West Berlin: The Geography of an Exclave

Abstract

T I HE possession of an uninterrupted territory is one of the principal requisites for the smooth functioning of a political entity so much so that any discontinuity in territory must be presumed to raise particularly delicate problems in political geography. The commonest cause of territorial discontinuity is simply the discontinuity of the land itself. A district or province may be separated from the main body of the country by an arm of the sea, like Vancouver Island or Newfoundland in Canada; or a state may consist entirely of islands, like the Philippine and Indonesian Republics. But these territories are divided by the high seas, a free channel of communication that can only in time of war be interrupted by a foreign power. The same is true of countries that, like Pakistan and Versailles Germany, are cut in two by alien territory but are still in a position to maintain contact over the high seas. In such a case friendly arrangements for overland communication are desirable; it is only where a true exclave exists a part of one state completely surrounded by the territory of another-that special political measures become essential and the political geography is necessarily affected. Before World War II four exclaves of this kind existed in Europe: one German in Switzerland, one Belgian in Holland, one Italian in Switzerland, and one Spanish in France. The settlements made between the victorious powers at the end of the war, and their subsequent antagonisms, have brought into being two quasi exclaves of parallel origin but dissimilar development West Berlin and West Vienna. These two differ from the pre-existing European exclaves both in their immeasurably greater importance and in their more equivocal political basis. Whereas the inhabitants of the smaller exclaves number altogether only a few thousand, the population of West Vienna amounts to more than a million and that of West Berlin to more than two million. Again, whereas all the smaller exclaves are embedded in countries with much the same conception of the laws of nations and of political and social structure, West Vienna and West Berlin are fragments of the Western world, occupied by troops of NATO powers, surrounded by territory occupied by Russian troops and, in the case of West Berlin, administered by a Communist government. They are anomalies in the most critical frontier in the world. Further, there is a difference in the status of the two groups of exclaves. The smaller exclaves are simply disconnected extensions of neighboring states, of which they form integral parts, having no