Landlocked
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A landlocked country is one that has no coastline. There are 42 landlocked countries in the world.
A landlocked sea is a sea that is either not at all or not directly connected to the oceans. The Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea are sometimes considered to be lakes. If that is taken to be true, 44 percent of the total amount of water in the world's lakes forms the Caspian Sea.
A sea that is almost landlocked is connected to the oceans by a strait only, such as the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Black Sea. This may be of strategic importance, with one or two countries controlling the entrance, and/or be relevant for tides and freshwater content.
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Significance of a country being landlocked
Historically, being landlocked was regarded as a disadvantageous position. It cuts the country off from sea resources such as fishing, but more importantly cuts off access to seaborne trade which even today makes up a large percentage of international trade. Around the world, coastal regions tend to be wealthier and more heavily populated than inland ones.
Countries thus have made particular efforts to avoid being landlocked. The International Congo Society, which owned the modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, was given a thin piece of land bisecting Angola to connect it to the sea by the Conference of Berlin in 1885. The Dubrovnik Republic had once gifted the town of Neum to the Ottoman Empire because it did not want to have a land border with Venice; this small municipality was inherited by Bosnia and Herzegovina and it now provides it with limited sea access, splitting the Croatian part of the Adriatic coast in two. After WWI Poland was given the Danzig Corridor to give it an outlet on the sea. The Danube was internationalized so that landlocked Austria and Hungary could have secure access to the sea.
Losing access to the sea is often a great blow to nations. The successful separatist movement in Eritrea and the current one in Montenegro are of greater concern to their host countries than they would be otherwise as they control the nations' only coastline. Bolivia lost its coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific. Still to this day the Bolivian Navy trains in Lake Titicaca for an eventual recovery and, in the 21st century, the selection of the route of gas pipes from Bolivia to the sea fueled popular risings. Hungary also lost its access to the sea as a consequence of the Treaty of Trianon: Although Croatia had a constitutional autonomy within Hungary, the City of Fiume was independent, governed directly from Budapest by an appointed governor, as Hungary's only international port.
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea now gives a landlocked country a right of access to and from the sea, without taxation of traffic through transit states. The United Nations has a programme of action to assist Landlocked Developing Countries, and the current responsible Undersecretary General is Anwarul Karim Chowdhury.
Some countries may have a large coastline, but no readily usable one. For instance Russia's only ports were on the Arctic Ocean and frozen shut much of the year. Gaining control of a warm water port was a major motivator of Russian expansion towards the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and Pacific Ocean.
Similarly, several countries have coastlines on landlocked seas such as the Caspian and the Aral. Since these seas are sometimes considered to be lakes, and since they do not allow access to seaborne trade, countries such as Kazakhstan are still considered to be landlocked.
An island nation, a country completely surrounded by water, is the opposite of a landlocked one.
Landlocked countries
Doubly landlocked countries
A landlocked country which is surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries may be called a "doubly landlocked" country. A person in such a country would have to cross at least two borders to reach a coastline.
There are only two such countries in the world: Liechtenstein in Europe and Uzbekistan in central Asia. However, their landlocked neighbours do have indirect access to the sea, via the Danube river in Liechtenstein's case and via canals from the landlocked but non-freshwater Caspian Sea in the case of Uzbekistan.
Half-landlocked countries
The following countries are almost landlocked, and their short coastlines measure only a tiny fraction of the length of their land borders:
Corridors
A landlocked country may be given access to the sea through a corridor, such as the Polish corridor giving this post-WWI country access to the Baltic Sea. However, one country's corridor may split another country into exclaves, such as East Prussia separated from Germany proper by the same Polish Corridor. The same is true of the sea corridor of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The lack of a land corridor joining Germany to East Prussia was a pretext for starting WWII. Bolivia lost its corridor to the sea after the War of the Pacific.
Railway missing links
While the railway systems of Europe and North America all interconnect albeit sometimes with incompatible gauges, etc, Africa, South and Central America, Asia and the Middle East generally do not connect very well. This might be called "rail-locked".
