Today I was supposed to post a new video about Congo and Coltan mines, but YouTube demonetized it and I'm still waiting for them to unlock it, if they ever do. 5 days wait on average. Remember the video about the migrants. Demonetized and no explanation. Praise be to Youtube. So I said to myself: what do I publish in the meantime that I wait? The Nigerian prince can still wait, Erdogan too. And I got the epiphany from the next video's protagonist: Leopold II of Belgium, who asked me in a comment, hello nova, since I pity and pity myself in drawing the borders, can you teach me to draw them by hand instead of using a ruler like a real loser? So, dear Leopold, talking about borders is a delicate thing. You must know that seeing a state changing its boundaries, widening or narrowing, generates strange feelings.
You know that feeling when you come home and notice that not everything is as you left it? Well, more or less that's what the local history buff must have felt when he noticed a long time ago an irregularity in the ground that should mark the border between Belgium and France. Shortly before, a Belgian farmer had accidentally (or maybe not, who knows) moved a stone that was obstructing the movement of his tractor What he may not have known was that this was, to all intents and purposes, a border stone, placed there since 1819 to separate the territories of Belgium from those of France, established by the Treaty of Kortrjik, after the final demise of Napoleon. By moving it about two meters, the peasant actually enlarged the Belgian domains at the expense of the territories of France The thing resolve itself in sweetness and light. between the two mayors of Erquellines, Belgium and Bousignies-sur-Roc, France. The fact is that the stone had to return to its place and if this did not happen it would be up to the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to resolve the issue by dusting off the old border commission inactive since 1930.
But if instead of 2 meters they had been 200 meters or 2 kilometers what would have happened? If this story teaches us anything, beyond the proper use of a tractor and not to move random things that someone put there for a reason, the reference to those who live with me is casual, is that measures in some contexts count and especially that the borders between two states are not just imaginary lines in colored maps but something that sometimes you can touch, move, and even destroy. A state is physically its border, starting from the bizarre shapes it can take which is always the territory that a people more or less legitimately claims as its own. Defining and discussing a boundary does not always end well, on the contrary. Either we end up expropriating a people of its territory, at least in part, or, which is the same, we allow a people to settle in what is not its land. After all, space is what it is and centuries of history more or less documented often end up giving reason to more peoples.
And there will always be someone who will claim to have been there before you. So, if you have seen this video, we have figured out how to create our own garden state, sovereign and independent and recognized by everyone Well not everyone… However, our fiefdom has managed to enter the UN and that's something. Everything works more or less well, but there is a problem. The neighbor, perhaps a little envious, starts to bring up the issue of the hedge that separates your gardens, which before (like a few centuries ago) was not there and now cuts off from his land the orange and apple trees that his family owns since the time of his grandfather.
So in a nutshell he comes to tell you that his family has always managed that part of the garden and therefore "de facto", it belongs to him. Here, be careful when someone use the word "de facto" because it is very likely he or she wants to cheat you. At this point they may come up with documents but you are not willing to give up the orange grove.
Regarding the apple tree you can discuss, but for the oranges that have cost your brothers tears and blood (at this point, don't be afraid to exaggerate), nothing to do. The neighbor has given it up for years, so de facto (you can also use this expression if arguments are scarce) the orange grove belongs to you. What can happen next varies depending on the actors involved. Either the municipality intervenes, which by necessity will have to give reason to one or the other, at most a justice of the peace will do it.
Or you solve it yourself. In the meantime, given the atmosphere, it is advisable to reinforce the hedge and take two Dobermans for guarding your border. The border dictates the law, or rather delimits it and where there is law there is power. Almost all ancient societies had very strong bonds with the places where they lived, especially with the resources or the fishing and hunting places that these places guaranteed But in the millennia after the flowering of the first city-states along the Tigris River, very few societies were able to identify with precision at what exact point, in the no-man's-lands that stretched between the walls of their cities, another city's kingdom ended and another's began. This problem ceased to exist when some of those city-states later expanded to encompass other peoples and other settlements, becoming established kingdoms or empires.
And in that case, borders ended up becoming a useful tool to put things in order and regulate trade, demographic controls and transits of armies. Borders could become rivers – as in the case of the Danube or the Rhine -, mountains, such as the Karakorum in the case of the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great, or deserts as on the Egyptian border of the Eastern Roman Empire. As the centuries went by, while the first medieval fiefdoms became real state entities in Europe, borders continued to be increasingly militarized and bureaucratized frontier territories: if in ancient times one hardly ever noticed (except for the Roman Empire) that one was passing from an uninhabited steppe to a territory under the control of another warlord, in more modern times, borders became increasingly guarded and often disputed areas, where establishing who was really in charge was really difficult. When, in the second century A.D., Rome's legionaries erected a limestone wall across northern Britain with Hadrian's Wall they certainly did not do so with concern for the erratic movements of Pictish shepherds.
That border, just like the famous bulwark of the Ming dynasty just outside Beijing that we call the Great Wall of China, was a military installation, erected, yes, to hinder invaders from adjacent lands but also to project power outwards, to make others understand that the lands beyond the wall were no longer for the use and consumption of the free local populations and that beyond that wall it meant running into big trouble. For most of human history, geography and its territorial division has been the easiest criterion to establish where it was possible to set foot and who to consider friend or foe. But man was not intimidated by seas, oceans and mountain ranges and soon decided to do his own thing, complicating things. If you want to get an idea of how man can complicate his life, you can take a trip to Baarle-Hertog, in Belgium, where apparently there is some impatience with borders. Or maybe you should say Baarle-Nassau, Netherlands In short, it's the same.
The fact is that there are two Baarle: the Belgian one, Hertog, and the Dutch one, Nassau, which were already distinct from each other in medieval times when the aristocratic families of the area divided up the various lots of land. When the borders between Belgium and the Netherlands were decided in 1843 through the Treaty of Maastricht, for some reason it was not possible to establish a precise delimitation for a strip of land of 50 km, where the town of Baarle was located. Therefore, the two countries divided it up, but not by drawing a simple line in the middle. We are not in Africa, after all. Belgium and the Netherlands agreed on sovereignty over the individual parcels that made up the city territory according to the medieval subdivision.
One by one. With the result of creating several Belgian exclaves in Dutch territory and Dutch exclaves in Belgian territory. Only in 1995 they came to divide the last parcel. Among the flags on the tables of the bars, lines on the sidewalks, crosses, NL here and B there, it's easy to not understand anything anymore. And if the reasoned madness of this town in Flanders is not enough, ask any Indian or Bengali to tell you the absurd story of Dahala Khagrabari. No, he is not a guru or a holy man. Dahala Khagrabari is a not-so-small plot of "Indian" land surrounded by a Bengali village, Upanchowki bhajni, itself enclosed in the Indian village of Balapara Khagrabari.
The nice thing is that this latter Indian village is in turn surrounded by the Bangladeshi territory, the Debiganj sub-district, in the Panchagarh district of the Rangpur division of Bangladesh that my father bought at the market. No, it's not Inception and not even a story by Borges, it's just the consequence of the confused partition of Bengal, which later became a sovereign and independent state in 1971 with the name of Bangladesh, between India and Pakistan in 1947. I remind you of the video I made about it. Dahala Khagrabari is what you call a third degree exclave, at least until 2015 when local governments decided to end the madness by making it a Bengali territory. Man unfortunately is not like other animals and to mark his territory he has to resort to more refined and sophisticated means instead of lifting his leg with the consequence of creating unpleasant and complicated situations such as enclaves or exclaves, depending on the point of view. Kaliningrad is the best known example. German city on the Baltic, known as Konigsberg, became part of the Soviet Union after the Second World War, changing its name, as well as a complete restyling.
Also of language and population, because German citizens were expelled and replaced by pure Soviets. For this reason the city remained under Russian control even after the collapse of the Soviet Union representing among other things a strategic port for the domination in the Baltic in view of anti-NATO. It's amazing how I always end up talking about Russia in all my videos. Returning to our garden state, you could solve the dispute of the orange and apple trees by creating enclaves in your garden under the control of your neighbor and if you want to do things right create a "corridor" that gives territorial continuity to your neighbor, but perhaps this is conceding too much. There are no stable rules for delimiting boundaries. Each country deals with its neighbor as it sees fit, and if things go wrong you can always use meridians and parallels, as between USA and Canada, which follow, at least in the southern border, the 49th parallel.
Since drawing the border line not only divides territories but also people, a good method would be to resort to popular consultations to understand their opinion. This is what Denmark and Germany did, for example, in 1920 to establish the border or, rather, sovereignty over the region of Schleswig, inhabited by both Germans and Danes. Three quarters of the population of northern Schleswig, which changed its name to Jutland, chose to stay with Denmark, while in central Schleswig a pro-German sentiment prevailed. Someone obviously lost out, for example the German communities in Jutland, but you can not always have everything.
However, there are few similar cases of territorial plebiscites. Usually the border is drawn according to the interests of the local population Leopold II, king of Belgium, (yes, once again Belgium), made the Congo a slaughterhouse, as we know, and did not put any brakes even in the attempts of territorial expansion. The southeastern part of present-day Katanga was part of the kingdom of Yeke, owned by the self-proclaimed ruler M'siri. This territory was full of copper and ivory and ended up at the center of the sights of Belgium and the English. It was Leopold's men who moved with more vehemence, arriving in 1891 to kill the sovereign M'siri without too many compliments. This resulted in a territorial dispute with the British, but this was certainly not enough to stop Leopold's expansion. On his own, he decided that the eastern border, with what is now Zambia, should be the Luapula River, while the southern border should be the Zambezi River.
This corridor, known as the Congo Peduncle, however, led nowhere It was so that our king, Umberto di Savoia, decided that he had crossed the limit (in all senses) and drew a straight line that joined the two rivers stopping the senseless expansion of Leopold. The same applies with Namibia, under German influence. Namibia obtained, through the Heligoland-Zanzibar treaty, a strip of absolutely unnatural territory connecting it to the Zambezi and Lake Victoria, the so-called Caprivi Finger. You can tell how something will go by how it begins, and we should not be surprised by the damage that colonial partitioning has caused in Africa. The territory of a state is consolidated over the centuries through more or less troubled histories, through the affirmation of peoples and rulers. So… What criteria could the Berlin conference of 1884 have followed in defining the zones of influence of colonial powers? Absolute nothing. Operations such as those related to the Congo Peduncle and the Caprivi Finger have led to shatter the contiguity of cohesive peoples such as the Maasai separated by the border drawn between British Kenya and German Tanzania. Even worse was the Yoruba, who saw themselves split between British Nigeria, Niger, German Togo, and Benin.
The current Nigeria, to be clear, includes what were the territories of three different ethnic groups: the Yoruba, the Hausa and the Igbo. It is as if you decided to create a new state by connecting half of Spain, a stretch of France plus Belgium. At this point we could perhaps demonstrate that a state with more jagged and twisted borders, but respectful of the natural conformation of a territory is more peaceful with its neighbors than a state with clear, regular but after all arbitrary borders, decided as a result of questionable agreements If we take the case of the two Koreas we certainly would not have problems to prove it. Between the fall of the Japanese empire and the Korean war the two regions were delimited by the 38th parallel. Later, the infamous Demilitarized Zone was established, a buffer zone separating the two countries by 4 km and with them their respective armies. Although the name seems to suggest it, it is not exactly a peaceful zone, given the many incidents that have occurred over the years.
And it's not exactly no man's land, and even if you wanted to claim it with your garden, it wouldn't be a good deal. Still, someone, soldiers aside, lives there. There are two villages, Daeseong-dong, belonging to South Korea and especially Kijong-dong, the "village of peace", under North Korea. The inhabitants of the former, a few hundred, classified as South Korean citizens have reserved treatment, so to speak. As for Kijong-dong…well it's a bit more complex. Kijon Dong is a ghost town, a propaganda village. The lights come on automatically at certain times showing housing and infrastructure unusual for North Korean lifestyles. But in fact they are empty buildings. The only inhabitants, if we can call them that, are the janitors who make sure that everything looks normal and clean. From a certain point of view it is truly the village of peace.
In an ideal world, the borders between nations and peoples should be an opportunity to meet, rather than clash, and the borderlands a crossroads of different cultures. This is what India and Pakistan do every day…in their own way. In one of the most tense and militarized borders in the world, more precisely at the Wagah-Attari border, every day for 70 years a ceremony is certainly choreographed, but sinister if we observe the context. At sunset the imposing gate that separates the two rival countries is opened. For several minutes the two sides in historical uniforms, distinguished by a fan-shaped headdress parade with martial steps, alternating threatening gestures towards their rivals with nationalistic slogans that arouse the crowd.
Yes, because real stadium stands have been built around the border, always crowded not only by curious tourists, but also by Indian and Pakistani nationalists. At a certain point, the two "leaders" broke away from their group until they touched each other on the border line. In spite of the gestures and threats, the clash never took place and everything returned to normal, under the watchful eye of soldiers no longer in their historical uniforms but fully armed. The ceremony has always taken place, even in the most tense moments in the history of the two nations India and Pakistan have always been on the warpath, of course, it is hoped that they will continue to do as their representatives of the border: insult each other, after all it is there, threaten each other, and that's fine, but without ever getting violent.
We are still talking about two nations that have nuclear weapons, a tad touchy and until proven otherwise they hate each other Let's hope that no soldiers on the Wagah-Attari border get the choreography wrong. In the end, as you may have guessed it is always a matter of good neighborliness and above all common sense. Whether you are heads of state, leaders of garden states or condo dwellers exhausted by the extravagances of the neighborhood your conduct in matters of borders is not that much different. If it's not the international court it's the building manager, if it's not Jerusalem or the West Bank it's the parking space and if it's not a Demilitarized Zone it's a hedge or a couple of Dobermans. Avoid as much as possible to create enclaves and exclaves if you don't want to go crazy try to keep a certain territorial and ethnic continuity as natural as possible and above all don't abuse the word "de facto" and other customary customs valid only for you.
If you have to draw a boundary line, let those who have a steady hand do it. Especially not from Brits and French And if they really make you angry take a cue from the Pakistani soldiers who smooth their moustaches to threaten the Indians. Psycho-warfare at its finest. Or do as the Dutch or Chinese do, if you don't want to expand without moving the borders of an inch remove them from the ocean with a nice polder or filling the South China Sea with sand. A big win for everyone, a little less for the environment and your international enemies. Now excuse me but I'm going to go see if the Congo video has been demonetized for me.
I hope you enjoyed the second video in the "how to do weird stuff" series. We'll see next week. if you have any topics you'd like to see in this wacky series, leave them for me in a comment just like Leopold did. Thanks to the YouTube and Patreon patrons, as well as PayPal donors, that allow this channel to survive in the oceans' tides. A warm greeting to you all. Per aspera ad astra..
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