The Study of Enclaves Some Introductory

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The Study of Enclaves - Some Introductory Remarks

Stefan Berger a
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DOI: 10.1080/14650040903486942
GEOPOLITICS OF ENCLAVES
The Study of Enclaves – Some Introductory

Remarks1
STEFAN BERGER
Downloaded By: [Berger, Stefan][The University of Manchester] At: 13:23 21 May 2010
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK
We still live in an era of nation-states. However, accelerated processes of

globalisation since the last third of the twentieth century have raised ques-
tions regarding the sovereignty of those nation-states, the porosity of the
nation-states’ borders and the increasing importance of transnational institu-
tions and organisations. Territorialised statehood has been taken for granted
by geopolitical studies for a long time. Its breakthrough came with the
Westphalian state after 1648, which was based on the unity of territory,
the unity of identity within bounded territory and the primacy of political
power. Only with the arrival of the globalisation debate did the notion gain
ground that new geographies of power were emerging which bypassed tra-
ditional territorial state power.2 Arguably, these emerging new regimes of
territoriality also make enclaves more interesting again as an object of study,
as they are no longer necessarily curious products of a bygone age, of the
pre-territorialised and pre-Westphalian state. The question needs to be put:
how does the decline of the territorialised state fit in with the continued
existence of enclaves?
This special section of Geopolitics would like to draw attention to the
problem of enclaves, i.e., territories wholly surrounded by the territory
of another nation-state. There are hundreds of those enclaves around the
world.3 Whilst some are peculiar remnants of forms of territorial ordering
long-forgotten and are only of interest to tourists, others are more problem-
atic and demonstrate a variety of international, cross-border tensions, which
operate in the world today. The case studies selected here belong to the lat-
ter category and demonstrate the importance of studying enclaves in order
Address correspondence to Stefan Berger, School of Languages, Literatures and

Cultures, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. E-mail:
stefan.berger@manchester.ac.uk
312
to understand fully a range of geopolitical conflicts in the contemporary

world.
Evgeny Vinokurow usefully distinguishes between different types of
enclaves, e.g., sovereign enclaves, such as San Marino or the Vatican, hard
territorial enclaves, surrounded by a state which has no sovereignty over
it and with no direct connection to the mainland, soft enclaves, e.g., lan-
guage enclaves, but also economic enclaves or cultural, ethnic or religious
enclaves. In addition there are non-territorial enclaves, such as jurisdic-
tional or administrative enclaves. The cases that are presented here are hard
territorial enclaves: Kaliningrad, Gibraltar, Gaza and Kosovo. Seen from a
different perspective, enclaves are also often exclaves. An exclave is a ter-
ritory belonging to a nation-state but separated from this nation-state by
territory belonging to other nation-states. All of the cases discussed below

can also be discussed as exclaves.
All enclaves are borderlands and as such they are characterised by their
peripheral status. They act as barriers against potential ‘others’, and they fil-
ter influences both from the surrounding area and the mainland, but they
are also contact zones and meeting points of different cultures, languages
and political orders, which often facilitate exchange and cultural transfer.4
The study of enclaves can therefore make an important contribution to the
search for meaningful typologies of borderlands.5 The principle of territorial-
ity in international relations, firmly established since the days of the Roman
empire, has frequently led to violence, usually in the form of wars over
contested territories. As enclaves violate the principle of territoriality, they
were often particularly contested between the nation-state surrounding the
enclave and the nation-state which claimed sovereignty over it without hav-
ing a direct territorial link to it. In his classical essay on exclaves, G. W. S.
Robinson already pointed out that exclaves were important phenomena in
geopolitics insofar as they highlight the modern states’ desire for a homo-
geneous territory.6 Enclaves seemed to fly in the face of what, according to
J. R. V. Prescott, had become one of the most important principles of the
modern European state system from the fifteenth century onwards: clear-
cut territorial jurisdictions, clear administrative hierarchies and uncontested
borders.7 In the classical age of European nationalism, roughly between the
1850s and 1950s, the often intense rivalry between different nation-states in
Europe made enclaves appear to be even more of an anomaly. It was only
under conditions of the Cold War, with parallel processes of Europeanisation
in Western Europe and the building of a Communist block of nation-
states in Eastern Europe, that narrow nationalism began to give way to
more transnational perspectives, which also made it easier for enclaves
to negotiate their existence between the rival claims of competing nation-
states. However, as the end of the Cold War often saw the return to more
national (and nationalist) perspectives in Europe, the problem of enclaves
314 Stefan Berger
resurfaced in a pressing and eerily nineteenth-century form, as the examples

from Kaliningrad and from the former Yugoslavia underline.
Given the revival or continued persistence of problematic enclaves, the
phenomenon is worth studying, but it soon emerges that enclaves need
to be studied from a variety of different perspectives. As they often have
been the cause of geopolitical tension, scholars of international relations
and international politics are needed. As enclaves provoked military con-
flict, military strategists are called for. At the same time, economists will have
to look at the ways in which the economies of enclaves interact not only
with the ‘motherland’, but also with the territories surrounding it, as there
were various degrees of economic assimilation of enclaves to its surrounding
areas. Enclaves tend to have weak and vulnerable economies which are not
capable of survival without high levels of exchange with and support from
both the mainland and the surrounding areas. Often they have a special
economic status in order to facilitate their economic well-being. And they
frequently specialise heavily and narrowly on particular sectors of the econ-
omy, e.g., Macao on gambling and tourism, or Hong Kong on finance and
trade. All this makes enclaves fascinating objects for study by economists.8
Social scientists will concentrate more on the development of enclave soci-
eties and their often ambiguous relationships to the ‘mainland’ and to the
immediately surrounding areas. Historians will contextualise enclaves as his-
torical phenomena, whilst cultural studies examines enclaves as meeting
points of different cultures (and sometimes different religions) and linguists
will be particularly interested in the impact of enclaves on language devel-
opment. Hence the study of enclaves will have to be a multi-disciplinary
task, and yet, as the profession is organised in disciplines, scholars have
tended to publish in discipline-specific outlets, often ignoring the work that
was being carried out in other disciplines than their own. Yet the study
of enclaves would benefit from an interdisciplinary dialogue, as often the
issues discussed and the problems analysed mirror each other and impact
on each other. In fact, as David Newman has pointed out in his seminal
article on the renaissance of geopolitics, the new critical study of geopolitics
will have to be interdisciplinary.9 This is especially evident, if we wish to
apply geopolitical perspectives to the study of enclaves. Clearly, perspec-
tives from politics, economics, social science, history, heritage, music, film,
literature and linguistics all impact on the construction and reconstruction
of enclaves and therefore any discussion of enclaves needs to take into
account intertextual approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives. The cur-
rent collection of essays wishes to contribute a little to furthering such a
development.
In the existing literature on enclaves as in the subsequent articles, the
question of collective identity in enclaves is often to the fore. Collective
identity has been a buzz-word in research in the social sciences and human-
ities since the 1980s. In the English-speaking world, the publication of three
seminal books on collective national identity by Benedict Anderson, John

Breuilly and Eric Hobsbam/Terence Ranger, all in the early 1980s, sig-
nalled a major renaissance of the topic which was to spread to other
parts of the world over the following years.10 At the London School of
Economics, research students and staff, among them Anthony Smith and
John Hutchinson, gave research into collective national identities a major
boost with the foundation of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity
and Nationalism in 1990, which holds annual conferences and publishes
two important journals, Nations and Nationalism and Studies in Ethnicity
and Nationalism.11 Much of the research on collective identities has been
focussed on nation-states, and it would be fair to say that the problem of
enclaves did not figure prominently on the research agendas into collective
national identities. Only more recently has there been a trend to look at col-
lective identity also in relation to spatial entities other than the nation-state.
In fact the questioning of the nation-state has been intimately connected
to the acceleration of processes of globalisation. In an important concep-
tual article, Charles Maier has suggested replacing the national orientation
of historical research with a variety of different regimes of territoriality.12
Geoff Eley has pondered the diverse ways in which a ‘historicisation of the
global’ has become urgent under the present conditions of globalisation.13
The move away from the national principle and the attention given to dif-
ferent territorial regimes – region, nation, empire, Europe, the globe – was
paralleled by a recognition that processes of collective identity formation
were very different at different times in history. François Hartog has drawn
attention to different ‘regimes of historicity’ impacting on collective iden-
tity formation.14 Following the rupture of the French Revolution, he argues,
history does not any longer serve as exempla for the present. Instead his-
tory becomes future-oriented. Its telos is now the nation-state (in the later
Communist variant, the classless society). It took the two world wars and
the holocaust to put some serious question marks behind the inherent
progressivism of this modern ‘regime of historicity’. In Hartog’s terms, it
was, however, after 1989 and the fall of Communism that the modernist
order of time with its future-orientation gave way to a presentism, which
looked at the past only with the concerns of the present. If we combine the
insights of Maier and Hartog, we can say that new regimes of territoriality
and the new regime of historicity after 1989 have major repercussions for
conceptualisations of collective identity in enclaves.
No longer has it been necessary to relate constructions of collective
identity necessarily to the allegedly inevitable dominance of nation-states.
If nation-states were not any longer the be-and-end-all of historical devel-
opment, enclaves ceased being an irritant and could theoretically develop
new regionalist forms of historical consciousness. However, a comparison
of the constructions of collective identities in Kaliningrad and Kosovo,
as outlined in the articles in this collection, clearly demonstrates the
316 Stefan Berger
enormous difficulties of such regionalist discourses against still powerful

claims of nation-states. On the basis of the case studies assembled here, one
would have to conclude that one underestimates the power of the nation-
state at one’s own peril and that it might be easy to overestimate the impact
of globalisation on collective identity formation.
The analyses of collective identities in enclaves, as assembled in this
special issue, all start from the assumption that those identities are not
a given, an a priori, but that they are constructed. In this, the following
contributions can build on a poststructuralist understanding of geopolitics,
which starts from a conceptualism of space as always socially and cultur-
ally constructed.15 Territory has no meaning as such. It is human beliefs,
practices and actions that give territory meaning, and therefore it is crucial
to concentrate on actors (which can also be institutions and organisations)

and how they construct the territory of the enclave vis-à-vis the (mother)
state and its surrounding territories. Following Deleuze and Guattari, the
drawing of territorial boundaries can be described as invariably connected
to the attempt to produce meaning and social identities – at least within
the Western logocentric universe.16 If we follow their argument further, then
indeed, deterritorialisation might well follow the processes of globalisation
which we are witnessing in the present, but at the same time, deterrito-
rialisation remains bound up with the reterritoralisation of space. As old
boundaries get erased, new ones are inscribed. The question which needs
to be answered is: what meanings are invested in them?
Meaning is constructed through narrative. As G. Toal has pointed
out, geopolitics can be understood as discursive processes through which
organisations and other actors attribute meaning to places and create ter-
ritorial order. Such geopolitical meaning and order is subsequently spread
via the mass media and becomes anchored in everyday social practices.17
Telecommunications systems, socialisation structures and identity regimes
are all arguably more important to the construction of territorial order than
military power and state bureaucracies which were at the heart of develop-
ing the modern nation-state.18 If, as a consequence of globalisation, we are
indeed witnessing the growing importance of trans- as well as subnational
regions,19 will enclaves (as one possible form of regionalisation) acquire
new meanings and importance in postnational scenarios? The answer will
depend on a thorough examination of the forms of (self-) representation
of the territorial entities that make up enclaves. Put in a Gramscian mode,
the question will be: who produces hegemony over enclaves and by which
means?20 Certainly their borders cannot be taken for granted. Instead their
social and cultural construction needs to be analysed. There is no exclusive
authority or ownership over territory and hence borders are always con-
tested. Space is made, and enclaves can play an important role in such space
making that accompanies the geopolitical planning of state and non-state
actors.
In such imaginative construction of space, memory plays a particularly

significant role. Geoff Cubitt has usefully defined the study of memory as
‘the study of the means by which a conscious sense of the past, as some-
thing meaningfully connected to the present, is sustained and developed
within human individuals and human cultures.’21 A memory of the past is
not so much an act of reliving, of resuscitating, of reproducing the events
and experiences of the past as it is an act of construction, of reworking,
of reconfiguring, of reinterpretation. Memory has a crucial role to play in
ordering space, and as such it will also figure prominently in many of the
subsequent articles. If memory is a vital ingredient in the construction of
territorial identities, it would equally be true to say that territorial identities
help to shape memories; hence both memory and identity work mutually on
each other. This is something that will have to be taken into account when
analysing the memory politics in enclaves.
What is more, memory, as well as territory, are narratively constructed.
As Jeffrey Olick put it: ‘We live in a society of narratives.’22 Collective identity,
territory, politics and culture are all constituted through narrative. But these
narratives are always contested and negotiated. Whilst they forever aim to
unify a given society, they equally produce friction, tension and conflict.23
Following Jeffrey Olick we can see collective identity as being formed in
process-relational ways:24 the cultural production of the meaning of mem-
ory is relational, produced through various media and genres leading to a
self-definition process that works through representation and is hardly ever
unitary or consensual.
If, in the contemporary globalised world, enclaves have regained a cer-
tain prominence, they are certainly not modern phenomena. In fact, the
existence of European enclaves necessitated contiguous territories.25 Some
are explained by peculiar natural geographical circumstances, but mostly
they were the result of political historical developments. Many of these
enclaves preceded the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and they were con-
centrated in Western Europe where feudalism was more widespread than
in Eastern Europe. Around 30 of them remain today. In Eastern Europe
soft ethnic, cultural and religious enclaves were particularly characteristic
until the middle of the twentieth century, for it was here that the competing
claims of empire, nation-state and region were at their most intense, whereas
in Western Europe, established nation-states commanded over much more
stable borders (at least after 1815). The patchwork of ethnic, cultural and
religious enclaves and counter-enclaves and the diverse identity construc-
tions that thrived here, came to a violent end in a series of ethnic cleansings
in the decade between 1938 and 1948.
In the modern period enclaves occasionally arose out of violent con-
flict resulting from disintegration processes of empires in central and eastern
Europe and from the formation and disintegration of composite national
states in Western Europe. In the contemporary world, they have been
318 Stefan Berger
particularly prominent in the context of the break-up of the former USSR,

where we can find 15 enclaves. In a global context by far the most
enclaves can be found on the Indian subcontinent (102 in India and 71
in Bangladesh) – often as a consequence of colonialism and postcolonial
settlements.26 India and Pakistan fought a war over Pakistan’s exclave of East
Pakistan in 1971, which led to the independence of Bangladesh. Colonialism
also produced, among others, the enclaves of Gibraltar, Ceuta and Melilla,
Macao and Hong Kong.27 In Western Europe, the cases of Baarle, Llivia,
Campione and Büsingen have attracted some attention.28 The enclaves on
the Dutch-Belgian border go back to period in which Belgium became an
independent nation-state from the Netherlands. The complex of enclaves
and counter-enclaves in Baarle-Hertog-Nassau are today a historical curiosity
in the EU, which has not hindered the Dutch and Belgian populations from
building a thriving community, where relations between the two nationali-
ties are excellent and the enclaves have mainly tourist value. But it is not that
long ago even here that the enclave had an important political-military func-
tion. During the First World War, the Germans respected Dutch neutrality,
and when they invaded Belgium, they did not occupy the Dutch enclaves on
Belgium territory. These enclaves subsequently became an important focus
for Belgian resistance against German occupation.29
Ultimately, the Dutch-Belgian border settlement of 1832 can therefore
be described as successful. Unsuccessful border settlements, however, such
as the ones between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom in 1922 or,
more recently, between the successor states of Yugoslavia, produced a vari-
ety of exclaves/enclaves, both soft and hard, which often produced further
violence. Vinokurow distinguishes three types of conflicts over enclaves:
a) disputes over the sovereignty of the whole or parts of the enclave
between the mainland and the surrounding state; b) ‘conflicts over enclave-
specific matters’, such as problems of border settlements, access, migration,
smuggling, etc.; and c) ‘representative, or substituting, conflicts’, where the
enclave is just a pawn in a bigger conflict between the mainland and the sur-
rounding territory (Berlin blockade; conflicts over Ceuta and Melilla between
Spain and Morocco).30
But enclaves have not exclusively been discussed in the context of
their potential for producing violent conflict. For Scott Reid, discussing the
possibility of the partitioning of Quebec, enclaves are part of the solution
to state separation without violence.31 UN protection zones, e.g., in East
Timor or Northern Iraq, have functioned as quasi enclaves, in order to
keep the peace and avoid the spread of violence. Enclaves have also often
been seen as bridges between or windows onto different cultures. Thus, for
example, Hong Kong was frequently referred to as a bridge between the
West and China whereas Kaliningrad likes to see itself as Russia’s window
onto Europe. Within the EU, relations between the mainland and the sur-
rounding area of enclaves have become so good that enclaves tend not to
represent any problems any more, as the cases of Baarle, Llivia and Jungholz
demonstrate. The deep integration processes among the EU states seem to
have rendered many of the problematic aspects of enclaves redundant. In
that sense, the EU, understood as a new empire in the making,32 is tran-
scending the nation-state and leaving the problematic of enclaves behind. As
the nationalisation of European territory had rendered enclaves problematic,
the denationalisation process of European territory from the 1950s onwards
has produced a more unproblematic context for the existence of enclaves.
Indeed, it has been observed that a new complex ‘geosociology’ of political
identities is in the making in the EU, where local, regional, national and
transnational universal identities overlap and ‘combine to generate multiple,
fluid spatial and non-spatial identities within and across political scales.’33
But at the borders of the EU, enclaves seem to have retained a higher poten-
tial for conflict, as two of the subsequent case studies indicate. With regard
to Kaliningrad and Kosovo there are very real geopolitical issues and con-
flicts connected to the continuing existence of enclaves. Even in the vicinity
of transnational macro-regions, such as the EU, talk of a borderless age is
therefore much over-emphasised. Borders and boundaries retain their sig-
nificance and have proven to be far more resilient than the exponents of
globalisation would want to make us believe. As the editors of a recent spe-
cial issue of Geopolitics on the postnational politics of the EU reminded their
readers: moves towards such a postnational politics do not mean the eclipse
of the nation-state as an important political actor both within domestic and
foreign EU policies.34
As we have seen above, the process of nation-state formation was pro-
ducing enclaves at the same time as it was trying to get rid of them. There is,
overall, a correspondence between the rise of the modern nation-state and
the decline of enclaves.35 Many enclaves were annexed, purchased or other-
wise absorbed by nation-states. There is strong evidence that the mainland to
which the exclave belonged had to be stronger militarily and economically
in comparison with the territory immediately surrounding the exclave for the
exclave to continue to exist and not to be absorbed by the surrounding ter-
ritory. Sometimes two nation-states even agreed on an exchange of lands to
get rid of the unwanted anomalies of enclaves, but such exchanges tended
to be easier if the exchanged land was sparsely populated or if the pop-
ulation desired the exchange themselves. What has happened very rarely,
historically, is that an enclave becomes independent of either mainland or
surrounding area. In fact, Vinokurow points out that the only known case
to date is that of Bangladesh.36 In fact, the language of collective national
identity penetrated enclaves to a major extent, as different nation-states were
often competing over enclaves and as enclaves sometimes attempted to play
off one nation-state against the other in the hope of achieving specific mate-
rial advantages for the locality. On the other hand, we can also observe
that local identities seem to be often particularly strong in enclaves, as the
320 Stefan Berger
population is keen to carve out a particular niche and status for themselves,
both vis-à-vis the surrounding area and the mainland.
Identity discourses are thus used in an instrumental fashion to achieve
particular aims – maintaining or gaining sovereignty over territory, carv-
ing out a special status, getting more material resources. Lutz Niethammer
has pointed out that the analytical use of the term ‘collective identity’ can
be traced back to the inter-war years, when both the extreme right (Carl
Schmitt) and the extreme left (Georg Lukacs) began using the term to iden-
tify ‘enemies’ (of the state or of the working class).37 Ever since, it has been
a term with a high conflict potential and a dynamic towards violence. For
these very reasons, it was ideally suited to become a weapon in the struggle
for ideological supremacy – even more so as its actual content has always
been extremely vague. Whilst Niethammer is right in warning against the

use of the term ‘collective identity’ for analytical purposes, it is important to
recognise the widespread use of collective identity discourses in enclaves –
for precisely those instrumentalist purposes.
If we wish to analyse those collective identity discourses in enclaves,
a range of institutions and organisations, groups and networks need to
be examined with a view towards establishing how they participated in
the construction of collective identity discourses in and vis-à-vis enclaves.
In modern communication societies, one naturally thinks of the media –
television, film, radio, newspapers – but also of the government and the
state institutions, which saw it as their most important task to ensure the
hold of national identity discourses over what they perceived as ‘their’ par-
ticular territories – whether they lay inside or outside the boundaries of the
nation-state. The nineteenth century witnessed the massive development of
civil society actors, who used extensively the language of collective identity
to ensure their status and importance in increasingly nationally constituted
societies. Very traditional institutions, such as the church or the military, did
not necessarily lose their hold as important mediators of collective identity
discourses. One immediately thinks of the diverse ways in which notions of
citizenship were linked to military service,38 or of the different techniques
with which the churches sought to establish an often symbiotic relationship
to the nation-state.39 Indeed, John Agnew has pointed to the strong relation-
ship between religion and geopolitics in a variety of different contexts,40
and our case studies here underline his point: the geopolitical conflicts
in the enclaves discussed are also always religious ones: Orthodoxy vs.
Protestantism in Kaliningrad, Islam vs. Orthodoxy in Kosovo and Judaism
vs. Islam in Gaza, and even in Gibraltar, far less marked than in any of the
others, there is an underlying conflict between Anglicanism as anchor of
Britishness and Catholicism as hallmark of the surrounding Spain.
Collective identity discourses in enclaves were often particularly con-
tested, not just because of the mulitiplicity of organisations and networks
involved, but also because of these institutions and groups belonging to
different territorial entities. First, there was the nation-state and often nation-
states competing over sovereignty over the enclave. Second, there was the
enclave itself, which often sought to negotiate the different claims of com-
peting nation-states. Third, depending on the size of the enclave, different
interests were at work within the enclave. Fourth, the adjacent regions
and localities often had very particular relationships (often close cross-
border contact, sometimes marked hostility) to the enclave itself, and these
regional relationships were not always sitting comfortably with the claims
and aspirations of nation-states.
Overall, then, the creation of collective identity discourses in enclaves
can hardly be analysed as a top-down process only. What is needed is
a multi-level analysis, which looks at the enclave itself (and, if neces-
sary, subdivides the enclave into different regions), the state to which the
enclave belongs (concentrating in particular on mainland-exclave relations,
which differed widely according to the distance between them and different
regimes of governance), the state(s) surrounding the enclave, which had no
sovereignty over it, but may well aspire to such sovereignty (some of them
might well have had historically close relationships to the enclave), and
transnational players (such as the European Union or the United Nations,
which have no direct link with the enclave, but, because of the con-
tested nature of many of those enclaves, might well become involved in
processes of conflict avoidance and resolution). And of course, all these
different players enter into relations with each other and the interrelation-
ship between all these actors determine to a large extent the construction
of collective identities in enclaves. Such identity construction took place
under a range of different problems: often there was the problem of access
from the mainland to the enclave. Access could have major repercussions
for the economic well-being of the enclave and for communication of
the enclave with the outside world. Blockades of enclaves by surround-
ing territories are not unknown – one thinks immediately of the Soviet
blockade of West Berlin or the Spanish blockade of Gibraltar. Given the
problem with access, many enclaves have at one point or another dis-
cussed the possibility of creating a corridor connecting the mainland with
the enclave. Connectivity often became a major concern for people living in
enclaves.
As should be clear by now, multi-agency is key when it comes to the
construction of collective identities in enclaves, which makes the need for
interdisciplinary approaches all the more important. A theoretical framework
for the study of collective identities in enclaves will have to take into account
the following: Who constructed identities? (agency); With which means
were identities constructed? (symbolism); To which end were identities
constructed? (functionalism; power); What opposition was there to iden-
tity offers? (resistance); and How many alternatives of identity construction
were in existence? (levels of contestation).
322 Stefan Berger
We already alluded above to the importance of enclaves as borderlands.

As ‘borderlanders’, the people in enclaves characteristically had access to
multiple identity constructions.41 The ways in which they situated them-
selves vis-à-vis those offers is revealing with regard to the processes of
collective identity formation. Given that enclaves were often irritants of
nation-state formation, people in enclaves were frequently confronted with
‘internal colonialisms’ seeking to erase the special character of enclaves and
make them more like other parts of the nation-state.42 The way in which
enclaves resisted or adapted to such forms of ‘internal colonialism’ again
reveals much about processes of collective identity formation in enclaves.
Whether they could resist pressure from the state or other outside bodies
depended to some considerable extent on the strength of local elites and
local civil society. Where they were strong, there was a greater likelihood
of enclaves resisting processes of ‘internal colonialism’. However, the level
of determination of the nation-state to get rid of enclaves and homogenise
the nation-state territory also played an important role in allowing enclaves
to retain their special character vis-à-vis the nation-state.43 Rival nationalisms
within enclaves could tear the enclave apart or it could allow the enclave to
negotiate its road between two powerful nationalisms. Religious differences,
if tied to collective national identities, often had a major role to play in
explaining the fortunes of enclaves vis-à-vis their surrounding areas. Overall,
enclaves seemed predestined to develop hybrid characteristics in terms of
collective identity. However, as many actual cases testify, such hybridisa-
tion frequently met with resistance and persecution by the authorities. As
our chosen case studies show clearly, even in an age of pluriform regimes
of territoriality and a presentist regime of historicity, as our own, national-
ising strategies vis-à-vis enclaves impact enormously on collective identity
formation.
Turning to the case studies, we start with two contributions on one of
the most hotly debated enclaves in Europe over the past two decades – the
Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Clive Archer and Tobias Etzold investigate
Kaliningrad’s role in future relations between the EU and Russia. The EU
and more particularly macro-regions within the EU involving several states
have become increasingly important actors in the process of ordering EU
space and the space at the EU’s borders. Hence, vis-à-vis the European
North, the Scandinavian states, Finland and the Baltic states have pursued
common strategies (not without internal tensions) vis-à-vis Kaliningrad and
Russia.44 Archer and Etzold argue that much will depend on how these rela-
tions develop over the coming years with two particular scenarios being
likely: first, a strategic partnership of friends, and, secondly, a more dis-
tant functional enlargement of the EU, they come to the conclusion that
Kaliningrad moved from being regarded as ‘close outsider’ to being seen as
‘semi-outsider’ of the EU. Two diametrically opposed views on Kaliningrad
prevailed: either it was seen as pilot region of EU-Russian relations, or it
was perceived as hell-hole against which the EU must protect itself. Before
EU enlargement, Kaliningrad was often treated as a security issue. The
separation of the exclave from the Russian mainland was seen as a dis-
tinct possibility. However, once the transit problems had been solved in
2003, Kaliningrad was increasingly perceived as an integral part of Russia.
It was viewed as Russia’s western-most window with an important role
for Russian-EU relations. The implementation of cross-border cooperation
programmes was to highlight that role and facilitate Kaliningrad’s new-
found mission. Especially the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (1994,
revised 2004) between Russia and the EU and the Northern Dimension pro-
gramme have played an important role in facilitating a range of multi-level
contacts between the EU and Russia – many of them involving civil society
actors and localities/regions rather than central state/EU agencies. In this

way, cross-border cooperation (including in the enclave of Kaliningrad) have
been insulated from the crisis in Russian-EU relations related to the recent
conflict in Georgia. A more functional and practical approach to cross-border
cooperation involving local and regional actors, thus tries to avoid the big
questions, including questions of collective identity, and instead seeks to
ensure the smooth day-to-day functioning of relations. In light of the ten-
dency of the EU to construct European space as a unified civilisation, the
bigger questions of belonging only really leave Russia the choice between
being counted wholeheartedly among the Europeans or continuing to act
its long-established role as Europe’s ‘Other’.45 And yet, even with the big
questions left to one side, it cannot be denied that the EU has been treading
ever more cautiously vis-à-vis Kaliningrad, as the Georgian conflict clearly
demonstrated just how sensitive Russia’s political elite is to any forms of
threat to its territory and to Russian people living in adjacent or nearby
territories.
If Russian-EU relations and their impact on Kaliningrad are at the
centre of attention of Archer’s and Etzold’s article, Stefan Berger deals
more directly with the negotiation of competing collective identities in the
enclave of Kaliningrad. Kaliningrad is, after all, a city, which is important
for Lithuanians, Poles, Germans and Russians. Predominantly a German city
before 1945, the article traces the refoundation of Kaliningrad as a Soviet
city, giving due attention to the local resistance to the erasure of all traces of
the German past. Under conditions of glasnost and perestroika, this German
past became a symbol for a different future of Kaliningrad and a focus
especially for intellectuals and the young in the city. The rediscovery of
Königsberg in Kaliningrad culminated in demands to celebrate the 750th
anniversary of the foundation of the city in 2005. The official celebrations,
which were held after lengthy and highly contested debates, marked the
official endorsement of the German past of Kaliningrad, which no longer
is seen as a taboo subject. However, as the article also demonstrates, such
acceptance was accompanied by the affirmation of the Russianness of the
324 Stefan Berger
enclave on behalf of the Russian government. Specific policies were intro-

duced to strengthen the links between Kaliningrad Russians and the Russian
mainland, and the anniversary celebrations were organised in such a way
as to underline Kaliningrad’s Russianness. Given the obvious concern of the
Russian government with identity politics in Kaliningrad, a look at German
attitudes towards Königsberg/Kaliningrad revealed a renewed interest in the
city due to the anniversary celebrations in 2005. However, given the exten-
sive efforts of the Germans to come to terms with their National Socialist
past, this interest is combined with a strong sense of permanent loss. Even
within the milieu of the expellee and refugee organisations, an increas-
ing willingness to accept the geopolitical situation and cooperate with the
Russian authorities has prevailed over revisionist demands, which remain
restricted to an insignificant extreme right in Germany. The article con-

cludes by asking about future scenarios for the collective identity discourses
in Kaliningrad. It argues that the predictions and recipes from the 1990s all
look dated now, and predicts a Russian future of the enclave – with strong
regionalist sentiments. It also suggests that Kaliningrad could be an excel-
lent place for Russian-German reconciliation and even a prime candidate for
becoming a European lieux de mémoire.
If collective identity constructions in Kaliningrad are increasingly com-
bining Russianness with a regional consciousness of difference in a peaceful
and constructive manner, they continue to have the potential for violent
conflict in the complex situation of enclaves in the former Yugoslavia – the
topic of Carl T. Dahlman’s and Trent Williams’ article in this collection. It
is based on extensive fieldwork carried out in Kosovo in 2008/2009 and
takes account of the vast amounts of grey literature published in Kosovo
and Serbia as well as making good use of the analyses published by the
International Tribunal for Crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Dahlman and
Williams situate the Serbian enclaves in Kosovo in the context of the overall
instability of firm state territorialities in an age of accelerated globalisation.
They carefully outline the complex political processes that led to the set-
ting up of those enclaves, over which the Kosovo Albanian government
has virtually no authority. Relating enclavisation in Kosovo to the long his-
tory of ethnic separation between Serbs and Albanians in the region, which
reaches back deep into Yugoslav times, throws an illuminating light on
the mutual violence that both ethnic groups engaged in during the 1990s.
It is clear from Dahlman’s and Williams’ analysis that ethnic divisions in
Kosovo have been exacerbated by Yugoslav traditions of municipal self-
government and the ethnicisation of this self-government during the 1980s.
Today’s Serbian enclaves have no fixed borders and lack any legal defini-
tion, and yet these enclaves are administratively served and supported by
Serbia; i.e., its inhabitants act as though they are still living in Serbia – and
the Serbian authorities concur. Hence they provide help with employment,
schooling and representational bodies, such as municipal governments and
assemblies. Serbian law courts take decisions regarding those enclaves and
Serbian authorities still issue passports to Kosovars. Dahlman and Williams
describe in some detail the way in which life in the enclaves maintains the
idea of its inhabitants being citizens of Serbia and the territories being proper
parts of the Serbian state nation, defending all the symbols of Serbianness
(including the Orthodox Church and the Cyrillic script). Comparing the sit-
uation in Kosovo with the situation in pre-blockade West Berlin, Dahlman
and Williams demonstrate the enduring importance of great-power rivalries
for the maintenance and existence of enclaves. But the comparison high-
lights even more the differences between the geopolitics of the Cold War
and the post-Cold War world, as the kind of enclavisation that we witness
in Kosovo is not the result of a bipolar world order, but rather the result
of competing governmentalities. The conflicts we encounter in Kosovo are

not just about state interests or great power interests, but also about specific
conditions of living for people on the ground. As the enclaves are formed in
the context of ethnonationalist projects in both Serbia and Kosovo which are
at odds with the EU vision of a multi-ethnic Europe, the article concludes
by exploring how the EU should react to the kind of ethno-territorialism we
encounter in Kosovo. If it does not want to accept the exclusivist claims of
one particular ethnicity over one particular territory, then, thus Dahlman’s
and Williams’ conclusion, it will have to provide the Kosovan state with the
means for rapid state-building whilst at the same time liberalising Serbia. If
the EU fails to succeed, ethno-territorialist politics in the region will prevail.
No less violent and fraught with difficulties is the situation in the
Palestinian enclave of Gaza. Shlomo Hasson approaches the situation by
delineating three different narratives of the enclave, which he identifies with
three different perspectives: a) a Palestinian narrative of victimhood, b) an
Israeli narrative of enmity and c) a Palestinian narrative of rivalry between
Hamas and Fatah. Those three narratives produce mutually incompatible
identity-shaping narratives, which contribute to the deadlocked stalemate,
which is preventing any constructive solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
The article on Gaza and the subsequent article on Gibraltar both stress
how the geopolitical imagination and its construction of social identities is
deeply rooted in historical-political contexts. For Gibraltar, the British monar-
chy has long played a very special role in constructing the Britishness of
the Rock, and Gibraltarians have formed a very close relationship to the
monarchy.46 Peter Gold surveys the historical development of Gibraltar from
its acquisition by Britain in 1704 to the present, paying special attention to its
positioning between the competing claims of Britain and Spain. He presents
the findings of a survey on Gibraltarian identity, which clearly shows the
strong commitment of Gibraltarians to a form of British identity. However,
it is a hyphenated British identity or what Gold calls a ‘hybrid identity’, as
Gibraltarians prefer to call themselves ‘British-Gibraltarian’. Explaining the
326 Stefan Berger
strength of this British-Gibraltarian identity, Gold stresses three points: first,

the importance of history and culture rather than ethnicity as determining
factors for identity. Clearly, most people living on the Rock are not ethnically
English, but feel themselves bound to Britain through culture and tradi-
tion. Second, Gold emphasises the importance of time: the length of time
determines the strength of allegiance. And third Gold highlights how coun-
terproductive pressure is: Gibraltarians resisted and remembered pressure
from Spain, which only increased their attachment to Britain.
All of the articles in this special issue testify to the importance of
studying collective identities in enclaves. They are vital in mobilising peo-
ple in the enclaves themselves but also outside the enclaves – of groups
and nation-states who have a special interest in the enclave. Enclaves are
often delicately poised between regional, national and transnational con-

structions of identities and belonging. As such they are particularly prone
to having fuzzy borders and unclear boundaries which in turn contribute
to geopolitical ambiguities and uncertainties. Collective identities, being so
intimately related to mechanisms of exclusion and of constructions of ene-
mies, are particularly prone to work towards violence. Mobilisations in the
name of collective identities is therefore still a dangerous undertaking. Far
from being touristic anomalies on a global map of increasingly globalised
and multi-cultural societies, enclaves serve as a timely reminder that violent
conflicts – in an ethnicised or cultural variant – still accompany the con-
struction of various regimes of territoriality and form a significant part of all
global geopolitical conflicts.47
NOTES
1. This article has been written and this special issue prepared whilst I had the privilege of
being a Senior Research Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies. My special thanks to the
directors, Ulrich Herbert and Jörn Leonhard, for allowing me to spend the academic year 2008/2009
in the hospitable surroundings of the FRIAS. My own research on Kaliningrad has been funded by the
British Academy which also provided the funds to hold a workshop on enclaves at the University of
Manchester in December 2007, where versions of the articles in this special issue were first presented.
My thanks also to the British Academy for their generous support. Finally, thanks are also due to the
anonymous reviewers of Geopolitics, who gave important hints on how to improve the initial manuscript.
The remaining shortcomings are, as always, mine only.
2. John Agnew, ‘The History of States and their Territories’, Geopolitics 10 (2005) pp. 184–187.
3. The topic has been studied extensively by Evgeny Vinokurow whose book on the topic is an
excellent starting point for all of those interested in enclaves. This introduction is heavily indebted to
it. See E. Vinokurow, A Theory of Enclaves (Lanham/MD: Lexington Books 2007), which also contains a
comprehensive survey of case studies.
4. Excellent introductions are provided by D. Newman (ed.), Territory, Boundaries and
Postmodernity (London: Frank Cass 1999); H. Donnan and T. M. Wilson, Borders. Frontiers of Identity,
Nation and State (Oxford: Berg 1999); Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey, Borders and Border Politics
in a Globalising World (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources 2004); Remiglio Ratti, ‘Problématique de
la frontière et du développement des regions-frontières’, Sciences de la societé. Territoires Frontalières.
Continuité et Cohesion 37 (1996).
5. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, ‘Theorizing Borders: an Interdisciplinary Perspective’, Geopolitics 10

(2005) pp. 633–649.
6. G. W. S. Robinson, ‘Exclaves’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49 (1959) pp.
283–295.
7. J. R. V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries (London: Allen and Unwin 1987) chap. 7.
8. On the basic economic features of enclaves see Vinokurow (note 3) p. 231.
9. David Newman, ‘Geopolitics Renaissant: Territory, Sovereignty and the World Political Map’,
Geopolitics 3 (1998) 1–16.
10. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso 1983); J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press
1982); E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1983).
11. <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/ASEN/>, accessed 11 Nov. 2008; A. Smith, The Ethnic
Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell 1991); A. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era
(Cambridge: Polity 1995); J. Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict (London: Sage 2004).
12. C. S. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality 1600–2000’, in G. Budde, S. Conrad and

O. Jansz (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht 2006) pp. 32–56.
13. G. Eley, ‘Historicising the Global, Politicising Capital: Giving the Present a Name’, History
Workshop Journal 63 (2007) pp. 154–188.
14. F. Hartog, Régimes d’Historicité. Presentisme et Expériences du Temps (Paris: Seuil 2003).
15. Mathias Albert, ‘On Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity: An International Relations
Perspective’, Geopolitics 3 (1998) 53–68.
16. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
1987).
17. G. Toal, ‘Understanding Critical Geopolitics: Geopolitics and Risk Society’, Journal of Strategic
Studies 22 (1999) pp. 107–124.
18. A. Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (New York: Wiley 1996).
19. Mathias Albert and Paul Reuber, ‘The Production of Regions in the Emerging Global Order:
Perspectives on “Strategic Regionalisation”’, Geopolitics 12 (2007) 549–554.
20. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and Political Economy
(London: Routledge 1995).
21. Geoff Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2007) p. 9.
22. Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret. On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility
(London: Routledge 2007) p. 4.
23. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
1977).
24. Olick (note 22) pp. 89 ff.
25. Alexander Melamid, ‘Enclaves and Exclaves’, in D. L. Sillis (ed.), International Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences, Vol. 5 (London: Macmillan 1968) pp. 60–62.
26. All figures from B. Whyte, ‘Bordering on the Ridiculous? A Comparison of the Baarle and Cooch
Behar Enclaves’, The Globe 53 (2002) pp. 43–61.
27. Specifically on Ceuta and Melilla see the informative article by Ingmar Söhrman, ‘Ceuta and
Melilla – Spain’s Presence on African Soil’, Europa Ethnica 56/1–2 (1999) pp. 36–61.
28. H. M. Catudal, The Exclave Problem of Western Europe (Alabama: University of Alabama Press
1979).
29. Louis Malvoz, ‘Baerle-Duc et Baerle-Nassau: Trente-quatre territoires pour deux communes’,
Bulletin trimestriel: Credit communal de Belgique 155 (1986) pp. 3–58.
30. Vinokurow (note 3) pp. 178 ff.
31. S. Reid, Canada Remapped: How the Partition of Quebec will Reshape the Nation (Vancouver:
Pulp Press 1992).
32. Jan Zielonka, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2006).
33. Carl Grundy-Warr and Clive Schofield, ‘Reflections on the Relevance of Classic Approaches and
Contemporary Priorities in Boundary Studies’, Geopolitics 10 (2005) pp. 650–662. See also M. Berezin
and M. Schain (eds.), Europe Without Borders. Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a
Transnational Age (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 2003).
328 Stefan Berger
34. Oliver Kramsch, Virginia Mamadouh and Martin van der Velde, ‘Introduction: Postnational
Politics in the European Union’, Geopolitics 9 (2004) pp. 531–541.
35. P. Raton, ‘Les enclaves’, Annuaire français de droit international (1958) pp. 186–195.
36. Vinokurow (note 3) p. 98.
37. L. Niethammer, Kollektive Identität: Heimliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur
(Reinbek: rororo 2000).
38. U. Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society
(Oxford: Berg 2004).
39. J. Kennedy, ‘Religion, Nation and European Representations of the Past’, in S. Berger and
C. Lorenz (eds.), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories
(Houndmills: Palgrave 2008) pp. 104–134; A. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004).
40. John Agnew, ‘Religion and Geopolitics’, Geopolitics 11 (2006) pp. 183–191.
41. Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, ‘Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands’,
Journal of World History 8 (1997) pp. 211–242.
42. For the concept of ‘internal colonialism’, see M. Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe
in British National Development 1536–1966 (Los Angeles: University of California Press 1975).
43. S. Berger, ‘Border Regions, Hybridity and National Identity: The Cases of Alsace and Masuria’, in
Q. E. Wang and F. L. Fillafer (eds.), The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography.
Festschrift for Georg G. Iggers (Oxford: Berghahn 2006) pp. 366–381.
44. P. Aalto, S. Dalby, and V. Harle, ‘The Critical Geopolitics of Northern Europe: Identity Politics
Unlimited’, Geopolitics 8 (2003) 1–19.
45. C. S. Browning, ‘The Region-Building Approach Revisited: The Continued Othering of Russia
in Discourses of Region-Building in the European North’, Geopolitics 8 (2003) pp. 45–71.
46. Stephen Constantine, ‘Monarchy and Constructing Identity in “British” Gibraltar, c. 1800 to the
Present’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34/1 (2006) pp. 23–44.
47. Compare also S. Nies, ‘Les enclaves – volcans éteints ou en activité’, in P. Conesa (ed.), La
sécurité internationale sans les etats, Special Issue of the Revue internationale et stratégique 49 (2003).
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The Study of Enclaves – Some Introductory

School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK

We still live in an era of nation-states. However, accelerated processes of

Address correspondence to Stefan Berger, School of Languages, Literatures and

to understand fully a range of geopolitical conflicts in the contemporary

territory belonging to other nation-states. All of the cases discussed below

resurfaced in a pressing and eerily nineteenth-century form, as the examples

seminal books on collective national identity by Benedict Anderson, John

enormous difficulties of such regionalist discourses against still powerful

to concentrate on actors (which can also be institutions and organisations)

In such imaginative construction of space, memory plays a particularly

particularly prominent in the context of the break-up of the former USSR,

been extremely vague. Whilst Niethammer is right in warning against the

We already alluded above to the importance of enclaves as borderlands.

actors and localities/regions rather than central state/EU agencies. In this

enclave on behalf of the Russian government. Specific policies were intro-

restricted to an insignificant extreme right in Germany. The article con-

of competing governmentalities. The conflicts we encounter in Kosovo are

strength of this British-Gibraltarian identity, Gold stresses three points: first,

often delicately poised between regional, national and transnational con-

5. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, ‘Theorizing Borders: an Interdisciplinary Perspective’, Geopolitics 10

12. C. S. Maier, ‘Transformations of Territoriality 1600–2000’, in G. Budde, S. Conrad and

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