Why Is Part of That Country Somewhere Else? Nobody Redrew the Old Lines

Two terms are used and they describe the same situation from different sides. A piece of territory belonging to one state but separated from its main body is an exclave from the point of view of the state that owns it. The same piece, if entirely surrounded by a single other state, is an enclave from the point of view of the state that surrounds it. A piece can be one and not the other, since territory separated from its parent but bordering several states or the sea is an exclave without being an enclave. Only a handful of whole countries are entirely surrounded by one other state.

The origins are almost always historical accident rather than design:

• •Medieval landholdings that survived into modern state boundaries
• •Dynastic inheritance splitting territory between heirs
• •Treaty settlements that traded specific places rather than drawing lines
• •Colonial borders drawn without reference to the ground
• •A state breaking up and leaving a fragment on the wrong side
• •Rivers moving and leaving land on the opposite bank

Living in one is complicated in ways that accumulate. Every journey to the rest of the country crosses another state, which requires an agreement about transit and can be stopped when relations deteriorate. Utilities, post, emergency services and schooling must either be duplicated at small scale or bought from the surrounding state. Customs and tax boundaries cut through daily life. Policing is awkward, since officers cannot cross to reach their own territory without permission. And the arrangement invites smuggling, since a border with a price difference on either side runs through the middle of a community. Many of these problems are managed by detailed bilateral agreements that are themselves a source of friction.

Not every example is international, and the domestic versions cause their own trouble. Counties, municipalities and school districts frequently contain detached fragments produced by the same historical processes on a smaller scale, and in several countries these were rationalised in nineteenth-century boundary reforms that took decades. Where they survive, they produce oddities such as a property paying taxes to a distant authority, a street whose two sides fall under different police forces, or a house where an ambulance must come from the far side of another jurisdiction. Some are preserved deliberately, since amalgamation removes a community's separate identity and is resisted for that reason alone.

Some examples are genuinely extraordinary. The border between India and Bangladesh contained nearly two hundred fragments, including several inside each other and one piece of India inside Bangladesh inside India inside Bangladesh, which left tens of thousands of people effectively stateless until an exchange of territory in 2015 resolved almost all of it. Baarle on the Netherlands and Belgium border contains dozens of parcels with the line running through houses and shops, marked in the pavement. Llivia is a Spanish town inside France, separated by a treaty in 1659 that transferred villages and not towns. Kaliningrad is a Russian region separated from Russia entirely, reachable only through other states or by sea.

A fragment of one state separated from its main body is an exclave to its owner and an enclave to whoever surrounds it, and most exist because an old landholding or treaty line was never rationalised. Transit, utilities, policing and customs all become bilateral problems. India and Bangladesh exchanged nearly two hundred fragments in 2015, including one nested four layers deep, which had left people effectively stateless.