HOW BORDERS BECOME REAL: THE STRANGE HISTORY OF IMAGINARY LINES

There is a café in the village of Baarle, on the Dutch-Belgian frontier, with an international border painted across the floor. Order coffee at one table and you are in the Netherlands. Move two seats over and you are in Belgium, in a different tax jurisdiction, under a different set of licensing hours, in a country with a different anthem. The coffee does not change. The floor does not change. Nothing physical happens at all. And yet everything that human beings have decided to care about most fiercely happens exactly there, along a stripe of paint that a surveyor could erase with a bucket of solvent. This book is about how that stripe got there, and why it holds. Borders are among the youngest inventions we treat as the oldest facts. For most of human history there were no lines, only zones: marches, frontiers, debatable lands, places where one power faded out before another faded in. The sharp line, the passport, the checkpoint, the notion that a human being requires permission to walk across a field - these are recent, deliberate, and traceable. They were made by identifiable people in identifiable rooms, usually in a hurry, frequently by candlelight, occasionally by men who had never visited the continent they were dividing. Peter Kriger follows the line from the boundary stones of Mesopotamia to the biometric database, through the surveyors and the census takers, the treaty tables and the partition commissions, the customs houses that came before the armies and the software that has now left the border behind entirely. Along the way he asks the question the maps are designed to prevent: who exactly does the earth belong to, and what happens to the answer when you notice that the ground itself has never once been consulted? >Keywords: borders, history, migration, nationalism, cartography, sovereignty, citizenship