Extract

At a first simple descriptive level, phantom borders are, “earlier, mostly political demarcations or territorial divisions that structure space despite their previous institutional abolishment”, as described by Béatrice von Hirschhausen. Despite spatial political restructuring, the traces could be materially observed for example in architecture and rural settlement patterns or in infrastructure designs. In most enigmatic ways, traces left in contemporary societies by defunct territoriality can also be displayed in statistics or maps on voting behaviour or other social practices, even several decades after the dismantling of historic borders.

Invisible borders or cultural boundaries between ethnic groups are not marked on the ground but function as an interface between communities, regulate their exchanges and construct the limits of what can be crossed and what is transgressive. By contrast, phantom borders neither check nor regulate movement. They are crossed without transgression. They are less akin to borders as a complex political and symbolic apparatus than to discontinuity. Local societies may even have only a confused awareness of them. As ghosts, such historical “phantom borders” (we can also speak about “phantom spaces”, “phantom territorialities” or “phantom geographies”) might appear on some electoral maps for a time and later disappear.

“Phantom borders” is a term identified when analysing the enduring geographical-historic patterns found in East Central Europe, on the territory of nation states which were composed after the First and the Second World War, from early pieces of the Habsburg, Russian, German, or Ottoman Empires. On electoral...