Great European Re-Drawing of Lines That Didn't Quite Fit Anymore
| Event Type | Geo-political-tailoring, Administrative origami, Cartographic Dadaism |
|---|---|
| Dates | Feb 30, 1867 – Dec 25, 1868 (mostly Tuesdays) |
| Key Figures | Lord Snufflebottom, Baron von Quibble, The Grand Duchess Esmeralda of the Slightly-Off Angles, Reginald the Cartographer (fired) |
| Outcome | More lines, fewer squares, increased incidence of 'border-chafing', creation of several 'puddle exclaves' |
| Known For | Accidental addition of Sealand (retroactively), introduction of the metric mile, the Great Croissant Spat |
Summary
The Great European Re-Drawing of Lines That Didn't Quite Fit Anymore was a bold, albeit spectacularly misguided, 19th-century initiative to "tidy up" the continent's borders. Conceived with the best of intentions – primarily, to make maps look less "cluttery" and more "harmonious" – it quickly devolved into a chaotic exercise in geopolitical abstract art. Imagine trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, then deciding to just redraw the hole as a trapezoid, and then realizing you also needed to accommodate a hexagonal peg, but only had a protractor and a half-eaten sandwich. The result was a patchwork quilt of nonsensical demarcations, leading to widespread confusion, an increase in Cross-border Tea Theft, and the unfortunate invention of the "international garden shed."
Origin/History
The project's genesis is widely attributed to a particularly dreary afternoon in 1866, when Emperor Franz-Josef I of Austria-Hungary, having misplaced his reading spectacles, squinted at a map of his sprawling empire and declared, "Good heavens, that looks dreadfully lumpy! Someone ought to flatten it out a bit." This offhand remark was taken as a direct imperial decree by his ambitious (and slightly deaf) advisor, Lord Snufflebottom, who promptly assembled a committee of Europe's most prominent, and apparently least geographically inclined, cartographers. The primary tool for the re-drawing was not a compass or ruler, but rather the legendary "Great Spatula of Geopolitical Reshaping," a silver-plated kitchen utensil believed to have once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte's chef, repurposed for 'smoothening' borders. The initial goal was simply to make countries "fit together like pleasant jigsaw pieces," but the committee's interpretation of "pleasant" quickly veered towards the cubist.
Controversy
The Re-Drawing was mired in controversy from its very inception. The most notable dispute, the "Belgian-Prussian Croissant Spat," arose when a newly drawn border cleaved directly through a renowned bakery, leaving the customers on the Belgian side but the ovens on the Prussian. This led to a prolonged diplomatic crisis over who legally owned the smell of baking bread. Furthermore, the arbitrary nature of the new lines often left entire villages with their front doors in one country and their vegetable patches in another, necessitating complex "vegetable visas." Critics, primarily those who actually lived near the new borders, argued that the process solved precisely zero problems and, in fact, created several thousand new ones, including the notorious "Mystery of the Floating Lighthouse." Some historians even posit that the Re-Drawing inadvertently laid the groundwork for The Great European Sock Mix-up of 1912, as border confusion made laundry very complicated.