
The Messy Mediterranean - BerislavLopac
https://sovereignlimits.com/blog/the-messy-mediterranean
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NKosmatos
Can we please leave politics out of HN? Being Greek I don’t want to see a
conflict starting here. With that being said, it would be best if all nations
signed and followed UNCLOS [0] guidelines and adopted a strict equidistance-
based maritime boundary for all sea disputes.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea)

~~~
gus_massa
It looks quite neutral for me, perhaps because I'm from Argentina and we don't
have any skin in this game. (We have our land and maritime border conflict
too. It's a sensitive topic in all the countries. [1])

The article helped me to understand the recent problem. My fast and possible
inaccurate takeaway is:

 _The land shore of Turkey has a lot of nearby Greek islands. If there is oil
nearby, that will surely cause a problem._

[1] Let's pick and easy one, the land frontier of Argentina and Chile. The
Andes mountain range is in between. One method to select the border is to pick
the highest mountains, other method is to look at the water basins. They are
very different, so after a lot of problem we selected a mixed method and then
added some arbitrary borders for a smaller section. Now it is quite settled,
probably because there is not too much oil under the area. Other borders are
too boring or too polemic.

~~~
ivanhoe
It's complicated to rely on natural barriers as they change too, for instance
some parts of the border between Croatia and Serbia were drawn to follow the
Danube river, but the river bed is ever-changing as water finds new ways -
creating meanders and river islands - so now we have some areas in-between the
two countries where ownership is disputed. Some guy even tried to declare a
new state in one of those areas
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland)

~~~
emteycz
The Gornja Siga area (where Liberland is) did not appear over time as the
river changed, it's that the Serbians are explicitly using the historical
river while the Croatians are explicitly using the contemporary river, which
results in Serbia not claiming the piece of land and Croatia declaring it
belongs to Serbia.

~~~
ivanhoe
Actually it's the opposite, and the difference between the two is because the
river bed has changed over the time naturally and by human engineering. To
quote Wikipedia: "Serbia holds the opinion that the thalweg of the Danube
valley and the centre line of the river represents the international border
between the two countries. Croatia disagrees and claims that the international
border lies along the boundaries of the cadastral municipalities located along
the river—departing from the course at several points—reflecting the course of
the Danube which existed in the 19th century before meandering and hydraulic
engineering works altered its course."

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StavrosK
Google cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fsovereignlimits.com%2Fblog%2Fthe%2Dmessy%2Dmediterranean)

I was hoping we'd gotten past the era where blog articles stopped loading
under a bit of traffic, alas.

~~~
rsecora
Yep, HN hug of death is still real.

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anonu
This is a very real problem in the Eastern Med. as the article points out.

From a Lebanon perspective, people have been talking about tapping into these
offshore energy reserves for a decade+. But the inside conversation is that
the Lebanese people would never see a penny from any revenues. They would
simply get funneled into various politicians pockets.

It seems like many countries would be far better off without this.

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082349872349872
TIL cyprus still has two UK bases. That might help complicate things.

~~~
toxicFork
UK, complicating things since 19... wait... 18... 1700s?

~~~
082349872349872
Wikipedia says 1688-1914. I would argue that brit foreign policy makers
weren't ready to pass the baton until 1957 made it obvious.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony#15th–19th_centuries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony#15th–19th_centuries)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis#Financial_pressure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis#Financial_pressure)

