Enclave & Exclave

Enclave (pronounced ahn-kleyv (U) or en-klave (non-U))

(1) A country or (especially), an outlying portion of a country, entirely or mostly surrounded by the territory of another country.

(2) In casual use (and as a quasi-technical term in demography and sub-strains of applied geography), any (usually) small, distinct area or group enclosed or isolated within a larger one.

(3) By extension, in politics, sociology etc, non-physically defined subsets of a whole; a group that set off from a larger population by its characteristics or behavior.    

(4) To isolate or enclose (especially territory) within a foreign or uncongenial environment; ie by an act of enclaving to created something enclaved.

(5) In pathology, a detached mass of tissue enclosed in tissue of another kind.

(6) In computer operating systems, an isolated portion of an application's address space which places certain restrictions on access by code outside the enclave (not to be confused with a sandbox (of which one or more enclaves may be a part.

(7) In geology, an aggregate of minerals or rock found inside another larger rock body.

1868: From the Middle French enclave, a noun derivative of enclaver (to enclose), from the Old French enclaver (to inclose, lock in), from the unattested Vulgar Latin inclāvāre (to lock in), the construct being in- + clave.  The prefix in- from the Proto-Italic en-, from the primitive Indo-European n̥- (not), a zero-grade form of the negative particle ne (not) and akin to ne-, nē & nī).  Clave was from clavis (key), from the Proto-Italic klāwis which was either (1) a secondary i-stem derivation of the primitive Indo-European kleu- & klēu (nail, pin, hook (the old instruments (ie bars & bolts) used to secure the doors of primitive structures)) from which Classical Latin also gained clāvus (nail), an inherited Indo-European word originally denoting an instrument for unlocking doors or (2) a loanword from the dialectal Ancient Greek κλᾱϝίς (klāwís) (in the Classical: κλείς (kleís)), from the same primitive Indo-European root.  Enclave is a noun, enclaved & enclaving are verbs and enclavish is the (rare) adjective; the noun plural is enclaves.

In political geography, the use to describe a "small portion of one country which is entirely surrounded by the territory of another" dates from 1868 in English but it had been in use in French since the mid-fifteenth century as a derivative of the thirteenth century verb enclaver which had since the late 1400s been a technical term in property law describing “a parcel of land surrounded by land owned by a another which could not be reached for its exploitation in a practical and sufficient manner without crossing the surrounding land”.  The legal mechanism to resolve this was what was called “servitude passage for the benefit of the owner of the surrounded land”, a device which was essentially a personal easement.  The word was first used in international law when the Treaty of Madrid was signed in 1526 and enclave came to be applied to just about any legally defined territory surrounded by land under other ownership, proving popular in English and many other languages although, under the Raj, "pocket" tended to be used instead and British geographical were also called detachments within the UK while the Colonial Office invented “detached dominions”.  In the Church of England, where the same concept existed as ecclesiastical districts, parishes, chapels or churches which operated outside the jurisdiction of the bishop and archdeacon of the diocese in which they were situated, the canon lawyers invented “the peculiar”.

As used to describe a segmented memory space in computer operating systems, enclaves are regarded by some as synonymous with sandboxes but the two constructs have separate purposes.  An enclave is created by an application as a memory space protected from the rest of the application yet if a call is made into the enclave, it remains able to access all memory used by the application; this is a deliberate aspect of the design.  Those requiring bi-directional exclusivity need to run their enclave (and in most cases thus the application) inside a sandbox, sonthing which obviously limits functionality in a production environment.

Enclave and exclave are distinct in legal definition and geographical consequence but in idiomatic or metaphorical use, enclave is used almost exclusively as a descriptor of anything where the idea is of something small surrounded by a larger whole.  It’s applied especially in economic and social demography (white enclave; Chinese enclave etc).   

Exclave (pronounced eks-kleyv)

(1) A portion of a country geographically separated from the main part by surrounding foreign territory.

(2) An outlying, detached portion of a gland or other part, as of the thyroid or pancreas; an accessory gland.

1885-1890: Modeled on enclave, the construct was ex- + -clave.  In Middle English, the prefix ex- was applied to words borrowed from Middle French.  It was from the Latin ex- (out of, from), from the primitive Indo-European eǵ- & eǵs- (out) and was cognate with the Ancient Greek ἐξ (out of, from), the Transalpine Gaulish ex- (out), the Old Irish ess- (out), the Old Church Slavonic изъ (izŭ) (out) and the Russian из (iz) (from, out of).  In English, the x in ex- sometimes is elided before certain constants, being reduced to e- (eg ejaculate), almost always to ensure spelling aligns with pronunciation.

In political geography, enclaves are territories (sometimes a disconnected part of a larger territory) wholly surrounded by another state or political entity and the edges need not be land borders, enclaves existing sometimes within territorial waters.  There are also semi-enclaves which differ from enclaves in that they possess (at least in part) a coastline which constitutes an un-surrounded sea border, thus providing and outlet to international waters.  Depending on historical circumstances, enclaves and semi-enclaves can be independent states or remote parts of sovereign states.

An exclave is that part of a state geographically separated from the main part by surrounding alien territory (which may be more than one foreign entity) and exclaves are in some cases also enclaves.  A pene-exclave is a part of the territory of one country that can be conveniently approached only through the territory of another country.  Pene- is from the Latin paene (almost).

At the international, national and sub-national level, there are literally hundreds of enclaves and exclaves, illustrative examples including:

Vatican City, an enclave surrounded wholly by Italy and in its modern form a creation of the Pacta Lateranensia (the Lateran Pacts of 1929), the most significant part of which is remembered as the Lateran Treaty which resolved many of the issues which had existed between Rome and the Holy See since the unification of Italy (1861-1871), one celebrated consequence of which was popes no longer living in self-imposed captivity in the Vatican.

The rather unimaginatively named  Australian Capital Territory (ACT), site of Canberra, the country’s artificially created capital, came about because during the debates in the 1890s about the idea of federating the six colonies as the Commonwealth of Australia, it became clear that the two largest states, New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, would never accede to either becoming the national capital.  Accordingly, it was agreed the new capital would be located not less than 100 miles (160 km) from the NSW capital (Sydney) and that the Victorian capital (Melbourne), would be the seat of government until the new city was built.  Thus some sheep country was carved from NSW to become the ACT and there, Canberra was built.  It’s very hot in summer, very cold in winter and otherwise unremarkable other than having over the years soaked up extraordinary amounts of money.   

Just east of the exclave of Andorra, the little Spanish town of Llivia lies some two kilometres (1¼ miles) from Spain’s border, surrounded completely by France, thereby making it both enclave and exclave, depending on whether one views the place from Madrid or Paris.  The stranger arrangement exists by virtue of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), when Spain ceded certain territories to France but the words in the document specified that only villages were to be transferred.  Llivia had long been gazetted as a town so remained Spanish.

In the narrow technical sense Alaska is a pene-exclave because although it cannot be reached overland except by transiting through Canada, it can be reached by sea or air because its coastline leads to international waters.  Alaska ranks with the Louisiana Purchase (in which the US in 1803 purchased from the French land equivalent to about 20% the size of the modern contiguous 48 states for less than US$20 per square mile) as the greatest real estate deals of all time.  The US in 1867 purchased Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million and during the twentieth century, there was much buyer’s remorse.

The medieval walled city of Dubrovnik sits on Croatia, Adriatic coast in the region of Dalmatia.  Laid siege to for seven months during the first of the Balkan wars which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the city was heavily shelled but in the late 1990s extensive repair work was undertaken with the assistance of overseas funding.  The southern-most part of Croatia's Dubrovnik-Neretva County, which includes Dubrovnik, is cut off from the rest of the country by a sliver of the neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 20-kilometre zone created in 1699 as a buffer zone between Venice and the Ottoman Empire.

Suddenly the world's most famous exclave (though many refer to it as an enclave which, in the sociological sense, it is), Kaliningrad, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, is part of Russia.  Historically, it’s best remembered as a part of Prussia but, in the way Europe for centuries did things, its national identity has often changed.  It was known as Konigsberg German rule and was the site of an extraordinarily expensive (and militarily ineffectual) propaganda film produced by the Nazis towards the end of World War II.  It became part of the USSR in 1945 where it remained until Lithuanian independence in 1991 turned it into an exclave of Russia and to most it remained obscure until the invasion of Ukraine.