Name: The World's Strangest Borders Part 5: Divided Islands
Uploaded: 2020-12-31T18:10:59.000Z
Duration: 9 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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There are thousands and thousands of islands scattered across the world's oceans.

Some are gigantic, like Greenland, while others are tiny, like this one that the British still decided to claim and build something on anyway.

But out of all of these thousands of islands in the ocean, only 16 of them have a border across them because there's only 16 that are actually shared by more than just a single country and despite there only being 16 of them.

Ah, lot of these borders air pretty wacky.

So let's start with the biggest island in the world that has a border across it.

It's divided roughly in half between the independent state of Papua New Guinea in the east and Indonesia in the west, despite there being only two countries that exist on the island.

Though New Guinea is probably the most diverse location on the entire planet, there are around 1000 different and unique tribes that air scattered across the island and just as many different languages spoken by each of them.

If each of these tribes and languages have their own independent country for themselves, New Guinea would end up looking something a lot like this.

But as it stands today, there are only two countries on the island, and the line that divides them separates a lot of these tribal areas and languages and half which you could probably guess as a lasting legacy from the time of Dutch and British colonialism on the island.

Next up, though, is Borneo, the third largest island in the world and the only one on this list to be politically divided between three different countries.

There's the Indonesian side, the Malaysian side and the tiny country of Brunei, located in side of the Malaysian side.

The closer you look at it, you see it's cut in half by territory that belongs to Malaysia, meaning that if people in Brunei want to get to the other side of their country without passing through Malaysia, their only options are either by boat or by air.

The next biggest divided island is one of the most controversial in the world.

Ireland 5/6 of the island, belongs to the Republic of Ireland, while the remaining 1/6 in the northeast corner belongs to Northern Ireland, which is a part of the United Kingdom.

However, despite being called Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland actually extends further to the north, which you can see when I draw this line from the northern tip out over so called Northern Ireland.

Next up is the island of Hispaniola, the second largest island in the Caribbean and one of the strangest on this list.

It's strange because the island is divided right down the middle between two countries that couldn't be any more different.

Haiti in the West and the Dominican Republic in the east.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, while the Dominican Republic is substantially better off with an economy and incomes that are nearly 10 times higher.

Spanish is spoken on the Dominican side, while French and Haitian Creole are spoken on the Haitian side.

The Dominican Republic is 73% mestizo and 16% white, while the Haitian side is 95% black.

Haiti has significantly less natural resource is and has a far higher population density as well.

All of these enormous differences between the two halves of the same island make the border across it, one of the starkest and the most obvious in the entire world.

But there's definitely other islands that have a lot weirder borders.

If you're a big fan of border Gore from games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalists, then you're gonna love taking a look at Cyprus.

It's over 80 times smaller than Borneo, and yet it's vastly more controversial and has even more political entities and drama on it.

There's the Republic of Cyprus, which takes a most of the southern half of the island and is widely internationally recognized as legitimate.

Then there's the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

That's very surprisingly in the north of Cyprus and is only recognized internationally by Turkey.

There's a few left over British controlled relics of the empire still remaining about.

And then there's the neutral U N occupied border barrier that stretches across the entire island.

Basically, there's four different governmental administrations that all exist, wedged together on a relatively small island, and it makes for some pretty wacky situations.

For example, the Republic of Cyprus is an EU member state and the EU considers the entire island to be you territory.

Despite the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus definitively not being in the EU and the UK military outpost definitively not being either post Brexit, the eastern British territory of Dhekelia is particularly confusing, though for multiple reasons.

Let's zoom into this part of the territory first.

This part is Cyprus, which is completely surrounded by British land, and this part is also Cyprus, surrounded by mostly British land.

They're divided by a British road that cuts between them.

And this part is on Lee, home to a Cyprus controlled and staffed power station that for some reason exclusively provides electricity and power for the British territory and not the Cyprus territory.

Then there's these other two weird exclave of Cyprus inside of the British zone, which citizens of Cyprus can only get to by going through the British land and then the British control this narrow, long, long road that stretches all the way out to even more British land because the British apparently didn't want to deal with any exclave situations, like Cyprus does on their own island for next Weird island.

It may not look like it from here, but France and the Netherlands actually do share a land border with one another.

It's on this random island on the other side of the world.

Here in the Caribbean, called ST Martin, the southern side belongs to the Netherlands, and the northern side belongs to France.

The French side is in the European Union and uses the euro, while the Dutch side, for some reason isn't and uses the Netherlands Antilles guilder.

The main airport is located over on the Dutch side of the island, so even most French people who visit the French side have to fly into the Dutch side first.

And since the island technically isn't in the European Union's Schengen area, despite the French side actually being in the European Union, there are actually border checks and custom stations on the only land border between France and the Netherlands that citizens crossing over must pass through Most of the politically divided islands in the world are the fault of Europeans at some point or another so it's only fair that a few would actually be located in Europe itself, and most of them are all located in the Baltic.

Like you, said, um, here, that's divided between Germany and Poland.

Catania that's just narrowly divided between Finland and Sweden and Co Alou Oto.

But by far the wackiest divided island in the Baltic and perhaps even the world is Marquette.

With these junkie borders divided evenly between Finland and Sweden, it's a completely uninhabited rock that only has a single building on it, a lighthouse that was constructed by Finland over here.

So the reason why this catastrophe of a border exists is because way back in 18 09 Sweden and Finland, which was then controlled by Russia, agreed upon their mutual maritime border that stretched through the Baltic.

Unfortunately, the border passed right over this rock, and nobody at the time really character noticed because it was an uninhabited, crappy little rock.

But almost 80 years later, however, in 18 85 the Finns just up and decided one day that they were going to build a lighthouse on it, and they naturally built it on the tallest part of the island.

Unfortunately, that part was over on the Swedish side of the island.

But the Finns didn't really care and did it anyway.

The Swedes thought, Oh my God, how dare they build that on this rock We didn't even really know existed until now.

And so they began loudly, protesting to Finland about it for literally the next 100 years.

Neither side would budge on the issue, even after the Finns made the lighthouse fully automated in 1979.

Eventually, though, 100 years after they built that dam lighthouse over in what was technically Sweden, the Finnish and Swedish governments finally managed to come to an arrangement.

The map adjusted the border to the zigzag pattern that you can see today, which placed the stupid lighthouse over on the finish side and gave Sweden some rocky compensation.

The border adjustment was carried out strategically so that neither side lost any territory so their national pride could stay intact and their coastlines on the island were also left unchanged so that their fishing rights would not be interfered with, and apparently they've both been pretty happy ever after that.

So figuring out how to equally divide a useless and rocky island is probably not the best way to spend time productively.

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