Who Actually Drew the World's Borders

Look at a map of Africa and something jumps out once you notice it. Whole stretches of the border between countries like Egypt and Libya, or Namibia and Botswana, run in dead straight lines for hundreds of miles, the kind of line you only get from a ruler, not from a river, a mountain range, or the edge of where one people's land ends and another's begins. That is because a ruler is more or less what made them. Roughly 44 percent of Africa's borders are straight lines, and they went down on paper in European conference rooms, drawn by men who in many cases had never set foot on the continent they were carving up.

That is not an unusual story. It is close to the normal one. Most borders you take for granted, the edges of the countries on the news every night, were not settled by the people who live inside them. They were settled by outsiders, in a handful of negotiating rooms, over the last four hundred years, and the world has mostly just kept living with the results.

Before there were lines, there were zones

For most of human history a border was not a line at all. It was a rough zone where one kingdom's tax collectors stopped showing up and another's had not yet arrived. Empires had frontiers, wide belts of contested or thinly controlled land, rather than a precise edge you could stand on with one foot in each country. Nobody surveyed these zones with any real precision, because nobody needed to. Government did not reach very far past a capital city, and the idea that every square mile of land needed to belong, clearly and exclusively, to exactly one state, had not really taken hold yet.

That idea, the one that shapes almost every argument about territory today, has a fairly specific birthday.

1648: the year territory got an owner

In 1648, a set of treaties known together as the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War, one of the deadliest conflicts in European history, fought largely over religion inside the fractured Holy Roman Empire. The treaties did more than end a war. They set out a working idea for how power over land should be organized going forward: each state would have supreme authority within its own territory, and other states would not get to interfere inside it. Historians call this Westphalian sovereignty, and it is the root of an assumption almost everyone alive today carries around without thinking about it, that the world is divided into countries, each with a government that is boss of everything inside its own lines and has no business inside anyone else's.

Westphalia did not hand out a finished map. Borders in Europe kept shifting through war and marriage and inheritance for centuries afterward. What it did was plant the idea that territory needed a single, exclusive owner, and that the owner's edge mattered. Once that idea existed, the pressure to actually draw the edge, precisely, on paper, was only a matter of time.

Fourteen men, a continent, and no rivers involved

The clearest, ugliest example of what that pressure produced happened in Berlin, between November 1884 and February 1885. The German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, called a conference to settle a rush of European claims on Africa before it turned into a war between the European powers themselves. Fourteen states sent delegates: Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, the United States, and a few smaller European states. Not one African kingdom, state, or community was invited to send anyone.

The men in that room agreed on a simple rule, later called the principle of effective occupation: a European power's claim to a piece of African territory would be recognized by the others as long as that power had some real presence on the ground, a fort, a trading post, an administration, however thin. What the rule did not require was any survey of who actually lived where, what language they spoke, or which of them had spent centuries as one people. The borders that came out of Berlin and the years of follow-up treaties that finished the job were drawn mostly with reference to European claims on other European claims, not with reference to Africa itself. Historians estimate the result split at least 177 distinct ethnic groups across two or more of the new colonial borders. A family, a market town, a shared language could end up cut in half by a line nobody local had ever asked for or seen drawn.

The Middle East, divided in a letter

A very similar thing happened to the Middle East thirty years later, and this time the paper trail is even more direct. In May 1916, in the middle of the First World War, a British diplomat named Mark Sykes and a French diplomat named François Georges-Picot worked out, in secret and with Russia's blessing, how Britain and France would carve up the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces once the war was won. The terms were confirmed in a letter from the British foreign secretary to his French counterpart on 16 May 1916. France would get the Syrian coast and much of what is now Lebanon. Britain would get direct control of southern and central Mesopotamia, the Baghdad and Basra provinces. The rest was split into zones of influence, with Palestine marked out for some kind of international arrangement.

None of it was drawn with much regard for the religious and ethnic map underneath, Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Christian, tribal, and it showed almost immediately. The borders that emerged from Sykes-Picot and the peace settlements that followed became the templates for modern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, states built along administrative lines two men had sketched during a war, expecting empires to simply carry on ruling the pieces. The empires did not carry on. The lines did.

Independence, and a very unpopular decision

By the middle of the twentieth century, colonies across Africa and elsewhere were winning independence, and the leaders of these brand new countries faced an obvious question: now that the colonizers are gone, do we keep their borders, the ones that split our own peoples in half and stitched rival peoples together, or do we redraw the map to match who actually lives where.

In 1964, in Cairo, the newly formed Organisation of African Unity answered that question, and the answer surprised nobody who understood the alternative. The OAU's member states resolved to respect the borders they had inherited from colonial rule exactly as they stood at independence, a principle known in law as uti possidetis, roughly "as you possess, so you shall continue to possess." African leaders were open about how arbitrary those borders were. They kept them anyway, because the honest alternative, a continent-wide redrawing of every border to match ethnic and linguistic lines, had no obvious stopping point and looked far more likely to produce decades of war between neighbors than a fairer map. A colonial map drawn without local input became the permanent map, not because anyone thought it was right, but because unpicking it looked more dangerous than living with it.

From treaties to satellites

The actual craft of marking a border has changed enormously since 1885, even where the border's location has not. Nineteenth-century boundary lines were often set out in vague treaty language, "the river, and thence to the nearest hilltop," and left for local officials to work out on the ground, sometimes decades later, sometimes never precisely at all. Today, contested borders are increasingly fixed by satellite geodesy and GPS survey, agreed to the metre and lodged with international bodies, and unresolved disputes are as likely to end up argued in front of the International Court of Justice as fought over with an army. The tools got exact. The lines they are tracing, in most of the world, are still the ones a much earlier and far less careful generation drew first.

The map is a record, not a description

Step back and the modern map stops looking like a picture of where nations naturally are and starts looking like something closer to a geological record, layer after layer of decisions made for reasons that had very little to do with the people living inside the lines. A seventeenth-century idea that territory needs one exclusive owner. A nineteenth-century conference that divided a continent without consulting it. A wartime letter that divided another. And a mid-twentieth-century decision, made under real pressure and for understandable reasons, to freeze the whole imperfect result in place rather than risk reopening it. Almost every border dispute making news today, and a great many of the conflicts that never quite end, trace back to one of those four layers. The line on the map looks permanent. It rarely started out that way, and it rarely started out where the people living on either side of it would have drawn it themselves.

Sources

• Britannica, "Peace of Westphalia" (the 1648 treaties and the birth of state sovereignty).
• Wikipedia, "Westphalian system" (how the principle of exclusive territorial sovereignty took hold).
• World History Encyclopedia, "Berlin Conference 1884-5" (dates, attendees, the principle of effective occupation, and the exclusion of African representatives).
• Wikipedia, "Berlin Conference" (roughly 44 percent of Africa's borders being straight lines, and at least 177 ethnic groups split across them).
• HISTORY, "Britain and France conclude Sykes-Picot agreement" (the 16 May 1916 letter and its terms).
• Smithsonian Magazine, "The Origins of the World War I Agreement That Carved Up the Middle East" (how the Sykes-Picot lines became the templates for the modern states of the region).
• African Union, Resolution AHG/Res.16(I), Cairo, 1964 (the Organisation of African Unity's resolution on the inviolability of inherited colonial borders).