 2,000 square kilometres between Egypt and Sudan. Both countries decline to claim it, because two different boundary definitions are in play and each country prefers the one that gives it a much larger and more valuable area elsewhere — claiming Bir Tawil would mean conceding the larger territory. It is probably the only habitable land on Earth that no state wants.

Antarctica is claimed by seven countries with overlapping wedges, and the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 froze all claims, banned military activity and reserved the continent for science. It is the closest thing to a functioning international commons.

Disputed lines

What is the situation in Kashmir, briefly and accurately?

At independence in 1947, princely states were to accede to India or Pakistan. Jammu and Kashmir had a Hindu ruler and a Muslim-majority population, and its ruler delayed. Following an incursion by tribal fighters from Pakistan, he acceded to India, and the first India-Pakistan war followed.

The result is a territory divided along a line that is not an international border. India administers Jammu, the Kashmir Valley and Ladakh; Pakistan administers Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan; China administers Aksai Chin and a strip ceded by Pakistan. The Line of Control separating India and Pakistan was formalised in 1972, and the Line of Actual Control separates India and China.

India regards the whole territory as integral. Pakistan disputes the accession and calls for a plebiscite envisaged in early UN resolutions. China holds territory both countries claim. Three nuclear-armed states share the dispute, which is why it is followed globally rather than regionally.

The Siachen Glacier is the extreme end of it: both India and Pakistan maintain military posts above 5,000 metres, in the highest-altitude conflict zone in the world, where the great majority of casualties on both sides have come from the cold and the altitude rather than from fighting.

Why does Israel-Palestine have no agreed map?

Because the two parties disagree about which lines are the starting point, and no line has ever been agreed as final.

The 1947 UN partition plan proposed two states and was accepted by the Jewish leadership and rejected by Arab states. The 1948 war produced armistice lines — the Green Line — which were explicitly not borders. The 1967 war placed the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai and the Golan under Israeli control. Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1979. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s divided the West Bank into three administrative categories intended as an interim step, and the interim has now lasted three decades.

The result is that maps of the region differ depending on who published them, and that any statement of "the border" is a political position. Volume VIII treats the history properly; what belongs on this page is the geography: there is no line both parties accept, and the practical map on the ground — settlements, checkpoints, the barrier, and separate road networks — matches no proposed map.

Which other territorial disputes should you know about?

Taiwan, governed separately since 1949 and claimed by the People's Republic of China. Most countries maintain unofficial relations under a policy of ambiguity.

Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony largely controlled by Morocco and claimed by the Polisario Front as the Sahrawi Republic, which is recognised by a number of African states. It is the last territory on the UN's decolonisation list without a settled status.

Crimea and eastern Ukraine, annexed and occupied by Russia from 2014 and after the 2022 invasion, recognised by almost no other state.

The South China Sea, where China's claim, marked by a line on its own maps, overlaps the exclusive economic zones of the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia. An arbitral tribunal ruled against the claim in 2016 and China rejected the ruling. Artificial islands have been built on reefs to support it.

Cyprus, divided since 1974, with the north recognised only by Türkiye and Nicosia the last divided capital city in Europe.

Odd survivals

Why is there a French island next to Canada?

Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, a few kilometres off Newfoundland, is a French overseas collectivity with about six thousand people, euros, French number plates and a French postcode. It is the last remnant of New France, retained by France in 1763 when it gave up Canada, because the fishing rights mattered more than the land.

During American Prohibition it became a major transit point for alcohol, and the islands' economy has never quite recovered from the end of it.

What is the strangest inhabited border arrangement?

Baarle, on the Belgian-Dutch frontier, where 22 Belgian enclaves sit inside the Netherlands and several Dutch counter-enclaves sit inside those. The border is marked with crosses set into the pavement and runs through houses, gardens and shops.

The rule is that a building's nationality is determined by its front door, so families have moved their door to change country for tax reasons, and one house has two front doors with two house numbers. When the two countries had different closing hours for restaurants, customers moved to the other end of the room.

The arrangement dates from medieval land deals between a duke and a lord, recorded parcel by parcel, and it survived every subsequent reorganisation because nobody could face untangling it.

Which country used to be inside another country's calendar?

Not a border but a related oddity: Nepal ran on its own calendar and time zone and still does — UTC+5:45, offset by 45 minutes from anybody, set so that noon roughly matches the sun over a peak near Kathmandu.

And Bhutan had no television or internet at all until 1999, when the ban was lifted for the king's silver jubilee. It also does not use gross domestic product as its principal measure of national success, publishing a Gross National Happiness index instead — which sounds whimsical and is a serious statistical instrument with nine measured domains, taken seriously by development economists.

What comes next

The next page zooms in to one country in detail — India, state by state, with what each is actually known for beyond the tourist summary.