by ADAM TAYLOR
Just after midnight Saturday, one of the most perplexing border disputes in the world officially ended. India and Bangladesh began the exchange of over 160 enclaves – small areas of sovereignty completely surrounded on all sides by another country – and in so doing ended a dispute that has lasted almost 70 years.
This act will have a major effect on the lives of more than 50,000 people who resided in these enclaves in Cooch Behar. Where they had been surrounded by a country they didn’t have citizenship in for decades, now they will finally gain access to things like schools, electricity and health care.
For curious cartographers and others obsessed with geopolitical oddities, however, it’s an end of an era. The exchange between India and Bangladesh means that the world will not only lose one of its most unique borders, but it will also lose the only third-order enclave in the world – an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by an enclave surrounded by another state.
It’s confusing, so let me spell it out: Dahala Khagrabari, the third-order enclave in question, was a part of India, surrounded by a Bangladeshi enclave, which was surrounded by an Indian enclave, which was surrounded by Bangladesh. If you’re still confused, this close-up map may make things a little clearer:
Enclaves themselves are not so unusual. Plenty exist around the world – Llívia, for example, is a part of Spain that is completely surrounded by French territories. Second-order enclaves (an enclave within an enclave) are not as rare as you might think, either: There are a web of enclaves within enclaves in Baarle-Hertog, a Belgian municipality with pockets of Dutch sovereignty. It is important to note that enclaves aren’t necessarily bad. As Frank Jacobs, an enclave-obsessed blogger wrote for the New York Times in 2011, Barle-Hertog is “a money-spinning tourist attraction.” Before the modern age of cartography and nation states, there were enclaves all over the place.
The Washington Post for more