On Borders

18Jan19

Lately — perhaps because of the border wall arguments here in the U.S. and the Brexit controversies in the U.K., I’ve been thinking about the Anglo-Scottish border.

If you take the LNER from London to Edinburgh now, and you pay close attention, you might notice when you cross the border. If not, you may notice a gradual change of scenery between the English Northeast and the Scottish Borders, the change becoming more obvious the closer you get to East Lothian. It was not always thus.

The Anglo-Scottish border evolved from Roman Britain to 1707 — as did (what would become) England and (what would become) Scotland. The Romans, thinking defensively, built walls, first Hadrian’s Wall (entirely in what became England), then the Antonine Wall (across what is now Scotland’s Central Belt, from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth). The Roman departure from Britain had many causes, including over-reach in other parts of the Empire and implosion within, but the Roman walls could not secure southern Britain for Rome — certainly not without security elsewhere.

As Scotland and England came into being, the border both shifted and changed. The border reached south of Berwick at times (Berwick Rangers still play in the Scottish association football leagues), and at one point was far enough north that Lothian (including Edinburgh) was in English hands. Thoughts on the shifting border also must take into account the times, notably during the reign of Edward I and during the Commonwealth, that Scotland was either a vassal of or incorporated into England.

Wherever the border lay, it was porous. Families spanned the border. Family allegiances shifted from north to south and back again. Men in trouble with the law on one side of the border would escape to family on the other side until the trouble abated — or was overshadowed by new trouble on the other side.

This seems a common situation for border territories. Think of Alsace-Lorraine, which was a bone of contention between France and Germany for fifty years; or of the Czech Sudetenland, which Nazi Germany claimed because of the presence of ethnic Germans (taking Czechoslovakia’s border fortifications with them). More recently, think of the ethnic Russians protesting (or more) in the Ukraine. Think of the southern border of the U.S., in its largely open period before World War I — the basis for many a Western movie. More positively, think of the Canadians who cross regularly to shop in Point Roberts, or of the international interdependence of El Paso–Juárez.

In the end, what settled the Anglo-Scottish border (in both location and in individuals’ cross-border ‘adventuring’)? Unification. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 meant that England would no longer turn a blind eye to Scottish reivers, nor would Scotland to English reivers. Trade between the two countries opened under their shared monarch, making the borders more a place to trade openly, and less a place to smuggle and evade the law. Parliamentary Union in 1707 sealed the deal, guaranteeing extradition, tariff-free trade, and the free movement of peoples.

What does this tell us about borders? Perhaps the most important lesson is that just because you have a line on a map doesn’t mean that the people near that line recognize it as significant. The Roman and Czech examples also indicate that walls don’t work — at least not on their own, and not without internal stability and security. (Experience at the U.S. border with Mexico, and at the border between Gaza and Egypt, also shows that walls can be defeated with a shovel.) What does seem to work, judging by the history of the Anglo-Scottish border (and of the border between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom) is creating a multi-national region with mutual support between governments, an interdependent economy, free trade, free movement of peoples, and with easy extradition between jurisdictions. It’s not an easy solution — especially as questions of sovereignty arise, and it’s difficult to navigate the demands of the different sovereign nations while protecting the peoples of each country. But it’s the only one that seems to work.

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