Bowling down the highway between Vilnius and Kaunas late one evening last week in a 1990s BMW E34 5 series – the car’s broken parts deftly duct-taped up before departure – and to the sound of second-hand cassette mixtapes of Whitney Houston and Canadian synth-pop, there was time for one more, last-minute geopolitical detour. After pulling off onto a dirt track and driving until there was no more road, I stepped wearily out of the car, and walked up to the front of a stocky, ecru-coloured building.

This was one of the only markers of the interwar Polish-Lithuanian border.

Following the First World War, and buoyed by Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination and the collapse of European empires, nationalist movements in East-Central Europe sought their independence. Yet the creation of nation-states was often a clunky process, frustrated by continuing wars, imperial legacies, competing nationalist visions, and regional ethnic diversity. As Simon Lewis writes, identities in East-Central Europe often surpass ‘normative, linear definitions’ and ‘were not only forged in the interstices between dominant groups as hybrid or hyphenated ontologies; interactions can also be discerned above and across ethnolinguistic collectives’.

Poland and Lithuania, welded together as one united Commonwealth until the late 18th century, then, had lots to untangle. National divides went down to the level of familial relations: in the Narutowicz family, one brother, Gabriel, briefly became the president of Poland, until he was assassinated five days after taking office; another, Stanisław, became a Lithuanian politician. There were also conflicts. In 1919 or 1920 – depending on which nation you ask – the Polish-Lithuanian war erupted over the ownership of territory. The war was, in part, the result of a clash between the two nascent nations, as well as between Belarusian, German and Soviet forces, over Vilnius, which was once a centre of both Polish and Lithuanian cultural life. In the last years of the First World War, and the immediate postwar period, the city and its wider region flitted in and out of German, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Soviet and, ultimately, Polish control. The Polish claim was to do with debates about the nature of the newly re-established country, the borders of which, some argued, should trace those of the old Commonwealth. This was the old Romantic narrative of Polish identity, visible in the opening of the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) by Adam Mickiewicz (who, incidentally, was born in what is now Belarus): ‘Lithuania, my fatherland!’ – a pre-modern cri de couer of regional belonging turned instrument of nationalism. After tussles with the Lithuanians and Soviets, Poland ultimately won; Vilnius slipped into a newly demarcated Polish territory, often marked out only with posts topped by straw; and Polish-Lithuanian diplomatic relations were broken off. The Lithuanian government decamped to Kaunas, which was ridiculed as a ‘village’ compared to the Baroque bombshell Vilnius – until the architects also moved in, and built it up as a modernist dream-city.

The building we reached in that retro BMW marked the Polish-Lithuanian borderline settled after the war – a border recognised internationally by the League of Nations in 1923, although not by Lithuania, which regarded it as an occupation line. Yet, now situated in independent Lithuania, the building bears no plaques, no signs of its fractious history. Unless we had known it was there – unless it had been pointed out as a place forgotten, a place nobody wants to remember – we would have probably passed the building by. We weren’t even sure, at first, that it was the right place at all. I’m still not sure what the building was used for. You can see it as a looming backdrop of a 1934 photo by the Dutch photographer and Polish-Lithuanian borderland enthusiast Willem van de Poll: it is the only structure in the open, flatlands of the Lithuanian countryside, in front of which stands a benign-looking Polish officer. The region saw one of the last battles of the Polish-Lithuanian war, and was heavily policed on both sides following the conflict, although smuggling still occurred. The building may well have been linked to a unit of the Polish Border Protection Corps, which was based in the area. The Corps was established to protect Poland’s new eastern frontier, and often constructed new infrastructure on the border to support defence efforts.

Just down the road from the building, the old border train station remains too, though the Polish name for the village, Zawiasy, is long gone. In the interwar period, continued tensions between Poland and Lithuania resulted in the severance of railway connections – and telephone lines – between the two nations, which were only restored after the two countries reestablished diplomatic relations in 1938. The Polish newspaper Światowid ran a short piece about the railway in Zawiasy, where ‘the border’, it claimed, ‘will come alive’. A year later, Poles from Vilnius, escaping the German invasion of Poland, were piling through Zawiasy in despair to enter Lithuania.

It felt somehow ironic, and like a juxtaposition, to be on the road, and move freely – and then leisurely, curiously, explore a place which had once been so contested, and in doing so, echo the broken journeys taken a century ago. What I’m getting at here is that our travel to the building on the border exposed us to both present, and past, geopolitical developments. Driving that road, and seeing that building, was to experience Lithuania’s current independence, as much as the contrasts with old Polish-Lithuanian divisions; the transport infrastructure here revealed different epistemologies, ideologies, and power over the region. In other words, this was geopolitics by BMW.

On the road or otherwise, transport infrastructure can offer useful insights into geopolitics – as well as functioning as its epitome, example, or proxy. Infrastructure organises and transforms space: it tells us about priorities and choices, desires and fears.

Infrastructure became especially significant in interwar East-Central Europe, as new infrastructures of national borders clashed with previously integrated systems, with economic, social and ideological consequences. Transportation systems, then, can give us both a sense of space and a sense of time. This is especially the case in and around Kaunas, at the historical intersection between empires and nations – much of it built on two floors so as to not be in the line of fire from attacking enemies. Kaunas sits within a region central to historical and contemporary geopolitical tensions, from Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, to present concerns of another attack by Russia on East-Central Europe.

We might consider Kaunas’s extensive fort system, built in the late 19th and early 20th century to protect the Russian empire’s western boundary from incursion. Or we could think about the River Neman (also called the Nemunas, Niemen, or Memel in Lithuanian, Polish and German, respectively), which marked the border between the Prussian and Russian empires. The river was also a temporal limit between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, with the bridge of those days jokingly referred to as the longest in the world. It has featured in the national works of many cultures, from the reach of Germany in the country’s national anthem (‘Von der Maas bis an die Memel’, or ‘From the Maas to the Memel’), to the words of Lithuanian poet Maironis in 1902 (‘Kur bėga Šešupė, kur Nemunas teka, Tai mūsų tėvynė, graži Lietuva’, or ‘Where Šešupė runs, where the Nemunas flows, That’s our fatherland, beautiful Lithuania’). Or we might look at the railway: to the nightly journey of a Russian train which quietly travels through Lithuania from the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to Moscow. Lithuania initially restricted the transport of goods to Kaliningrad following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, until the EU lifted the ban. Yet the line has also become a backdoor for thousands of fleeing Russians to enter the EU, and raised issues around smuggling, security, and international sanctions. Kaliningrad is, of course, split from Russia by the Suwałki Gap, recently labelled by Politico as ‘the most dangerous place on Earth’ for its potential as a battleground for a Russian-NATO war. This was the same area over which Poland and Lithuania competed for ownership a century ago.