Enclave

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In human geography, an enclave is a piece of land which is totally enclosed within a foreign territory. If another country has sovereignty over it, it may also be called an exclave:

• it is an enclave of the foreign territory which surrounds it
• it is an exclave of the country which has sovereignty over it

Exclave may also exist in subnational level when a subdivision exists outside of its parent division. (See #Subnational Enclaves)

The word 'enclave' crept into the jargon of diplomacy rather late in English, in 1868, coming from French, the lingua franca of diplomacy, with a sense inherited from late Latin inclavatus meaning 'shut in, locked up" (with a key, late Latin clavis). The 'exclave' is a logical extension created three decades later.

Since living in an enclave can be very inconvenient and many agreements have to be found by both countries over mail addresses, power supply or passage rights, enclaves tend to be eliminated and many cases that existed before have now been solved.

In English ecclesiastic history subnational enclaves were known as peculiars.

Contents 1 Enclaved Countries 2 Coastal countries 3 Coastal Fragments 4 True Enclaves 5 Practical Enclaves 6 Subnational Enclaves 7 See also 8 External link 8.1 References

Enclaved Countries

Some enclaves are countries in their own rights, completely surrounded by another one, and therefore not exclaves. Three such sovereign countries exist:

• The republic of San Marino, enclaved within Italy
• Vatican City, within the city of Rome, in Italy
• The Kingdom of Lesotho, embedded inside South Africa

Coastal countries

Some countries may be enclaved inside another one, except for a small coastal section with allows them to have access to open waters. However, this access is more of a corridor.

• The most typical country of this kind is Gambia, prevented only by a 50 km shore strip on the Atlantic Ocean from being an enclave of Senegal.
• Both the independent city of Singapore and the Sultanate of Brunei, within Malaysia.
• The independent city of Monaco within France.

Although Canada and Ireland, for example, border just one other country, they have enough access to international waters not to be considered near-enclaves.

Coastal Fragments

Some territories cannot be reached from the country they belong to except by international waters. These are considered detached fragments of their motherland rather than enclaves, since they do not meet the criterion of being enclosed on all sides by foreign territory. Some examples :

• The Spanish towns Ceuta and Melilla on the north coast of Morocco.
• The British colony of Gibraltar, on the south coast of Spain.
• Oecussi-Ambeno, a fragment of East Timor geographically within the Indonesian part of Timor, but accessible from the sea
• Cabinda, a territory north of its main land of Angola, locked between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo.
• The Russian territory of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, which, before World War II, was the German city of K�nigsberg, capital of East Prussia, itself an exclave after World War I.

Many countries have coastal fragments that can't be directly accessed from the main land except by boat or aeroplane. An extreme example of is Alaska, detached from the United States of America by Canada, but at least two other tiny parts of the USA can't be reached by foot except by entering Canada: Point Roberts in north-western Washington, and the Northwest Angle, a peninsula bordering Lake of the Woods in Minnesota. The far south coast of Croatia, part of the Dubrovnik-Neretva county, is separated from its mainland by a tiny corridor in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

See also: List of international enclaves, and "Countries consisting of two non-contiguous parts" in the Country article.

True Enclaves

Here, we consider those territories where a country is sovereign, but cannot be reached without entering another country. The best-known example was West Berlin, prior to the re-unification of Germany, which was de facto a West German exclave within East Germany, and thus an East German enclave (many small West Berlin land areas were in turn separated from the main one, some by only a few meters). De jure all of Berlin was ruled by the four Allied powers; this meant that West Berlin could not send voting members into the German Parliament, and that its citizens were exempt from conscription.

From the numerous enclaves that used to exist in Europe, only the following ones now remain:

• The town of Baarle in southern Netherlands is made of the municipality of Baarle-Hertog, a group of 22 Belgian enclaves within Netherlands and of the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau which itself has 3 enclaves in Belgian soil and a small one inside one the Belgian enclave.
• [[B�singen]], Germany, is an exclave in the canton of Schaffhausen, northern Switzerland. Germany also has a group of 5 exclaves created by a railway track between the towns of [[R�tgen]] and Monschau, south of Aachen, which was granted Belgian sovereignty.
• The town of Campione, in Italian, is enclaved in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland. It is part of Swiss customs, but still Italian soil. The money used is the Swiss Franc and its inhabitants don't have to pay any income tax to Italy.
• The Spanish town of Llivia, exclave in southern France, a few kilometers east of the Principalty of Andorra.
• In the eastern part of Belarus, the Russian exclave of San'kovo-Medvezh'e is made up of two villages.
• The highway which crosses the town of Palanca in eastern Moldova has recently been exchanged to Ukraine for an area of the same size, creating an enclave.
• The villages of Ormidhia and Xylotimbou in Cyprus, surrounded by the British Sovereign Base Area of Dhekelia. Inside this base, the Dhekalia Power Station also belongs to Cyprus although it's surrounded by British land and is even divided in two by a British road.

Outside Europe, enclaves are to be found in Asia :

• Madha is an Omani territory enclaved in the United Arab Emirates which in turn hosts the tiny territory of Nahwa, an UAE enclave within Madha.
• In the Indian district of Cooch-Behar, there are 92 exclaves of Bangladesh. Similarly, there are 106 exclaves of India inside Bangladesh. 21 of the Bangladeshi exclaves are embodied in Indian exclaves. 3 of the Indian exclaves are embodied in Bangladeshi exclaves. The largest Indian exclave, Balapara Khagrabari, embodies one Bangladeshi exclave, Upanchowki Bhajni, which itself embodies an Indian exclave called Dahala Khagrabari.
• In Armenia, there exist three exclaves of Azerbaijan. Two of them are villages in north-eastern Armenia. The other one is located north of the region of Nakhchivan (which is a detached fragment of Azerbaijan stuck between Armenia, Iran and Turkey).
• Reciprocally, there exists one Armenian exclave, a village in north-western Azerbaijan.
• The Fergana Valley, a region where Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan meet, has a large number of enclaves. Barak, a small Kyrgyz village is surrounded by Uzbekistan. The Tajik village of Sarvan is in Uzbek territory and the Tajik village of Vorukh and a small piece of land near Kairagach are embodied in Kyrgyz land. The Uzbek towns of Sokh and Shakhimardan and the two tiny Uzbek territories of Qalacha and Khalmion, north of Sokh are all surrounded by Kyrgyz territory.

Two set of islands, surrounded by the territorial waters of another country, can be found elsewhere :

• The Malawian islands of Chisamula Island and Likoma Island are located within Mozambiquean territorial waters in Lake Nyasa.
• The Argentine island of Isla Martin Garcia is surrounded by Uruguayan territorial waters of the Rio de la Plata mouth.

The life in such areas varies a lot from one enclave to another. Whereas in modern times European enclaves are usually legally well-defined and their population is often free to move from one country to another, Asian enclaves often result from disagreement over border treaties. This causes their inhabitants to be at worst enclosed inside, at best seriously impaired in their usual life.

Practical Enclaves

Some territories, while not geographically detached from their motherland, are more easily reached by entering a foreign country, because of their location in a hilly area, or because the only road available enters that foreign place before coming back to the mother country. Those territories may be called "practical enclaves" and are easily to be found along every border. Here are some examples:

• The Austrian municipality of Jungholz is surrounded by German territory virtually everywhere, except at one point: the top of a mountain.
• Some villages in eastern Estonia can only be reached by a road which ventures inside Russian territory. One can drive on the road without any visa, but it's forbidden to stop before coming back to Estonia.

Subnational Enclaves

Sometimes, administrative divisions of a country, due to historical or practical reasons, caused some areas to belong to a division while being attached to another one. There are countless examples; here are some:

• In Japan, Kitayama Village (北山村) and Wakayama Town Enclave (熊野川町飛地) of Wakayama prefecture are located in the border between Mie and Nara prefectures.
• In Wales, the traditional borders of Flintshire include a large exclave called Maelor Saesneg.
• In Scotland, Cromartyshire traditionally had a large number of enclaves in Ross-shire.
• In France, the [[d�partement]] of Vaucluse has a rather large exclave around the city of [[Valr�as]] inside [[Dr�me]]. Valr�as used to be part of the possessions of the Pope in France near Avignon and were all attached to Vaucluse when annexed after the divisions were created.
• In the United States of America, the westernmost part of Kentucky is a piece of land known as the Madrid Bend, located inside a loop of the Mississippi River, detached from its mother state. Crossing the river in any direction from the Madrid Bend would bring a traveler to Missouri; the only road in the area goes to the south, into Tennessee.
• In Australia, the Australian Capital Territory is an enclave of New South Wales. The Australian constitution (written before the founding of the ACT) specified that the site for the national capital should be wholly within New South Wales.

See also

• List of ethnic enclaves in North American cities

External link

• Enclaves of the world
• Jan S. Krogh's Geosite

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Enclave" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclave, used under the GNU Free Documentation License