Borderlines by Lewis Baston – review

A present from my brother, a heartfelt thank-you for such an excellent book. Subtitled 'A History of Europe, Told from the Edges', Borderlines sets out to examine the international borders that define our continent, its history, its peoples and their identities. Lewis Baston, a British writer known for his work on political geography, set out on many trips along Europe's borders, from that between Ireland and the UK to that between Ukraine and Russia.

Baston delights in borderland anomaly stories. One such is the village of Baarle, split between Belgium and the Netherlands in such a way that the Belgian part includes 16 exclaves within Dutch territory. These exclaves, in turn, surround seven Dutch areas. Many building straddle both countries; the nationality of a given house is determined by where its front door lies. The root cause of this borderline mayhem goes back to a deal struck between two local dukes in... 1198.

Of huge fascination to me is the way fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its aftermath. A point I only recently got was how Germany's Anschluss with Austria in 1938 was a result of the collapse of the Habsburgs and the splitting of Austro-Hungary into Austria and Hungary. The unification of Germany in 1871 excluded the German-speaking areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; with that gone, the merging of Austria into a greater Germany made sense to nationalists after WW1.

One border mentioned in the book that I recently visited (in May 2024) is the one between Poland and Germany, between Świnoujście and Ahlbeck. Baston points out where the border runs, but fails to mention that right on the German side is a nudist beach (FKK-strand) that dates back to East German times. And he mentions the German train that runs into Świnoujście, but doesn't say that even on the Polish side, all signage and information is in German only, or that złotys are not accepted. 

I have also crossed twice on foot from Poland into the Czech Republic (left), and into Slovakia by car in 2008. My crossing into Ukraine was back in pre-blog days (2005) and entailed waiting a couple of hours to cross over by road.

Baston makes a one-paragraph mention of Akce Kámen, the Stalin-era Czechoslovak provocation designed to capture and interrogate its citizens trying to flee west. A false border was set up in front of the real one with West Germany; StB agents posing as guides would lead would-be defectors through forests across this false border into the hands of imposters posing as US soldiers to whom they would gladly give up information about the Czechoslovak opposition networks before being arrested. I watched a haunting BBC Screen Two drama about this in 1988 (Border) which made a powerful impression on me.

The book mentions the Austro-Hungarian Transversal Railway ("a pet project of the empire that never paid its way") long sections of which I have walked.

For anyone interested in such matters, this book is compelling, and captures the spirit of those lands divided by arbitrary lines drawn by man. Hills, concludes Baston, make for better borders than rivers. The book asks some basic questions: is one's identity defined by language or place of birth? Citizens of somewhere or anywhere? The book ends with a chapter on "the secret capital of Europe" – Chernivtsi/ Czernowitz/ Cernăuți – on, in Polish, if you are so inclined, Czerniowce. In western Ukraine, close to the border with Romania, the city was in four different countries in the 20th century (Austro-Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine). Nicknamed 'Little Vienna', Chernivtsi epitomises the essence of Europe's borderlines optimally for Baston; he mentions his feelings of "nostalgia by proxy", as he sat in a Chernivtsi square, "as if time had jumbled" – I recognise that exomnesia feeling very well.

Borderlines, Hodder Press, £25

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