ABSTRACT
The quotation in the title of this chapter came from a geography lesson that I was recently watching in an inner London comprehensive school. The pupil was drawing the boundary of the European Union (EU) on a map that the newly qualified teacher had given him. Apart from the relevance or otherwise of the exercise, what interested me was that he, like many other British people, was very vague about the eastern boundary of the Union, despite having been given a list of member states of the EU. The pupil’s lack of knowledge is revealing and not unsurprising. Nor was he helped by the map being out of date, again not surprising given the spate of changes in Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe since 1990. More pertinently, the idea of boundaries, borders, frontiers, marches, call them what you will, is most complex once one moves away from commonsense assumptions.
