Corridor (sovereign zone)

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A corridor is a narrow strip of territory that grants access through or through foreign territory, as it usually connects a state through foreign territory with the sea or with an exclave or leads across foreign territory . It can be designed as a land ( corridor train ) or air zone ( air corridor ).

Stephan Trüby describes the corridor as a zone that opens up other spaces, but is perceived as alien itself and has been used in this sense for geographically, strategically or geopolitically defined spaces since the First World War.

An example from the past was the Polish corridor through West Prussia after the Peace Treaty of Versailles , which enabled Poland to build a seaport , but at the same time cut off the area of Danzig as a free city under the supervision of the League of Nations from the German Empire , and thus insurmountable new political problems caused. A similar example was the Panama Canal Zone , which was controlled by the United States until 1979 and which intersected the territory of Panama .

A current example from today is the Neum Corridor in Bosnia-Herzegovina , an approximately 10 km wide strip surrounded by Croatian territory, which is the country's only access to the Mediterranean. Such corridors, which cut through the national territory of another country, are also called cutting corridors.

In railway traffic there are corridor trains that use a route over foreign territory due to geographical conditions, for example the corridor trains of the Austrian Federal Railways over the German corner .

Individual evidence

  1. Duden dictionary, 25th edition, term "corridor"
  2. ^ Stephan Trüby : History of the corridor , Paderborn 2019.
  3. Martin Schwind : Textbook of General Geography , Volume 8: General State Geography , de Gruyter, Berlin 1972, pp. 38-39