Borderlines a history of europe, told from the edges / Lewis Baston

Introduction -- Place Names -- Part One: West ( Where the checkpoint used to be (Ireland/United Kingdom) -- The watch on the Rhine (France/Germany) -- United by borders (Netherlands/Belgium) -- Switzerland and its neighbours (Italy, France, Germany, Austria) ) -- Part Two: North ( The very hungry empires (Lithuania, Russia, Poland) -- Exit, pursued by a bear (Finland, Estonia, Russia) -- The land of amber (Germany/Russia/Poland) -- From Stettin on the Baltic (Germany, Poland) -- The occult romance of Lower Silesia (Poland, Germany) ) -- Part Three: Centre ( Heart of Europe -- The successor state (Czechia, Slovakia, Germany, Austria) -- The peaceful battlefield (Austria/Hungary) -- The other side of the gateway (Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Czechia) -- The Trianon complex: Hungary and its neighbours (Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia) ) -- Part Four: East ( Where is my home? (Ukraine/Russia) -- The chosen path (Ukraine/Poland) -- 'I came from nowhere' (Ukraine/Slovakia/Hungary) -- The secret capital of Europe (Ukraine/Romania) ) -- Acknowledgements -- References -- Picture acknowledgements -- Index.

Europe's internal borders have rarely been 'natural'; they have more often been created by accident or force. In Borderlines, political historian Lewis Baston journeys along twenty-nine key borders from west to east Europe, examining how the map of our continent has been redrawn over the last century. The fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander Ⅰ, Castlereagh, Napoleon Ⅲ, and Bismarck are all there, but today's map of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945.