Frontiers (1907)

by George Nathaniel, Marquis of Curzon, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.

Last month the Foreign Minister of Ukraine visited Beijing, requesting China’s intercession in peace negotiations with Russia, partly because China is one of the few remaining countries with an active frontier1. Ukraine (meaning ‘steppe frontier’ or ‘steppe borderland’ in Ukrainian, Polish and Russian) has always been an ill-defined frontier rather than a normal country. Britain’s Foreign Minister and father of the famous Curzon Line, Lord Curzon delivered the talk below (reproduced in two parts) in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, on a cold night in November, 1907.

A large part of my younger days I spent in travel upon the boundaries of the British Empire in Asia, which had always exercised upon me a peculiar fascination. A little later, at the India Office and at the Foreign Office, I had had official cognizance of a period of great anxiety, when the main sources of diplomatic preoccupation, and sometimes of international danger, had been the determination of the Frontiers of the Empire in Central Asia, in every part of Africa, and in South America. Further, I had just returned from a continent where I had been responsible for the security and defence of a Land Frontier 5,700 miles in length, certainly the most diversified, the most important, and the most delicately poised in the world; and I had there, as Viceroy, been called upon to organize, and to conduct the proceedings of, as many as five Boundary Commissions.

I was the more tempted to undertake this task because I had never been able to discover, much less to study, its literature. It is a remarkable fact that, although Frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every Foreign Office in the civilized world, and are the subject of four out of every five political treaties or conventions that are now concluded, though as a branch of the science of government Frontier policy is of the first practical importance, and has a more profound effect upon the peace or warfare of nations than any other factor, political or economic, there is yet no work or treatise in any language which, so far as I know, affects to treat of the subject as a whole. Modern works on geography realize with increasing seriousness the significance of political geography; and here in this University, so responsive to the spirit of the age, where I rejoice to think that a School of Geography has recently been founded, it is not likely to escape attention. A few pages are sometimes devoted to Frontiers in compilations on International Law, and here and there a Frontier officer relates his experience before learned societies or in the pages of a magazine. But with these exceptions there is a practical void. You may ransack the catalogues of libraries, you may search the indexes of celebrated historical works, you may study the writings of scholars, and you will find the subject almost wholly ignored. Its formulae are hidden in the arcana of diplomatic chancelleries; its documents are embedded in vast and forbidding collections of treaties; its incidents and what I may describe as its incomparable drama are the possession of a few silent men, who may be found in the clubs of London, or Paris, or Berlin, when they are not engaged in tracing lines upon the unknown areas of the earth.

Origin of Frontiers.

If we start with the dawn of history, at least in Europe, it is not difficult to trace the conditions under which the first Frontiers came into being. The existing peoples of Europe are with rare exceptions, of whose origin we have no certain knowledge, the deposit of successive waves of human immigration from Asia. These nomads would, in each case, pursue what may be described as the groove principle of advance. Entering Europe, for the most part, through the gap between the southern end of the Urals and the Caspian, they found a continent largely overspread, particularly in its northern parts, with forests, morasses, and swamps, intersected everywhere by great rivers, and in its central and southern portions split up by mountainous masses or long projecting spurs. Between, or amid, these obstacles they would naturally follow—as they did follow—the easiest and most accessible grooves, everywhere taking advantage of natural barriers, and settling down in areas of which the limits had been provided for them. Rivers were not a natural Frontier in those primitive days. More often they were a means of access to a country than a line of division between races: indeed, both banks were not unlikely to be occupied by the same race. Only as time passed and artificial boundaries were required to supplement those of nature did rivers, though natural in origin, begin to play a part in the scheme of territorial subdivision. Mountains constituted the earliest and most obvious barriers. Then as forests were cut down and swamps were drained, the peoples pushed their way over the more level areas, until, little by little, the empty places were occupied. To what extent natural features were responsible for the earliest form of organized state may be seen from the city communities and republics of the Greek and Latin races. The limits of each were determined by its mountain barriers, and there was but little communication or power of common action between State and State[2]. It was in the more open countries that larger kingdoms and empires tended to be formed. Then, as population increased, and commerce and industry grew, as naval and military forces developed, and as larger political aggregations began to supersede the smaller units, natural boundaries were found no longer to suffice. It became necessary to supplement or to replace them by artificial Frontiers, finding their origin in the complex operations of race, language, trade, religion, and war.

Natural Frontiers

Here, however, I must pause to define the factors and to indicate with greater precision the various classes of Frontiers with which we are called upon to deal. I have already accepted the broad distinction between Natural and Artificial Frontiers, both as generally recognized, and as scientifically the most exact. Of all Natural Frontiers the sea is the most uncompromising, the least alterable, and the most effective. The defensive attributes of the sea receive the poet’s testimony in his description of England as compassed by the inviolate sea; its exclusive qualities are celebrated in a not less familiar phrase: the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

It is true that in one aspect the sea may be regarded as a connecting link by the artificial aid of navigation, much in the same way as a land Frontier may be crossed by a railroad or pierced by a tunnel. The sea was such a link in the case of Greece and her city colonies, enabling her (no hostile power having command of the Mediterranean) to maintain connexion with her foreign colonies, in spite of the fissiparous influence of her physical configuration on the mainland. Similarly, the Mediterranean was a connecting link between Rome and her outlying possessions, just as it is at the present day between France and her North African colonies. Indeed the Mediterranean has never in civilised times been the southern Frontier of Europe; the latter has in reality been supplied by the Atlas Mountains and the great Desert of Sahara. The Persian Gulf is another illustration of a sea that has shown itself to be not a barrier but a link: the Arabs who were skilled and courageous mariners from early times (witness the story of Sinbad the Sailor) having occupied both shores with their settlements. The sea may also act as a vehicle of invasion. It brought the Jutes and Saxons, the Norsemen and Danes to England, just as it had brought the Romans before them.

Nevertheless, the opposite or separating quality of the sea is undoubtedly the more striking and familiar aspect. I have already alluded to its influence upon the relations of Great Britain and France, and of Great Britain and Ireland. Only when England ceased to be a Continental power did the national spirit blossom into any fullness. The project of a Channel Tunnel between the coast of England and France has twice perished because of the invincible and legitimate repugnance of the Englishman to sacrifice his maritime Frontier for no tangible return. It was because of the interposition of the sea that England lost America; that the Dutch and Portuguese lost the greater part of their Indian Empires; that Napoleon, equally with Rome, experienced so many difficulties in Egypt; that the Mexican adventure of France and Austria ended in fiasco; that Spain was robbed almost in a day of her possessions in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines. In these circumstances the continued connexion of the parent State with her transmarine possessions—which might seem to be an impossible aspiration—is only maintained in modern times by the grant of some form of self-government with a view to attaching the inhabitants of the colony or possession to the seat of imperial authority.

Deserts

Second in the list of Natural Frontiers may be placed deserts, until modern times a barrier even more impassable than the sea. Asia and Africa afford the best known instances of this phenomenon. For centuries China has been protected by the great Gobi Desert on her north-west border; Samarkand and Bokhara were shielded by the sandhills of the Kara Kum; the Indus valley was severed from the rest of India in its southerly portions by the Sind Desert, while Beluchistan is still safeguarded by the waste that stretches from Nushki to Seistan. Syria found a natural Frontier on the east in the desert that bears her name. Indeed, the whole of western Asia, that part, in fact, which was exposed to Hellenic influences was for centuries cut off from India by the broad wastes of Persia and Turkestan. Egypt, protected on the west by the impassable barrier of the Libyan Desert, and on the east by the desert of the Sinaitic peninsula, has retained a physical identity almost unequalled in history. It was of her eastern desert Frontier that the greatest captain of modern times, who had himself crossed it at the head of an army, wrote as follows in his Commentaries:—

Generals who have marched from Egypt to Syria or from Syria to Egypt have in all periods of history considered this desert the greater obstacle the larger the number of horses they took with them. The ancient historians declare that when Cambyses wished to penetrate into Egypt he made an alliance with an Arab king, who caused a canal to flow with water in the desert, which evidently means that he covered it with camels bearing water. Alexander sought to please the Jews so that they might help him in the passage of the desert. This obstacle, however, was not so great in ancient times as it is today since towns and villages existed, and the industry of man contended with success against the difficulties. To-day scarcely anything remains between Salihiyeh and Gaza. An army must, therefore, cross the desert successively by forming establishments and magazines at Salihiyeh, Katieh, and El Arish. If this army starts from Syria it must first of all form a large magazine at El Arish, and then carry it forward to Katieh. But these operations are slow, and they give an enemy time to make his preparations for defense. . . . An army defending Egypt can either assemble at El Arish to oppose the investment of this place, or at Katieh to raise the siege of El Arish, or at Salihiyeh: all these alternatives offer advantages. Of all obstacles which may cover the frontiers of empires, a desert like this is incontestably the greatest. Mountains like the Alps take second rank, and rivers the third. If there is so much difficulty in carrying the food of an army that complete success is rarely obtained, this difficulty becomes twenty times greater when it is necessary to carry water, forage, and fuel, three things which are weighty, difficult to carry, and usually found by armies upon the ground they occupy.

Finally, Africa furnishes the crowning illustration of the Great Sahara, which for centuries not only cut off the Mediterranean belt from the rest of Africa, but cut off the entire remainder of Africa from the civilized world. It was not till the voyages of Prince Henry the Navigator that this long period of isolation came to an end.

In quite recent days, however, deserts as Frontiers have lost the greater part both of their terror and their strength. Like the loftiest mountains, like the stormiest oceans, they have yielded to the all-conquering influence of steam. When Skobeleff advanced to the extirpation of the Tekke Turkomans at Geok Tepe in 1881, he laid a light railway behind him. As the English troops moved up the Nile to the recovery of Khartoum in 1898, the steel rails kept pace with their advance. It was to the desert line, and not to the actual collision at Omdurman, that the Khalifa owed his destruction. The Turkish railways to Syria, if protracted, would soon deprive Egypt of the security on her eastern border which Napoleon described. Given a level desert with a sound foundation, a railroad becomes the easiest of constructions, and built by competent engineers, can be pushed forward in war time at the rate of three miles a day. Similarly it is the aid of railways that has enabled the United States of America to make so light of the great deserts that stretch eastwards from the Rocky Mountains. There are few desert Frontiers in the world that now remain intact. If occasion arose, the doom of the survivors would probably be sealed. It is a question, not of mechanics, but of water and fuel. On the other hand, a ghost of the idea may be said to survive in the still existing preference of uninhabited or thinly peopled tracts as Frontiers over areas of crowded occupation.

Mountains

I turn to the consideration of the third type of Natural Frontier, namely, mountains. We have already seen that mountains were the earliest of the barriers accepted by wandering man. Prima facie, also, they are the most durable and the most imposing. They are liable to little change (except such as may be indirectly effected by human agency in the shape of roads, railroads, and tunnels), and they are capable of instant and easy recognition. Such has been the position, and the decisive influence of the great mountain barriers of the world—of the Hindu Kush and Himalayas in Asia[4], of the immense and serried ridges that separate Burma from China, of the Caucasus between Asia and Europe, of the Taurus in Asia Minor, of the Alps and Pyrenees (and in a lesser degree the Balkans and Carpathians) in Europe. From the military point of view the labour in crossing a mountain range is commonly great, particularly for armies, and is exposed to many dangers. What it was in ancient times, a century ago, and in more modern days, may be compared in the crossing of the Alps by Hannibal, and again by Napoleon, and in the experience of the Russians in the Balkans. We have yet to see a campaign in which the appliances of modern science in respect of railroads, tunnels, and telegraphs, are seized by one party so as practically to annihilate the mountain barrier upon which the other relies for protection, although the Germans seized and utilized the French tunnel through the Vosges at the commencement of the Franco-German War, and the Boers possessed themselves of the Drakensberg range and the Laing’s Nek tunnel in order to facilitate their descent upon Natal.

On the other hand the theoretical superiority of a mountain Frontier may be qualified by a number of considerations arising from its physical structure. Of course a range or ridge with a sharply defined crest is the best of all. But sometimes the mountain-barrier may be, not a ridge or even a range, but a tumbled mass of peaks and gorges, covering a zone many miles in width (for instance, the breadth of the Himalayas north of Kashmir is little short of 200 miles), and within this area the inhabitants may be independent or hostile. Such has been the case with a large portion of the Pathan Frontier of India, where the physical conformation of the border lends an immense advantage to the holders of the mountains against the occupants of the plains. The desire to counteract this advantage and to transfer it to the Cis-border Power has led to the pursuit of what is known as the Scientific Frontier, i.e. a Frontier which unites natural and strategical strength, and by placing both the entrance and the exit of the passes in the hands of the defending Power, compels the enemy to conquer the approach before he can use the passage. It is this policy that has carried the Indian outposts to Lundi Khana, to Quetta, and to Chaman, all of them beyond the passes, whose outer extremities they guard.

In every mountain border, where the entire mountainous belt does not fall under the control of a single Power, the crest or water-divide is the best and fairest line of division; for it is not exposed to physical change, it is always capable of identification, and no instruments are required to fix it. But it is not without its possible drawbacks, of which the most familiar is the well-known geographical fact that in the greatest mountain systems of the world, for instance, the Himalayas and the Andes, the water-divide is not identical with the highest crest, but is beyond it and at a lower elevation. Another parent of much controversy is the ambiguous phrase ‘foot of the hills’, the different interpretations of which in fixing the Indian Frontier almost produced a rupture between the Indian Government and the late Amir of Afghanistan.

Rivers

We now come to the important category of Rivers. As the creation of nature, in contradistinction to the creation of man, no Frontiers are more natural. But in another sense, namely, that which is in accord with the natural habits of man, rivers are not natural divisions, because people of the same race are apt to reside on both banks. Thus the Germans are found living on both banks of the Upper Danube, and the Slavs on both banks of the Lower Danube; the Turks or Tartars live on both banks of the Oxus, though to the north they are in Russian (i.e. Bokharan) territory and to the south under Afghanistan; the Indus was not a natural frontier to the Punjab, because Indian peoples, as distinct from Pathans or border men, inhabit the further as well as the nearer bank of the river. So many of the peoples of Laos lived astride the Mekong that the French soon found it to be an impracticable Frontier. The long contest between America, France, and Great Britain over the Mississippi valley, arising out of the French policy of shutting in the United States behind the Alleghanies, and using the Indians as a barrier between the mountains and the river, abundantly illustrated the futility of a river as a permanent boundary. As soon as the Americans broke through the Alleghanies with railroads there was no stopping them by the Mississippi or any other natural Frontier until they reached the sea. In fact the teaching of history is that rivers connect rather than separate. Strategical reasons have almost invariably been responsible for their conversion into Frontiers. As States developed and considerable armies were required for their defence, the military value of rivers, in delaying an enemy, and in concentrating defensive action at certain bridges, or fords, or posts, became apparent, and in the demarcation of larger kingdoms and States, they provided a convenient line of division, everywhere recognizable, and easily capable of defence. It was for this reason that Augustus selected rivers—the Rhine and the Danube—as the Frontiers of the Roman Empire, though strategical considerations soon tempted the Romans beyond, as the English have been tempted across the Indus, and the French by other causes across the Mekong.

Accordingly the advantages and disadvantages of rivers as Frontiers may be thus stated. The position of the river is unmistakable, no survey is required to identify or describe it, and the crossing-places frequently admit of fortification. Rivers are lines of division as a rule very familiar to both parties, and are easily transferred to a treaty or traced on a map. On the other hand, they may be attended by serious drawbacks, confronting diplomatists and jurists with intricate problems. Rivers are liable to shift their courses, particularly in tropical countries. The vagaries of the Helmund in Seistan, where it is the boundary between Persia and Afghanistan, have led to two Boundary Commissions in thirty years. The precise channel which contains the Frontier line, the division of islands, very likely new accretions, in the river-bed, the determination of drinking rights or of water-rights in cases where cultivation is only effected by means of irrigation from the Frontier river, the exact identity of the source of a river, if this be mentioned in a Treaty or Convention, or of its main affluent, or, in a deltaic region, of its mouth, the provision required for navigation, police, and fiscal control—all of these suggest possible difficulties in the acceptance of a river boundary, particularly in new or tropical countries, which cannot be ignored. In ancient and civilized States the procedure to be followed in many of these cases is regulated by international agreement or by the Law of Nations. The general principles regarding the navigation of rivers traversing different States were indeed embodied in Articles 108–116 of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna[5], and have been applied by subsequent Agreements to some of the principal rivers of Europe, Africa, and America.

The last Natural Frontier to which I need here refer is the wellnigh obsolete barrier created by forests and marshes and swamps. The various Saxon kingdoms of England were, for the most part, thus severed from each other. When Caesar first landed in Britain, the head quarters of Cassivelaunus, the British leader, were placed at Verulamium, near St. Albans, which was surrounded by forests and swamps. Arminius gained his famous victory over the Roman legions by entangling them in the forests and morasses of Westphalia, and there is no more poignant picture in history than the description of Tacitus of those mournful scenes[6]. Venice was many times saved from absorption both by foreign invaders, such as Goths and Huns, and by jealous neighbours by her cincture of lagoons. These, however, as cultivation, settlement, and drainage have advanced, are disappearing types of Frontier, of which no more need now be said.

Artificial Frontiers

Artificial Frontiers, by which are meant those boundary lines which, not being dependent upon natural features of the earth’s surface for their selection, have been artificially or arbitrarily created by man. These may be classified as ancient and modern, the distinction between them—which is one of method only and not of principle—roughly reflecting the difference between the requirements of primitive and of civilized peoples. Primitive society, where not assisted by natural features in the determination of its limits of occupation or conquest, but being nevertheless desirous to protect its boundaries from external aggression, commonly either erected a barrier or created a gap. Under one or other of these headings will be found to fall all the Artificial Frontiers of the ancient and mediaeval world.

The commonest type of the barrier-frontier was a palisade or mound or rampart or wall; elsewhere use might be made of an existing road or canal or ditch. Of the latter class a familiar illustration is the great Roman road of Watling Street, in this country, which, by the Treaty between Alfred and Guthrum, was made the boundary between the English territories and the Danes. An early English example of the other type was Offa’s Dyke, the huge earthwork constructed by the Mercian king of that name (about 780 A.D.) from the mouth of the Wye to the mouth of the Dee as a Frontier against the Welsh. Palisades have been found as far apart as the borders of China and Manchuria and of Manchuria and Korea, and the outskirts of the Roman dominions beyond the Danube and the Rhine. Spartianus, in his Life of Hadrian,[7] describes the palisade erected by that Emperor in the trans-Danubian section of the Roman Frontier, and the researches of the German explorers, who in recent years have laid bare the traces of that remarkable barricade from end to end, have revealed the existence of split oak trunks, nine feet high, driven into a deep ditch, and held together by stout transverse beams.

The palisade or rampart or wall of ancient history was, however, the commonest illustration of a type of Frontier that was concerned less with delimitation than with defence. When the Chinese built the Great Wall of China, when Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and Severus raised the double line of fortification between the Firths of Clyde and Forth, and between the Solway and the mouth of the Tyne, when the Flavian Emperors built the Pfahlgraben and other ramparts or walls between the Rhine and the Danube, when the successors of Alexander raised a similar barrier in the country to the east of the Caspian—one and all were not thinking so much of rounding off the territories of conquests of the Empire as they were of protecting its Frontiers in the best manner against the terrible and ever-swelling menace of the barbarians. Consequently the wall or barrier was sometimes erected upon the administrative Frontier, and sometimes far in advance of it. Though Hadrian’s wall was for centuries the effective Frontier of the Roman dominion in Britain, the Romans yet to some extent occupied the ground between it and the second or northern wall, and even beyond the latter. Similarly the Roman limes in what is now Germany and Austria advanced or receded, not so much as indicating a fluctuating movement of the real boundaries of the Empire, as following the best line of military defence that was suggested by the exigencies of the time. Trajan’s conquest of Dacia was of course a positive, though only a temporary, extension of the Empire.

Rudimentary in conception though these structural barriers may be thought to have been, they were effective in the age and against the foes for whom they were devised. There can be no greater mistake than to ridicule them as monuments of misdirected effort or of human vanity. The Great Wall of China, commenced before the Christian Era and continued at intervals for 1,700 years, was a genuine palladium to the heart of the Chinese Empire. Though occasionally circumvented and more than once pierced by the nomad hordes, for centuries it held back the Mongolian Tartars from Peking, acting as a fiscal barrier for the prevention of smuggling and the levying of dues, as a police barrier for the examination of passports and the arrest of criminals or suspects, and as a military barrier against hostile invasions or raids. It was even more a line of trespass than a Frontier. Much the same might be said of the Roman walls, whether directed against the Picts and Scots, or against the Marcomanni and Teutonic tribes. Guarded by fortified posts or forts at intervals, with watch-towers between, garrisoned in the early days of the Roman Empire by veterans of the army, in later times by native auxiliaries, with the great legionary camps in the rear, they kept the front of the Empire until the ever-mounting crest of the barbarian torrent burst through defences, which there were no longer the men or the military spirit to defend. Walls and ramparts have now passed away as Frontiers of dominions, just as they are becoming obsolete as defences of cities. Occasionally in some remote corner to which the tides of human movement have not penetrated, their survivals are found. The Tibetans thought that they could bar their mountain plateaux to the Indian army by a stone wall built across a valley. A more practical and modern analogy has been traced in the Customs Hedge or Frontier made of thorny bushes and trees, which until a few years ago was stretched for 2,500 miles round the territories of British India to keep out contraband salt from the Native States.[8]

But a commoner and more widely diffused type of ancient Frontier was that of the intermediary or Neutral Zone. This may be described as a Frontier of separation in place of contact, a line whose distinguishing feature is that it possesses breadth as well as length. Sometimes it was a razed or depopulated or devastated tract of country; at others a debatable strip between the territories of rival powers: or, again, a border territory subject to and defended by one party, though exposed to the ravages of the other. Between Korea and China there existed, till beyond the middle of the last century, a broad uncultivated and uninhabited tract over 5,000 square miles in extent in which neither people were permitted to settle under penalty of death (though latterly it began to be encroached upon by colonists from both sides), and which became an Alsatia for roving banditti. A more innocent reproduction of the same idea may still be seen in the Neutral Ground between the British and Spanish Lines at Gibraltar. Travellers have reported the existence of the same device for keeping apart the lands of tribal communities in Central Africa, in the interior regions of the Soudan, the Congo, and the Niger.

In mediaeval times we see a more developed form of the same expedient in the Marks or Marches—a part of the settled policy of Charlemagne and Otto, and generally of the Frankish and German kings. From these Marks, intended to safeguard the Frontiers of the Empire from Slavonic or alien contact, and ruled by Markgrafs or Margraves, sprang nearly all the kingdoms and States which afterwards obtained an independent national existence, until they became either the seats of empires themselves, as in the case of the Mark of Brandenburg, or autonomous members of the German Federation. The same word (already familiar in the Marcomanni or Marchmen of the days of Antoninus), and in slightly different forms the same practice, reappear in the West Saxon kingdom of Mercia, or the March-land, in the Marches between England and Wales, for five centuries the scene of bloody conflicts between the Marcher Lords or delegates of the English kings, and the Welsh inhabitants; in the title Marquis, springing from that office; in the Wardens of the Marches, three on the English and three on the Scottish border, who watched each other from both sides of the Tweed and the Cheviots, and interwove a woof of chivalry and high romance into a warp of merciless rapine and savage deeds; and, finally, in the title of the Merse given to the Lowland counties on the Scottish side of the border. I would that I had the time to say something here about that typical illustration of Frontier character and Frontier civilization, whose history is written in the battered castles and peels of the Border, and enshrined in a literature of inimitable charm.

More pertinent is it to notice that from this ancient and mediaeval conception of a neutral strip or belt of severance has sprung the modern idea of a deliberately neutralized territory, or state, or zone. The object in both cases is the same, viz. to keep apart two Powers whose contact might provoke collision: but the modus operandi is different. Where primitive communities began by creating a desert in order to prevent occupation, and then provided for occupation by authorities and forces specially deputed for the purpose, modern States construct their buffer by diplomatic conventions, and seek the accommodating sanction of International Law. At one end of these devices we are but little removed from primitive practice. I allude to the arbitrary and often anomalous creation by modern powers of small neutral zones, ostensibly with a view of avoiding contact, quite as frequently in order to evade some diplomatic difficulty or to furnish material for future claims. Of such a character was the 25-kilomètre strip on the right bank of the Mekong created by the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1893, nominally owned but not policed by Siam, containing both authorities and inhabitants whose connexion lay with the opposite or French bank. Such a diplomatic fiction could only be a temporary expedient preluding a more effective solution. Similar in character and result were the neutral zone established by Great Britain and Germany in the Hinterland of the Gold Coast in 1888, and the petty buffer State which Lord Rosebery sought to erect in 1893–5 between the borders of India and of France on the Upper Mekong. The abortive Agreements of 1894 with King Leopold and the Congo State were similarly intended to set up a buffer between the Central African territories of Great Britain and her European rivals. A yet further illustration would be the Cis-Sutlej strip of territory, into which, though it belonged to the Sikh rulers, they were not permitted by treaty to enter with armed force, and their violation of which led to the Sikh wars. Of these artificial expedients it may be laid down that they have no durability, unless they are based upon some intelligible principle of construction or defined by a defensible line, and are administered by an authority capable of preserving order.

The history of British, and subsequently of American, expansion in America affords a significant illustration of the futility of an artificial buffer. When the British had conquered Canada and all the territories east of the Mississippi, George III issued a Proclamation (Oct., 1763) forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic (this was known as the ‘fall line’), reserving the lands beyond the Alleghanies for the Indians, and forbidding settlers to enter them. At the same time an effort was made to construct a buffer along the Indian border by the purchase of Indian lands and the settlement of European colonists upon them. But the Alleghanies were crossed almost before the ink on the Proclamation was dry; and, these once passed, no other physical barrier intervened until the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, which retarded, but did not finally impede, the American advance to the Pacific.[10] The Americans inherited the British policy, and as they pushed forward kept steadily thrusting the Indian Frontier backwards by a series of removals or deportations, the object being in each case to separate them from contact with the white man. But the progress of the latter was so rapid that these artificial Frontiers were continually being caught up and overlapped, the Indian territories finding themselves enveloped in the advancing tide. This led to the ‘reservation’ system, which continues to this day, and under which the national existence of the Indians is only, and that with difficulty, preserved by the creation of ‘enclaves’ with arbitrary Frontiers.

Much more is to be said for the buffer State as commonly understood, i.e. the country possessing a national existence of its own, which is fortified by the territorial and political guarantee, either of the two Powers between whose dominions it lies and by whom it would otherwise inevitably be crushed, or of a number of great Powers interested in the preservation of the status quo. The valley of the Menam, which is the central portion of Siam, has been thus guaranteed by Great Britain and France; Abyssinia has been guaranteed by these two Powers and Italy: in the Agreement just concluded between Great Britain and Russia about Central Asia the integrity and independence of Persia are once more guaranteed by the two great contracting parties—thereby constituting that country a true buffer State between their respective dominions: but a new provision is introduced in which, while rival spheres of interest, Russian and British, are created on the north and east respectively, a zone is left between them of equal opportunity to both Powers. This is an arrangement wanting both in expediency and permanence, the more so as the so-called neutral zone is carved exclusively out of the regions in which British interests have hitherto been and ought to remain supreme. The same Agreement contains a further novelty in international diplomacy, in the shape of a neutralizing pledge about Tibet made by two Powers, one of which is contiguous while the other has no territorial contact whatever with that country. Tibet is not a buffer State between Great Britain and Russia; the sequel of the recent expedition has merely been to make it again what it had latterly ceased to be, namely, a Mark or Frontier Protectorate of the Chinese Empire. There is a second type of buffer State lying between two great Powers in which the predominant political influence is acknowledged to belong to one of the two and not to the other. Korea, which has passed under the unchallenged influence of Japan, is such a buffer State between Japan and China. Afghanistan is in the same position between Great Britain and Russia. Here we have a close analogy to the Mark system of the Frankish Emperors and to the practice of the Roman Empire, which sought to protect its Frontiers by a fringe of dependent kingdoms, or client-states.

In all these cases the buffer State is an expedient more or less artificial, according to the degree of stability which its government and institutions may enjoy, constructed in order to keep apart the Frontiers of converging Powers. That such an experiment must necessarily fail is certainly not the teaching of European history, where it is the marchlands of Empire, Castile, France, Prussia, that have often fought their way to greatness and fame. A quite abnormal type of a buffer State existed in Europe, with slight breaks, for over 1,100 years, in the shape of the Papal Dominions. Its boundaries were perpetually shifting, and they made no pretense to represent natural or geographical lines of division. But they approximately severed the continental and peninsular portions of Italy, those parts which have always looked to the West, and those parts which have constantly been exposed to Hellenic or Eastern influences.

In Europe, however, buffer States have not as a general rule been situated between the territories of Powers possessing superior force and a higher civilization. In Asia, where the experiment is now more commonly tried, and where the conditions are less favourable, the degree of vitality to be expected is less. There the buffer conditions are apt to foster intrigue outside, apathy and often anarchy within; and either partition follows or the stronger and least scrupulous of the bordering Powers absorbs the whole. It is unlikely that Korea will permanently retain even her present figment of independence. The future of Siam, Persia, and Afghanistan constitutes one of those problems on which speculation on an occasion like the present would be at once improper and unwise.

Lastly, there are the States, situated entirely in Europe, which are protected by an International Guarantee. These are, Switzerland neutralized by eight Powers in 1815, Belgium neutralized by five Powers in 1831, and Luxemburg neutralized by five Powers in 1867, the object in each case having been to create a buffer State between Germany and France.[11] Neutralization does not absolutely protect, and has in practice not protected, these countries from violation: but it renders aggression less likely by making it an international issue. The desire to extend a Frontier at the expense of a neutralized State can, therefore, only be gratified at a rather expensive price. Whether Holland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, can permanently retain their independence without the safeguard of some such form of guarantee is problematical. The former has to some extent protected itself by constituting the Hague the seat of an International Tribunal, which claims to be interested in the preservation of peace: the latter are temporarily safeguarded by dynastic alliances. But in both groups lie critical Frontier issues of the future.

I now proceed to the examination of the commoner forms of Artificial Frontiers in use among modern States. They are rarely found in Europe, or even in Asia, where either long settlement or conflict has, as a rule, resulted in boundaries of another type.

1. The best known illustration of the astronomical line is the Frontier between Canada and the United States, which from the Lake of the Woods follows the 49th parallel of latitude to the Pacific coast, a distance of 1,800 miles. This line well illustrates both the strength and the weakness of the system. As a conventional line through unknown territories it has answered its purpose. But its demarcation on the spot was so laborious and protracted that, fifty years after the conclusion of the Treaty which created it, the joint surveyors were still at work, clearing a strip 100 yards wide through the primaeval forest, and ornamenting it with iron pillars and cairns, at a cost to both countries which was enormous. Similar lines have been employed to define the boundaries of Canada and Alaska, to separate many of the Australian Colonies from each other, to determine European Spheres of Influence or Protectorates in Africa, and, quite recently, to define the Russian and Japanese shares of the island of Saghalin. Such lines are very tempting to diplomatists, who in the happy irresponsibility of their office-chairs think nothing of intersecting rivers, lakes, and mountains, or of severing communities and tribes. But even in the most favourable circumstances they require an arduous triangulation on the spot, and until surveyed, located, and marked out, have no local or topographical value.

2. The straight line from point to point is also a method very popular in America, where it has been employed in laying down the internal Frontiers of States, and is in keeping with the mathematical precision commonly applied to the laying out of cities and streets. Like the Frontiers of latitude or longitude this type of boundary is a useful and sometimes an indispensable expedient; but it possesses no elasticity, and it is apt to produce absurd and irrational results. It is said in America that many men reside in one State and do their business in another, and there is no reason why so artificial a device should not have even more inconvenient consequences. The internal administrative or county boundaries of Great Britain have been constructed on the opposite principle, and represent a combination of historical, geographical, and occasionally ethnological conditions.

3. Frontiers by reference, i.e. Frontiers defined as running in a specified direction or for a certain distance, or as the arc of a circle, or as the tangent to a circle, are very familiar features in African treaties, where use has to be made of visible features or landmarks. But they are a fruitful source of error or misunderstanding, both in terminology and topography. For instance, the Alaskan dispute between Canada and the United States turned upon the meaning of the ambiguous words ‘a line parallel to the windings of the coast which shall never exceed the distance of ten marine leagues therefrom’. What was the coast referred to, and what was the practicability or meaning of a line that scaled inaccessible peaks and was lost amid ice and eternal snow?

I have now passed in review the various forms of Frontiers either furnished by nature or created by man, and have endeavoured to indicate their degrees of strength or weakness. In practice the tendency of mankind has been to ignore or override nature, and in the case of older States to adopt racial or linguistic or purely political lines of division, in the case of the partition of new countries to adopt the temporary or conditional expedients which have been described. In North America few of the internal boundaries correspond to any natural feature. In South America where, owing to the configuration and history of the country, natural boundaries are commoner, there is scarcely an undisputed Frontier. In Europe, apart from certain ranges of mountains, (but few rivers), which being genuine barriers have exercised a permanent influence upon the formation of States and the distribution of men, the boundaries of the majority of States are purely political, and find their origin in the events of history; although geographical conditions, such as the eligibility of elevated, or sterile, or sparsely peopled tracts for Frontier purposes, have not been without influence in their selection. Of political or historical Frontiers I may mention as illustrations the Frontiers of Spain and Portugal, of Germany and Holland, of Germany and Austria, of Russia and Germany, of France and Germany (except the Vosges), of France and Belgium, of Belgium and Holland, of Turkey and Greece. Here and there exists a State like Switzerland, which accords with no one principle of national distribution, or Belgium, which infringes them all. Both are the creations of expediency or of fear. In Asiatic Frontier delineations tribal boundaries, except where overridden by political considerations, are apt to be observed.

Continued in Part 2, China.