Humans effectively live out our lives on a non-Euclidean plane. Although the third dimension is sometimes employed to our advantage, for example in warfare via tunnelling, air raids and submarines, the political map of this planet is projectable onto a flat surface and countries are generally two-dimensional. This has various consequences for us all as Iain M Banks once noted in depth.
We’re also terrestrial. We can’t fly on our own and to be frank the prospect of flight in vehicles from point A to point B on the surface is not terribly exciting because great vistas of discovery do not lie in that direction. Most of the land surface of the planet was known, if not thoroughly explored, by 1903 when the Wright Brothers launched their first plane. The ocean is another matter, as only five percent of it has been explored. Some time in the 1970s, the National Geographic said that the year on the Continental Shelf of North America was 1492, meaning that it had only just been discovered. A Eurocentric view to be sure, and in fact it’s more like the first time humans left Afrika. The sea is both an opportunity and a threat to us. It enables us to move heavy goods relatively easily, unfortunately messing up the planet in the process, and beyond a certain limit it doesn’t belong to anyone, meaning that there are no legal barriers to trade across it past territorial waters.
Not all countries have coastlines. Britain has been particularly fortunate historically in having shipping, a navy and a number of relatively easy routes to other lands, which probably explains the existence of the British Empire. It has little to do with national character except insofar as it’s been formed by the fact that we know we’re on an island or several and what follows from that, and a lot more to do with the fact that we’re near the centre of the Hemisphere Of Land. We’re just lucky: that’s it.
Other countries are not so lucky. Some of them have coastlines, but only along lakes. Some have no coastlines at all. Two don’t even have coastlines with countries which do: Liechtenstein and Uzbekistan. The former can hardly be seen on the above world map but the latter is a big purple blob in Eurasia. It’s notable that the continent with the most landlocked countries is Afrika. North America and Australasia have none. South America has Bolivia and Paraguay. South East Asia notably has Laos, which for most people not living in that area is perhaps one of the least-known countries in the world, quite possibly because it’s landlocked. Bolivia is also quite obscure. Bhutan and Nepal are considered remote mountain countries, which Bolivia also has a claim to be.
These look at first to be merely curioisities of geography with no real world consequences, although one might expect the countries concerned to be more likely to be arid and mountainous. Arid because they’re more likely to be far from the sea, and mountainous because the sea is low down and they’re far from the low down bits. In fact the landlocked status of a country has big economic consequences, which I’ll come back to.
It seems to me that landlocked countries tend to be less familiar to the outside world beyond their neighbours. For instance, Kazakhstan has long stuck in my mind, even before its independence from the Soviet Union, as a vast but unfamiliar country, and is in fact the largest of all landlocked territories. It’s the ninth largest country in the world, the largest country other than Russia in the former Soviet Union and eleven times larger than the “U”K including the relevant part of Ireland. It’s bigger than any country in Afrika, and contains the centre of global human population. That is, it includes the location which minimises the mean distance each person would have to travel to reach. As such, I used it as the location of the world capital in my as yet unfinished book ‘1934’. Unsurprisingly, it’s arid to semi-arid and the capital, Nursultan, is the second coldest in the world, the coldest being Ulaanbaatar in the second-largest landlocked country (Outer) Mongolia. Also unsurprisingly, both are on the largest continent, and Kazakhstan has a particularly high mountain, Khan Tengri, just short of 7 km above sea level.
Hence there are various stochastic reasoning processes which can be used to draw probable conclusions about the characteristics of landlocked states. The probabilities of the following facts about the largest are high:
- Located in Asia
- Arid
- Very cold in winter
- Extremes of temperature
- Includes a high mountain
- Contains the point farthest from the ocean in its continent
It’s almost like Deep Thought being able to deduce the existence of income tax and rice pudding from first principles, except that the last isn’t quite so, although it is near the Kazakh border with China. The only thing is, Kazahstan is also a new country. Although it has a long history as the Kazakh Khanate, it was more or less annexed by the Russian Empire around two centuries ago and therefore became part of the USSR after the Revolution, becoming the last Soviet Republic to declare independence in at the end of 1991 CE, ten days before the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Nonetheless Kazakhstan is a probable country. If there are any other planets with intelligent life and territories, there will probably be Kazakhstan-like countries on them.
It’s also possible to identify various locations in this way. For instance, the world’s highest mountain is likely to be on a border and partly in a landlocked state, and if that’s Everest then it is, on the border of Nepal and China. However, Mount Chimborazo, the point on the surface of the planet furthest from its centre, is in Ecuador, although it’s more probable that it would be near the Equator so there is a cause for it being there. Deserts are also likely to be partly in landlocked countries, and this is true of Bolivia, Kazakhstan and the double landlocked country Uzbekistan, as well as several Afrikan states in the Sahara. Liechtenstein, Austria and Switzerland are also all mountainous, as are Armenia, Lesotho and Andorra. I also have a hunch that landlocked countries are more likely to border larger numbers of other countries than those with coastlines because the latter would not be surrounded by borders. However, large countries, such as China, are also likely both to have coastlines and lots of borders, so maybe not. Another guess, which I can’t justify, is that landlocked countries are also likely to be smaller.
They have several advantages. For instance, they’re immune to damage from the sea such as tsunami and they’re less likely to suffer from hurricanes, which are fed by the sea, and it’s easier to control borders. However, landlocked countries are usually also poor, with the exception of those in Europe, because they have transportation difficulties for international trade and have to pay customs duties and the like to their neighbours and beyond unless they’re in a customs union, and in order to trade efficiently they also have to maintain good relations with countries nearby, whereof there may be many due to the longer land border. Europe is, as I say, an exception. Liechtenstein is fine even though it’s double-landlocked, and Switzerland is one of the richest countries per capita in the world. The number of landlocked countries has also increased in recent years because there are more independent countries. Ethiopia, for example, the world’s most heavily populated country of this kind, has a population of around a hundred million, and lost its coastline to Eritrea. When Czechoslovakia split, that increased the number by one, although there was a time when Bohemia had access to the sea.
In toto there are forty-nine such countries in the world, 11% of the land surface and seven percent of the world’s population, which implies of course that their population is lower than average, which considering their terrain and climate makes sense. Surprisingly, they have a right to a maritime flag and some have navies. Bolivia lost access to the Pacific after a war with Chile in the nineteenth century, but still has a navy with more than a gross of ships and five thousand sailors. It also has a national Dia del Mar, which commemorates its former coastline and focusses on regaining access to it. Since it has part of the Amazon within its borders, the navy mainly operates on that river and is involved in drug trade reinforcement. The Swiss merchant navy has a remarkable history. It has just over three dozen ships. During the War, when it was surrounded by fascists and countries occupied by fascists, it was able to continue trade with the Allies by sending ships up the Rhine and using Rotterdam as its port. Its own port is Basel. Mongolia also used to have a vast empire and reached the sea, so it too had a navy and even invaded Japan with it, but it now consists of a single ship with six sailors on Lake Khövsgöl, which just transports oil across the lake. Finally, a number of landlocked countries border the world’s biggest lake, the Caspian Sea, and therefore have a navy in connection with that body of water. Then there was the Sea of Aral, which bordered Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which has now mostly dried up, leading to the collapse of fishing and the onset of economic hardship in both countries. The Aral is also heavily polluted, and is worth considering on its own.
I first noticed the Sea Of Aral on maps as a child when I was wondering what the third largest lake in the world was. The topic of lakes, particularly the chain of Eurasian ones across the former Soviet Union, deserves a post of its own, but briefly, they’re the remnants of the Tethys Ocean along with the Mediterranean, which closed up from the mid-Oligocene into the Miocene around 23 million years ago. They also include Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake at 1600 metres, the largest freshwater lake by volume at 23 000 square kilometres and it’s also the size of Belgium and the oldest lake in the world, being a remnant of the Tethys. These inland seas are all undergoing a gradual drying upo process which even affected the Med, and will do so again in future, in a trend towards the disappearance of the final traces of the Tethys, but it’s still underway and the drying up of the Sea of Aral is more to do with the fact that it’s vulnerable to this happening due to that fact, but was exacerbated by the Soviet plan to irrigate land to grow cotton for export in the 1960s. It became two separate lakes about twenty years ago. It was also used for weapon testing and the rivers which do still drain into it are full of pesticides. Its ecosystem has basically collapsed due to human interference. This was part of the Soviet план преобразования природы – “Plan for the Transformation of Nature” – which could be linked back to the East German emphasis on plastics I mentioned the other day. There’s also pollution from industrial chemicals.
Apart from Kazakhstan, the Aral also borders the other doubly-landlocked state than Liechtenstein, Uzbekistan, and bearing in mind the problems landlocked states have in general, Uzbekistan could be expected to have them worse. It has five neighbouring countries. The climate is, as could be expected, fairly extreme, varying between 40°C in the summer and -23°C in the winter, and much of it is the Kyzylkum Desert. None of the rivers in Uzbekistan lead to the sea, so it can’t even in principle do what Switzerland does to trade, another likely consequence of being doubly landlocked. It has suffered considerably from the damage and destruction of the Sea of Aral, and unlike Kazakhstan, which is rich in mineral resources because of being very large, it has less recourse to other sources of wealth.
Turkmenistan borders both of the aforementioned states and is of course also landlocked. It’s considered a totalitarian state and is famed for renaming its months after the adopted name of the leader and the title of a book he wrote, as well as various other national symbols. These names were removed in 2008, but it’s not as extreme as it sounds when one considers that two of our months are named after Roman emperors. It’s just not the kind of thing one would expect to happen two millennia later. Turkmenistan is also a neutral state, which may be favourable to landlocked states for which good relations with their neighbours are particularly important, such as Switzerland.
Liechtenstein is the other double landlocked state and also has in common with Luxembourg, San Marino and Vatican City the distinction of being a landlocked European microstate. The imperatives other landlocked and microstates experience are very evident here, since it’s in the Schengen Area and has a monetary union with Switzerland, and like Switzerland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a distinction it shares with many other microstates.
Two other landlocked European microstates are surrounded entirely by Italy: Vatican City and San Marino. To be trainspottery for a second, these are two of the three landlocked states completely surrounded by a single country, the other being Lesotho with South Africa. Lesotho, like many other such countries, is mountainous and high enough to have a temperate climate, which makes it quite distinctive in being a developing country with a temperate climate. It may even be the only one. Eswatini is the other country of this kind bordering South Africa, and with that I’ll turn to the situation of landlocked Afrikan states.
Afrika has the highest proportion of landlocked states even though none are doubly landlocked. Out of a total of fifty-five countries (not sure about disputes so some may disagree with that number), sixteen are landlocked, and of those sixteen, fourteen have a low Human Development Index, the exceptions being Botswana and Zambia. This means life expectancy, schooling and average income (that can also be misleading, see Angola) are all low. There is a correlation between proportion of sea borders and success, although this doesn’t always apply because Madagascar, for example, is extremely poor, and it makes me wonder what would happen if Ireland became unified because then both Britain and Ireland would only have sea borders. The difficulty created for international trade makes the manufacturing sector smaller and many Afrikan landlocked economies therefore rely on mineral resources, exported without being made into products, which means they have no added value in the countries concerned. This also means they rely on relatively few commodities. Their market value tends to vary a lot. It’s also been claimed that the isolation of these countries, with relatively little contact with the outside world, tends to make the national character inward-looking, leading to a drift towards totalitarianism. It almost doesn’t need saying that the borders of these countries were usually initially drawn by the colonial powers with little regard for the needs of their inhabitants.
A country which has long bugged me, and which I have for some reason not bothered much to find out about, is Laos, which from my doubtless racist perspective as a White Westerner seems to be one of the most obscure countries in the world. It’s the only example in Southeast Asia and has five borders. It suffered a lot from the Vietnam War and is full of unexploded bombs. Since it’s on a peninsula and near the Equator, it bucks the trend of many other territories by having substantial rainforest. It is the least developed country in the region. For instance, it only has a couple of kilometres of rail leading in from Cambodia to the capital Vientiane, which is near the border, although a second line from China over four hundred kilometres in length is under construction.
The existence of these countries is a combination of our willingness to divide ourselves and identify locally, and of geography. Our planet is 71% covered in water with five inhabited continents out of six, and we live on land. There have been times in the history of this planet when there was just one supercontinent, and that time will eventually come again. In such a situation, assuming territorial claims existed, the number of landlocked nations would probably be much higher and they would be more arid, have more extreme climates and more extreme problems with trade. If, on the other hand, this planet was almost all water and largely covered in small islands, there would probably be no landlocked countries. Finally, in a situation where this planet had less water it would usually only have one landmass and therefore, once again, many landlocked nations, although since it might then have landlocked oceans there could be more countries like the US, Canada and Mexico with coastlines on two oceans. Finally, on a world like Mars with no oceans at all, if nations or other political entities ever came to exist on it, they would all be landlocked and all suffer from the disadvantages of that situation. Fuel for fiction I think.
A Box Of Chocolates 