C2: STRANGE CONFINES

C2 COOPERATIVE MOBILITY: Baltic Boundaries

L'ARBITRAIRE DES FRONTIÈRES  by Lycée Ravel

SHARING and oral presentation materials

The arbitrariness of borders is illustrated by the Lycée Ravel team through the Spanish example.
The boundary between Spain and its neighbors never strictly separates two states (let alone two nations) if we examine it in detail. The supposedly natural border of the Pyrenees follows neither the peaks nor separates the hydrographic basins: it passes where men have agreed, and not where geography would have decided. It also shares the Basque country as well as the Catalan country.

There is nothing specific about these circumstances: despite the Law, the border is rarely a line without thickness, incontestable and dividing. It is always crossed, easily in the Schengen area, but even when we intend to fortify it and make a wall of it (as here, facing migrants, in the South of Spain, whose southern limit is part of the "limes "between countries of the North and the South and benefits from the FRONTEX system that the European Union created to strengthen its external border