The world’s exclaves

Enclave or exclave?

An enclave is part of one country enclosed inside another. An exclave is the same kind of piece seen from home: land that belongs to a country but is cut off from the main part of it.^[1] So Llívia is a Spanish exclave and, seen from France, an enclave in France. Which word you use depends on which side you are looking from.^[1]

The word “enclave” came into English diplomacy in 1868 from French, and “exclave” followed about three decades later. The Treaty of Madrid of 1526 is probably the first document to use the word.^[1]

Five kinds

A true enclave is completely surrounded by one foreign country, like Llívia (Spain, inside France), Büsingen (Germany, inside Switzerland) or Campione (Italy, inside Switzerland).^[1] A place joined to home by a single point also counts, because nobody can travel through a point. Austria’s Jungholz touches the rest of Austria only on the summit of one mountain.^[1]

A semi-enclave, or coastal enclave, is surrounded by one country on land but has a coast. Ceuta and Melilla (Spain, in Morocco), Gibraltar, Oman’s Musandam, Timor-Leste’s Oecusse, Brunei’s Temburong and Alaska are all of this kind.^[1]

A mere exclave touches more than one foreign country, so it is not an enclave of any of them. Russia’s Kaliningrad (between Poland and Lithuania), Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan (Armenia, Iran and Türkiye) and Angola’s Cabinda are examples.^[1]

A pene-enclave is joined to home on the map, but in practice can only be reached through another country, usually because of mountains or water. Point Roberts, a tip of the United States half an hour’s drive from downtown Vancouver, can be reached by land only through Canada.^[1] Finally, whole countries can be enclaves: Lesotho, San Marino and the Vatican are each surrounded by a single country.^[1]

Where they come from

Vinokurov describes four waves. In medieval Europe land belonged to lords rather than nations, and was bought, inherited and given away piece by piece, leaving thousands of scattered holdings. Most disappeared as nation states formed, but Baarle, Büsingen and Llívia survived, and so did Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican.^[1]

Colonial empires made the second wave, and Ceuta and Melilla are left over from it. Borders drawn as those empires broke up made the third, including Lesotho, The Gambia, Brunei and Cooch Behar.^[1] The fourth came with the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia: about 20 enclaves appeared in 1990–91. Kaliningrad became an exclave in 1990, when Lithuania declared independence, and most of the others, such as Uzbekistan’s Sokh and Tajikistan’s Vorukh inside Kyrgyzstan, in 1991.^[1]

The most tangled, and the biggest swap

Baarle, on the Belgian–Dutch border, has 22 Belgian pieces surrounded by the Netherlands and 8 Dutch pieces surrounded by Belgium.^[1] For centuries the most complex set was along the border of India and Bangladesh around Cooch Behar, where Vinokurov counted 106 Indian and 92 Bangladeshi enclaves.^[1]

At midnight between 31 July and 1 August 2015 India and Bangladesh exchanged 162 of them: 111 Indian enclaves covering 17,160 acres became part of Bangladesh, and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves covering 7,110 acres became part of India. About 37,000 people lived in the Indian enclaves and 14,000 in the Bangladeshi ones, many of them for a generation without schools, clinics or power, and they could now take the nationality of India or Bangladesh.^[2][3]