NATIONS DEFINE THEMSELVES by the stories they tell about themselves. That much we know, but what is less remarked upon is that particular weight is put on the stories nations tell about their edges – the borders and coastlines – and how they choose to define and mark them. Some of this is so familiar it’s banal: think of the enduring significance of the white cliffs of Dover to English identity for example. The enduring popularity of the television series Coast speaks to that British fascination with its island identity. There is a powerful psychogeography to the edge; the recurrent stories of coastal erosion along the East Coast get extensive media coverage precisely because they unsettle, they challenge Britain’s cherished island identity as singular, and steadfast. Or, as Shakespeare phrased it of England, in Richard II: ‘this fortress built by Nature’ with the sea serving ‘in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house.’
Despite Britain’s intense affection for its coastal geography, the confusions have been legion as to how that maps onto its national identity. The historian Norman Davies in the introduction to his history, The Isles, takes the reader on an entertaining tour of how often England is mistaken for an island, and how often England and Britain are conflated even in the prestigious library catalogue systems (Davies, 1999).
Our Island Story: A History of England for Boys and Girls was published in 1905 and has been confusing generations of children ever since (Marshall, 2007). Of course, England shares an island with two other nations, Scotland and Wales, and is part of a political entity that straddles two islands, Britain and Ireland. In 2013 David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, offered an entertaining example of a senior politician getting himself horribly tangled in this stubborn geographical confusion. (Needless to say he once cited Our Island Story as one of his most formative childhood books.) A coastline is the one form of border that might offer clarity as well as continuity, but it seems not.
Less familiar than the white cliffs is the striking history over half a century of how the new nation of Britain used the North West coastline of Scotland to fashion a new set of stories for itself. During a few weeks in 1832 Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture was premiered and JMW Turner’s painting, Staffa, was unveiled in London. In the preceding few years both Sir Walter Scott and John Keats had joined the long queue of visitors, and penned poems extolling the wonders of Fingal’s Cave. An uninhabited windswept island off the West Coast of Scotland had become central to the cultural life of Britain.
Fingal’s Cave provided the still young nation with an iconic image: it represented a marvel of geology, a lost mythology and a subjugated people. All three were grist to a nation-building oriented to projecting the expansive vigour of empire and its greed to appropriate. The proximity to the ancient ruins of Iona underlined the point of an ancient, glorious past that confirmed a sense of historic destiny. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert duly paid their respects and the Victorian tourists balanced precariously on the basalt columns as they made their way to peer into the cave.
The intriguing point about Turner’s treatment of this iconography was that the artist (raised on the shifting mud flats of the Thames) was not interested in the geology. His painting of Staffa puts a steamship centre, with its long plume of smoke pointing to the blurred headland of the cave. A third of the painting is a murky brown, and tiny pinpricks of red on the ship accentuate the loneliness of the imperial adventure. He has inverted the myth to describe the loneliness of empire, exile and immigration.
The North West edge of Britain is where the great projects of the British state petered out: many islands of the Western Isles remained Catholic in a country defined itself as Protestant. Many continued to speak Gaelic despite compulsory English in schools until the policy finally shifted in the late twentieth century. It’s part of the appeal of borders and edges that they are liminal places of uncertainty where identity can frequently be contested.
Fascinated by these borderland uncertainties, on a holiday in eastern Finland, I once insisted that we drove our hired campervan to the Finnish-Russian border. This was once one of the most dangerous borders in Cold War Europe, but in 2008 the road approaching the frontier was lined with lorries in laybys. A long traffic jam of vehicles waited at the border crossing. We turned off and headed down a dirt track. It was a curiously idyllic stretch of countryside where fields were interspersed with birch woods and the verges were full of wild flowers. Finally, we arrived at a barrier with a sign warning us not to go any further. There was an empty guard post. The bees hummed in a gentle breeze.
A sign in English informed us of a three kilometre exclusion zone before the border which was patrolled by armed guards daily. A similar exclusion zone lies on the other side. It was eerie to stand there amongst the butterflies, and suspect that our every move was being relayed by satellite to some Russian surveillance centre. A strip of this silent countryside, six kilometres wide, runs along this eastern Finnish border; it’s a land which the Finns fiercely defended in the Second World War. They still mourn the loss of the Karelia region (which included Finland’s second city and its main industrial heartland – with an eighth of the population having to be resettled) in the post-war peace agreements.
Britain struggles to imagine this often traumatic European psychogeography of borders. Apart from Northern Ireland, it has had no land border for three centuries. This is what sets it apart from its Continental partners. It alone has been able to develop an identity around inviolability, while most Continental nations have experienced traumatic loss of territory, and mass displacement at some point in the last one and a half centuries. Countries shape-shift in Europe and borders have always proved provisional.
The travel writer Philip Marsden provides a vivid portrayal of this violent shape-shifting in his book, The Bronski House (Marsden, 1995). He traces the story of a Polish émigré who fled to Britain in the Second World War. Her family home was on territory contested by four nations: Lithuania, Belorussia, Russia and Poland. The house was in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, then Poland, finally Belorussia, but the nearest city was Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. The German and Russian armies swept back and forth while the surrounding forests in the Second World War became the haunt of a myriad of different ‘partisan’ movements. A land of anarchy. Such histories charge the politics of many countries in Europe with an intense insecurity.
The late eighties was a brief moment of unexpected hope that this historical burden of contested European borders might be no longer relevant. Those ‘hard’ borders of dogs, checkpoints, barbed wire and alarms ‘softened’ and the European Union pressed ahead on the Schengen agreement. Globalisation held out the promise of conquering space with new technologies and ease of movement. Air travel and hyperconnectivity seemed to make the geography of land, river, mountain range and sea, a matter only for tourism. Borders become purely bureaucratic and technological as queues stood in airports.
The illusion faded swiftly in the Bosnian war. But it was the extraordinary mass movements of Syrian refugees through south east Europe in the summer of 2015 which demonstrated that the crucial significance of geography had re-emerged. The images drove it home: refugees camped in fields in Slovenia or trudging down motorways to Austria. Borders which had been sleepy nondescript places only a few weeks before, became the flashpoints for political crises. We reached out for maps: we needed to learn geography again.
To feed this new appetite comes the wonderful timely book by Kapka Kassabova, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Kassabova, 2017). A Bulgarian who lives in the Scottish Highlands, Kassabova has plenty to tell the UK about borders. She takes the reader on a journey along the southern Bulgarian border with Turkey and Greece. Like the east Finnish border, this was a tense Cold War frontier where ‘the sandals’ as they called the young East Germans, were murdered as they attempted to flee to the west.
But long before, its soil was drenched in the blood of the Balkan Wars leading up to the First World War when the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. The new nations forced Bulgarians and Turks from their homes ‘under pain of death’ writes Kassabova, ‘then for half a century, they were prohibited from crossing it under pain of death.’ There were further extraordinary and under-reported mass movements of populations (300,000 Bulgarian Turks were deported in the last days of Communism). Now these densely wooded hills are criss-crossed with paths used by smugglers, refugees and all manner of secret traffic between Asia and Europe.
Such history no doubt confirms the British fear of borders and their delight in those coastlines and the ‘silver sea’ that serves as Shakespeare puts it, ‘Against infection and the hand of war’. But Kassabova’s writing depicts how borders are one of the most explicit expressions of the central state’s power. This is where the character of that power is starkly revealed. At its most basic, does the power of the state reach its peripheries? Is the state apparatus – the crossings and checkpoints – competent and humane or violent and corrupt? The edges are where things fray and unravel. Borders and how they are kept in place, reveal nations to themselves.
Davies, N. (1999), The Isles: A History, London: Macmillan.
Kassabova, K. (2017), Border, A Journey to the Edge of Europe, London: Granta Books.
Marsden, P. (1995), The Bronski House: A Return to the Borderlands, London: Harper Collins.
Marshall, H. E. [1905] (2007), Our Island Story: A History of England for Boys and Girls, London: Civitas.