‘Drawing The Line’: Border Commissions in Eastern Europe. Introduction

At the dawn of the new millennium, Charles Maier popularised the idea that territoriality would eventually lose significance in a world of ever-closer economic and cultural interconnections. ¹ Yet, just over two decades later, persisting conflicts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union over borders and sovereignty – between Kosovo and Serbia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, among Central Asian states in the Fergana Valley, and most prominently Ukraine's defence of its statehood and spatial integrity following Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 – have rendered Maier's prognosis questionable. ² Across Europe, fear and hostility occasioned by the so-called migrant crisis, as well as political measures against the coronavirus pandemic, have led to a heightened awareness and reassertion of borders, to a degree previously unseen in the European Union. This resurgence of territoriality in political practice and popular consciousness is striking and can only be fully understood by examining its historical origins and evolution.

This special issue presents four case studies of territorial demarcation in Eastern Europe (broadly conceived, to include South-Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region) in order to elucidate the specific processes and practices that have shaped the formation of modern states in the region. In doing so, it also aims to prompt further reflection and research on general questions concerning modern territoriality as a convergence of diplomatic, political, social and scientific discourses and interventions. Each article focuses on the work of one international border commission, exploring their constitution and membership; the knowledge and expertise they brought to bear on border-making; and their delegates’ perceptions and values, commonalities and conflicts. Articles also examine commissioners’ experiences in the field, as they ‘rode the line’ to translate diplomatic settlements inscribed on maps by statesmen and politicians into real, meaningful and visible borders in physical landscapes far from capital cities.

The case studies span the period from the mid-19th century to the aftermath of World War I, when the collapse of the old empires and the rise of new nation-states and supranational territorial entities, such as the Soviet Union, posed a unique set of challenges and sowed the seeds of future conflicts, many of which persist to the present day. In this brief introductory essay, the editors of the special issue will outline the key theoretical, historiographical and historical contexts that have informed and shaped the case studies.

1. Space, territory and territorialisation

Since the early-modern era, European governments have mobilised groups of experts to draw lines on the map and on the ground, partitioning space – both conceptually and physically – into political territory. ³ If space in this account denotes something diffuse and vague (like ‘Eastern Europe’), territory is defined and demarcated by boundaries, generally the outcome of political negotiation and legal settlement, albeit frequently the focus of persisting dispute, protest or resentment by one or more of the parties involved. ⁴ Thus territorialisation refers to the border-making processes and practices that carve out territories in space, giving power structures, political entities and populations a seemingly fixed geographical shape. ⁵ These processes and practices both depended on and promoted the rise of scientific method and new technologies – especially in geography and cartography – and states’ mobilisation of scientific and technical expertise in drawing and demarcating borders in turn prompted a shift in the meaning of sovereignty from a jurisdictional to a territorial concept. ⁶ By the 20th century, territory presupposed visibly delineated borders that defined what and who fell inside or outside the purview and competence of the modern state. ⁷ Hence, looking at territorialisation always means examining the structures of state power and the multiple inter-relations between states, as well as between competing centres and peripheries at all scales, with all their tensions and asymmetries.

Inevitably, territorialisation also reshapes local identities, especially in regions that are transformed into borderlands. But local identities and interests can also shape processes of state-formation. In his seminal study of the Pyrenees, Peter Sahlins demonstrates how inhabitants of the Spanish-French border region of Cerdanya began to adopt national identities in response to the unifying efforts of their respective states. Yet they never gave up on their local identities or their particularist sense of place. By analysing the interplay between state centres and peripheries over two centuries, as well as enduring cross-border mobilities, transactions and interactions, Sahlins reveals the complexity of border-making and border-enforcing processes and how concepts and practices of territorialisation evolve through time. ⁸ Over the past three decades, researchers such as Anssi Paasi, Börries Kuzmany, Sabine Dullin, Marina Cattaruzza, Mathijs Pelkmans and Sören Urbansky have further refined the study of borders and bordering processes in other historical and geographical contexts. ⁹

In her recent study of the Russian-Ottoman borderlands, Gözde Yazici Cörüt explored the conceptual differences and historical inter-relations between zonal and linear boundaries. In her account, modern states, through special regulations and provisions, sought to maintain the smooth functioning and tranquillity of their borderlands, even while striving to collapse traditionally open, expansive frontier zones into defined borderlines. ¹⁰ As other historians have also shown, borderlands as transnational regions frequently continued to exist between newly territorialised states long after the formal demarcation of their borders. ¹¹ Several of the articles in this special issue address the tensions between zonal frontiers and linear borders, between the survival of hybridity and the generation of difference, as this played out in 19th- and early-20th-century bordering practices in Eastern Europe.

Even while European governments were elaborating and implementing processes of territorialisation across the continent, the establishment of their overseas empires exported their concepts of territory and methods of border-making across the globe, laying the groundwork – physically and conceptually – for the modern international state system. In many cases, European surveyors and experts, engaged in demarcating borders in their colonial domains, paid little attention to the concerns of local populations: as John W. Donaldson has noted, they often “literally etched” their own conceived borders onto the landscape. ¹² As Camille Lefebvre shows in her book on the creation of modern Niger, in other cases colonial powers were forced – usually because of limited administrative resources – to take account of local economic and tribal dependencies. ¹³ Notably, European concepts of territory and statehood sometimes took root even where traditional dynasties retained power in their domains. Thongchai Winichakul, for example, has highlighted how European imperial designs on South East Asia prompted the Kingdom of Siam (now Thailand) to seek to resolve the territorial ambiguities and multiplicity of spatial identities at its margins, instead to establish a clearly defined state border as a container and a marker of its nationhood and sovereignty. ¹⁴ In our case studies of Eastern European border-making in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, we see all these diverse and sometimes conflicting concepts, forms and practices of territorialisation at work.

2. Territorialisation in Eastern Europe

In contrast to Western Europe, where processes of national unification in the second half of the 19th century (e.g., in Italy, Germany and Switzerland) eliminated many borders between smaller states, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe during the same period and beyond experienced the weakening and collapse of four major continental empires. This gave rise to multiple new state formations, each of which required new territorial settlements and border demarcations. ¹⁵

In the Balkans and in the Caucasus region, the European Great Powers’ shared belief that they were politically and morally obliged to prevent or remedy internal disorder within the Ottoman Empire shaped international relations from the late-18th century onwards. Throughout the 19th century, anxieties about the so-called Eastern Question prompted the Concert of Europe to strive to manage the realm's territorial dissolution and oversee the emergence of new nation-states on its margins. ¹⁶ The Great Powers’ interventions in the Ottoman Empire shared common features with their colonial policies overseas, as their officials and experts used scientific method and technology to generate difference and hierarchy along newly created borders, rationalising their notions of ethnonational order with little regard for pre-existing spatial and demographic realities. ¹⁷ The need for all the Great Powers to ratify Balkan border settlements in concert often meant that political and diplomatic compromise prevailed to the detriment of the populations and polities of the newly autonomous provinces and independent nation-states. ¹⁸

In some cases, though, the extreme complexity or intractability of border disputes tempered imperial claims and gave leverage to local actors. Throughout the period under scrutiny, the Russian Empire's predatory stance towards the Ottoman Empire disrupted attempts to establish a stable balance of power in the region. The Crimean War (1853–1856) for the first time divided the Concert of Europe, prompting Great Britain and France to come to the aid of the embattled Ottoman Empire. One of the main aims of the victorious western powers during the subsequent peace talks was to halt Russia's southward expansion and push its borders back from the Danube's shores. ¹⁹ As Constantin Ardeleanu's article in this issue on the demarcation of the border between the Russian and Ottoman Empires in Southern Bessarabia shows, conflict among Concert states gave local power brokers some influence on decision-making. For example, Grigore Sturdza, an Ottoman military representative of Moldovan descent, successfully defended the Moldovan principality's political interests and property rights along the Danube against Russian claims. Similarly, Montenegro's government managed to maintain a semi-autonomous position at the edge of several imperial spheres of influence throughout most of the 19th century. ²⁰

Twenty years later, after a new period of crisis and conflict in the Balkans, the Congress of Berlin (1878) presented a chance to redraw disputed borders and establish a more enduring settlement. However, the Concert of Europe was by now greatly weakened by the Great Powers’ intensifying imperial rivalries. ²¹ New geopolitical actors, such as the German Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, pursued their own territorial ambitions. Negotiations became ever more complex at all levels as newly established states und competing non-state organisations clashed over territory and belonging. Appointed by the Congress of Berlin, the Delimitation Commission for Montenegro, which Giorgio Ennas’ article in this issue examines, brought together representatives of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ actors in the region: the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Montenegro and the ‘Albanian League’. While the Commission's experts strove to apply scientific criteria based on painstaking field research and measurement to settle the conflicts ‘objectively’, their work provoked various forms of local protest and revolt. Ultimately, it took threats of military intervention by the Great Powers to force all rival parties to agree to the territorial compromises necessary for a settlement. The South Bessarabian and Montenegrin cases highlight that Balkan border commissions in the mid-19th to late-19th century worked in a changing context of overlapping and competing national and imperial allegiances, ambitions and claims. ²²

World War I brought the old European imperial order in the east and south-east of the continent to an end. ²³ The Ottoman and Habsburg Empires fragmented and disappeared. The German and Russian Empires collapsed and underwent substantial transformations. Within these ‘shatterzones’, a multiplicity of new nation-states emerged. ²⁴ Drawing on homegrown linguistic, ethnographic and cartographic expertise and knowledge, these new Eastern and South-Eastern European states defined and demarcated themselves with reference to prevailing ideas of nationalism and self-determination. ²⁵ However, delineating national borders in an ethnographically heterogeneous region posed two major challenges. First, the establishment of new nation-states created – by definition – majorities and minorities within their territorial borders. ²⁶ Second, many borderland regions were contested between two or more nation-states. ²⁷ Some competing claims, for example over areas surrounding Cieszyn/Těšín (in Upper Silesia) and Vilnius/Wilno, led to small-scale wars among these nascent nation states. ²⁸

During the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and 1920, the slogans of national self-determination and the promise to end secret diplomacy reverberated among the participants. ²⁹ Delegations mobilised expert opinions, drew maps, forged new alliances and tried to discredit their rivals. ³⁰ After the victors and the vanquished had signed the treaties, the newly agreed borders had to be surveyed on the ground. The Allied powers, France and Great Britain in particular, supervised these commissions. However, while claiming the role of arbiters they often had their own agendas. ³¹ Catherine Gibson's article in this issue examines the Latvian-Estonian border commission as a case study of the intricate interplay between the Great Powers, the representatives of the newly formed nation-states and the population on the ground.

The Soviet state and the nascent Turkish Republic were the outcasts of the new order that was established in Paris. Facing the same geopolitical adversaries, they soon formalised their relations and joined forces. With the treaties of Moscow and Kars in 1921, they settled territorial disputes in the South Caucasus and proclaimed the end of a century-old rivalry. ³² In his contribution to this issue, Stephan Rindlisbacher shows that the success of the Turkish-Soviet border commission was, despite instances of distrust, more than just propaganda. In reaching mutual agreement on their new state borders, both powers sent the powerful message that they could act without any foreign, western intrusion.

3. Aims, scope and themes of the special issue

Each article in the special issue offers new insights into the complex and evolving realities of border-making ‘on the ground’ in different periods and places across the region. Together, they provide an intricate picture of the practices of drawing and physically demarcating borderlines that, in many cases, are the cause of persisting disputes and conflicts to the present.

As the case studies vividly show, border-making was often a lengthy and complicated process because it required different sets of knowledge and skills. In order to fulfil their tasks, commissioners needed knowledge of geography, topography, ethnography and of local linguistic distributions and economic circumstances. They had to master surveying practices and possess relevant languages and interpersonal negotiating skills. At the same time, as delegated officials, they had to respond to instructions from their superiors to mediate in local disputes and ensure the functionality of borders. ³³ Commissioners were thus forced to produce and engage with two fundamentally different ways of knowing, which Tim Ingold has called ‘occupation’ and ‘habitation’. ³⁴ In the work of the commissions examined in the case studies, the geometric line of the imperial imagination, which strove to delimit and close territory, met the lived-in space of the local population, which allowed for mobility, discontinuity and breadth. ³⁵ The tension between these epistemological modalities compelled commissioners to operate simultaneously on different scales of border-building: while acting according to political directives from above, they were sometimes able to respond to local voices, unheard in distant decision-making centres.

By emphasising local practices of international border-making, as opposed to the diplomatic or state-level processes by which the borders were initially negotiated and agreed, the contributions to this special issue aim to elucidate the interrelations between ‘high’ politics and ‘lived’ ideology, identity and agency, and by so doing to crystallise new perspectives on the history of empires, states, territory and space. Despite the fact that borders often followed natural geographic features, such as mountain ridges or rivers, they still relied on negotiated agreements between central authorities, provincial representatives and the local population. While monarchs, ministers and ambassadors hashed out agreements in grand state rooms in imperial capitals, academic specialists, surveyors, map-makers, lawyers and military officers met in commissions on the faraway frontiers in order to work out the details of the new borders, to consult with locals, to resolve issues arising from the specificities of landscape, and to draw the line.

All the case studies here give border commissioners centre stage as experts who came together with the task and intention of settling contentious issues by applying scientific criteria. In many cases, these experts shared common interests, values, professional standards and identities. However, as the case studies show, a detailed examination of the membership of the border commissions, and of their work in committee rooms and in the field, reveals that settlements were often the result of compromises and compensations that arose from their interactions with other officials at different levels of state hierarchies and with the local residents they encountered during the course of their fieldwork.