Border states is a term referring to the European nations that won their independence from the Russian Empire after the Russian Revolution, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and ultimately the defeat of the German Empire in World War I. During the interwar period the nations of Western Europe implemented a border states policy which aimed at uniting these nations in defense against the Soviet Union and communist expansionism. The border states were Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and, until their annexation into the Soviet Union, Belarus and Ukraine.
The policy tended to see the border states as a cordon sanitaire, or buffer states, separating Western Europe from the newly formed Soviet Union. It was never particularly successful, however; disputes and different allegiances between and within the group of states hindered unity. The matter was further complicated by the rise of the expansionist Nazi Germany. In 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which effectively divided the territory of the border states between those two countries. With the exception of Finland, all border states fell under Soviet occupation as a result of World War II.
Famous quotes containing the words border and/or states:
“Swift while the woof is whole,
turn now my spirit, swift,
and tear the pattern there,
the flowers so deftly wrought,
the border of sea-blue,
the sea-blue coast of home.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)