Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire by Steven Seegel (review)

The core thrust of Mapping Europe’s Borderlands is the exposition of individualism in the service of state projects of nation building, with attendant calculations of territory. This is most apparent in spatial “ethnoschematizations.” Character-driven historical novels could be written based on the archival evidence of cartographic personalities and motives included in this fine and daunting history of cartography. Biographical details are matched by areal descriptions of ever-changing “borderland” regions – including Lithuania, Ukraine, Galicia, Austria, and Hungary. Seegel’s ability to weave believable history is matched by his engagement with a range of critical concepts, the most important of which is critical cartography.

In addition to painstaking archival research carried out in the 26 libraries listed alongside primary- and secondary-source bibliographies, Seegel has evidently done a great deal of reading in critical cartography and GIS, covering thinkers writing from the late 1980s (especially J.B. Harley) up to the present day (including especially Jeremy Crampton and his critique of Harley), and in critical geopolitics, with insights into the work borders do in defining international arrangements of power. The primary message of this book, as the title indicates, is to shift the focus from borders as parts of power containers to borderlands as negotiated areas, in Thongchai Winichakul’s (1988) sense.

Seegel quotes Serhii Plokhy (2008, 293): “[b]orders were created to polic and divide people, but the borderlands served as contact zones where economic transactions (legal and illegal) took place, loyalties were traded, and identities negotiated” (p. 194). This bolsters Seegel’s own claims that cartography, as practised by individual cartographers, produced a discourse heavily skewed in favour of representing borders as opposed to borderlands, serving to mask messy “ground truths” that might exist “out there,” blurring senses of boundary in ways that imperial (i.e., expanding) states find uncomfortable.

Seegel traces a trajectory from 1707, the date on which Jonathan Swift’s character Lemuel Gulliver arrived in the land of Laputa, until the end of World War I. The former serves as a trope for Swift’s own critique of European imperialism and senses of (universalizing) boundaries, while the latter offers a point of critique of Communism’s hypocrisy in adopting the racist categorizations of the Tsarist regime, which Seegel terms “ethnoschematization,” or the reduction of ethnicity and identity to lines on a map and covering swatches of territory. Seegel notes “that the state needed cartographers to make military, historical and ethnographic maps, and cartographers likewise needed a state and its institutions to make their nationalizing and imperializing visions of ‘open space’ a reality” (p. 274).

This “open space” was crucial to an expanding urge essential to imperial universalizing projects. At various times, “subject” peoples, and especially the Polish, were categorized as tribe, linguistic group, or nation, depending on the state to which particular cartographers were beholden and the interests they served. Counter-mapping played out through mapped methods for “sorting things out,” those “things” being, in fact, people living out their lives in reality on the ground, against maps whose provenance was often based more on fantasy than on a concern with reality or objective truth. Conveniently for state interests, fantasy and reality are very hard to distinguish when projected upon maps designed to convey power and objectivity (Bowker and Star 1999).

Opened (cartographic) spaces are more easily filled by those who control the conditions of their opening, conditions created in and through maps. Supposedly neutral tools used in making pigeonholes for people become less benign when viewed in light of Seegel’s details of cartographers’ struggles for recognition and the lengths to which they will go to achieve promotion in service to military and surveying branches of government. Seegel even briefly mentions GIS in the introduction to Mapping Europe’s Borderlands (p. 11), and...