It’s Always Chile in Norway: the Five Types of Territorial
Morphology
by FRANK JACOBS
JANUARY 21, 2013, 7:50 PM
Do Norwegians feel curiously at home in Chile, and vice versa? Do South Africans have a
strange affinity with Italians? And Filipinos with Maldivians? They should, at least if they’re
map nerds: each lives in a country with a territorial morphology [1] that closely resembles the
other’s.
Although they’re on opposite sides of the globe [2] Chile and Norway are each other’s type,
morphologically speaking: elongated to the extreme.
From east to west, Chile on average is just 150 miles (240 km) wide, which is the distance
from London to Manchester, or New York to Baltimore. But from north to south, it measures
2,700 miles (4,300 km), which takes you from London to Tehran; or New York to Los
Angeles. This makes Chile the world’s most stretched-out country - 18 times longer than it is
narrow.
Norway is much smaller than Chile, but still the longest country in Europe. The country
extends 1,100 miles (1,750 km) north to south, with an average width of 270 miles (430 km).
Which makes Norway only 4 times as long as it is narrow [3].
South Africa and Italy? Perhaps the first one gives it away: the nation on Africa’s southern tip
bears a faint resemblance to a bowling ball, what with that large enclave in its middle: the
totally independent Kingdom of Lesotho [4] is totally surrounded by the Republic of South
Africa. You need to zoom in quite far to see something similar in Italy, but then you’re
rewarded with two examples: Vatican City, in Rome, and the Republic of San Marino [5], north
from Rome, near Rimini on the Adriatic coast.
‘Perforated’ is perhaps the
second-most recognizable of the 5
types of territorial morphology
after ‘elongated’. The others are
‘compact’, ‘fragmented’ and
‘protruded’ (a.k.a. ‘prorupt’ [6]).
Fragmented states typically are
island archipelagos, like Japan,
Indonesia, the Philippines or the Maldives. Prorupt/Protruded states are quite rare, but the
Malay Peninsula is shared by two - Burma and Thailand. The least remarkable morphology
also is the most common one: compact states are unperforated, non-fragmented, and lack
noticeable protrusions. When considering shape, size doesn’t matter: China is compact, for
example, while Italy is not (come to think of it, it’s both perforated and elongated).
The Five Types of Territorial Morphology sounds fun,
at least in map-making circles (is Portugal compact or
elongated? Is or isn’t Somalia prorupt? Does New
Zealand qualify as fragmented?) But there is a
serious, geopolitical concern behind this attempt at
classification. For a country’s shape has a profound
impact on its economic success, and even its political
viability.
Case in point: Lesotho. Being completely surrounded
by S. Africa does its economy no good. Four out of
ten Lesothans live on less than $1 a day, and the
country ranks 160th (out of 187) on the
UNDP’s [7] Human Development Index. Even when
compared with the wildly unequal country South
Africa, that surrounds it, Lesotho stands out as a pocket of poverty and deprivation.
The country’s economic misery is compounded by an HIV pandemic, which is all the more
difficult to combat because of Lesotho’s isolation and limited means. One in four adult
Lesothans is infected - one of the highest rates in the world [8] - and one estimate counts
400,000 AIDS orphans for a total population of 2 million. Life expectancy is controversially
reported to be under 50, about 42, or as low as 34. In 2010, a petition for South Africa to
annex the country gathered the support of 30,000 Lesothans who signed in favor of the
annexation. But South Africa as yet has refused to make Lesotho its 10th province.
Another morphology, another set of problems. Fragmented states often experience great
centrifugal pressures, with separatism affecting their non-attached fragments. This is true of
the Philippines, the central government of which only last October concluded a peace deal
with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front [9], which had waged a separatist guerilla campaign on
the southern island of Mindanao. Something similar has been constant in Aceh, a territory on
the western tip of Sumatra, where both the Dutch colonizers and the Indonesian central
government have continually battled rebellions.
Indonesia has had to contend with a
few other centrifugal forces, one of
which actually succeeded and gained
recognition as a sovereign nation: East
Timor, which in 2002 became the 21st
century’s first independent state. In the
process, East Timor changed from
being a fragment of a fragmented state
to being the solid core of a compact
state [10].
The implicit message of the five types
is that compact is best, avoiding the
logistical problems posed by the
elongated, fragmented, perforated and
protruded types. But is that really so?
Cambodia, vaguely resembling a sea
shell, is a fairly compact nation. That
didn’t stop it from descending into
murderous anarchy in the mid-1970s
and installing a communist regime
within its territorial borders. China itself,
morphologically compact, is torn between its high-performing coastal zone, an
underdeveloped hinterland, and a far west that is highly Tibetan and forever rumbling with
the distant thunder of separatism [11]. When considering these factors China is just as
fragmented as it is compact.
Perhaps morphologies are more the signs of geopolitics. Morphology seems a fairly random
way to categorize states and territories, which may or may not behave like the categories
they’re placed in predict they will.
1. Explain the main idea of this article?
2. Who in the article is asking to be annexed yet is being refused and why is this so?
3. The author asserts that China is both compact and fragmented why does he make this claim?
4. What does the author mean when he claims that “East Timor went from being a fragment of a fragmented state to
being the solid core of a compact state?”
5. How does this reading relate to our overall unit on boundaries and borders?
6. According to the reading which morphology is best?
7. Based on your understanding of the various morphologies explain what type of morphology Kuwait has and why
you believe they fit in this category.