That's an interesting story and I wonder why the two governments today wouldn't work together to clean that up a little bit, since it seems like it's bringing a fair amount of troubles for the people.
I also wonder if the story about the restaurant clients needing to change table is true tho. In theory, sure, but come on. Do you really expect police to come in with a map of the border and enforce the fact that clients should not be sitting at table #4 but table #5 is ok? That seems a little ridiculous too.
Also, does that imply that business on the border have to be incorporated in both countries? If not, does the Belgian business have to comply to Dutch laws since it's in part physically located in the Netherlands? In that case, is it really only subject for what's physically in the Netherlands? What if the kitchen is on Belgium side, The Netherlands are not allows to do proper health and safety inspection?
As I write this I realise that it brings a lot of interesting questions and everything must be very complicated over there!
As the countries are very friendly and work together in almost anything, this is not a big problem in practice. Presumably some very small scale hustling is tolerated as no government official really cares. When there is an actual problem, the two governments arrange another land swap. There is one every few years. Nobody cares, it gives both our monarchs something to sign on an official visit and gets another sheer for international cooperation from the press.
If you want to have some fun, you can smoke pot while standing on the border and holding it in your left, Dutch hand. If you're really daring you swap it over to your right, Belgian hand, and congrats, you're an international drug smuggler. If a cop sees it and you're unlucky, I suppose he'll ask a few puffs from you - Yeah I saw that happen in real life, and that was in Brussels a.k.a Belgium and as far from the boundary as you can get.
Land swaps can be a royal PITA; the highest point in Finland is most of the way up a mountainside; the peak is just across (as in, within a stone throw) the border, in Norway.
To mark the centennial of Finnish independence, there was a campaign in Norway to give the Finns a few hundred square metres of Norway, so that they could get a highest point which was indeed a local maximum.
Too bad the Norwegian constitution says you cannot give away bits of the country; a land swap was suggested to ensure both countries remained the same size afterwards, but apparently this, too, would violate the constitution...
A couple of Norwegian conscripts technically invaded Finland earlier this year; while patrolling the border, they accidentally strayed onto the other side.
(Not as hard as it may sound; the border isn’t marked as such, only with the occasional pole here and there.)
I guess it depends on whose definition you use; Norwegian papers at the time quoted experts (presumably a professor of international law, though I can’t remember) who claimed that legally speaking, having troops in uniform venturing into another country counted as an invasion.
Considering all the notes being passed back and forth afterwards, the conscripts must be kicking themselves for not keeping quiet about it; they weren’t observed by Finnish border guards; rather, they notified their officers when returning to base that they’d crossed the border; the army notified the DoD, which notified the Foreign Department, which notified the Finns, who said ‘Huh?’
The Dutch actually have a continuing conflict with Germany about a maritime area: the Dollard/Dollart. Not that it's an actual problem: all practical affairs have been arranged in harmony, but still both countries' claims overlap, and in fact the last few metres of the pier of Delfzijl are in Germany according to their interpretation...
>If you want to have some fun, you can smoke pot while standing on the border and holding it in your left, Dutch hand. If you're really daring you swap it over to your right, Belgian hand, and congrats, you're an international drug smuggler.
-The problem with trying to outwit the police is that they can be creative, too. If I were a sufficiently annoyed Belgian police officer, I’d just grab you on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance, take a blood sample to prove it and throw the book at you. (Assuming that not just smoking, but also being intoxicated on herbs is illegal in Belgium...)
Having fun with the police is never a good idea, but they'll have to grab you for something other than cannabis, as Belgium has a 'gedoogbeleid' (policy of tolerance) concerning soft drugs.
If :
* You are adult i.e. 18 or more
* You own at most 3 grams or 1 plant
* You don't deal
* You don't cause minors to use drugs
* You aren't high in a car
then your usage of cannabis has the lowest priority, which basically means you're not getting prosecuted. In practice, they don't do anything against non-dealing non-annoying usage even if you are severely above these limitations.
> What if the kitchen is on Belgium side, The Netherlands are not allows to do proper health and safety inspection?
It seems that way. A couple of years ago Belgium & Netherlands agreed to swap ownership of a small peninsula because it was on Belgian territory, but the only access was from the Netherlands, and so the area was being used for crimes where neither country had legal access:
"In short, the Dutch could not go there because it was Belgian, and Belgian police and judicial authorities found it tough to get there. They are not allowed to cross into the Netherlands without permission and the peninsula had no proper landing zone for boats or equipment coming in by water."
By the way, police can now enter each other's countries more easily by now. Belgium and the Netherlands work together on integration through BENELUX, a politico-economical union between Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. These days it serves as a testbed for integration policies in the EU at large. So recently we signed an agreement that allows our nations' police forces direct access to each other's police databases and to cross borders without having to get prior permission.
Not exactly the same situation, but this reminds me of the area between the Utah-Arizona border and the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Legally it's part of Arizona but it's much more accessible from Utah (there's no bridge across the Canyon, so to get to the North Rim from the rest of Arizona, you have to drive hundreds of miles out of the way).
It ends up being a sort of no man's land. It's difficult to access for Arizona authorities, and Utah authorities don't have jurisdiction there.
Due to the long-standing cooperation of the two countries, it's not really bringing trouble; in fact, it's a bit of a tourist attraction. There were, however, difficulties during the two world wars.
They did clean it up a bit a few years ago, because there was some legal uncertainty about a small number of the enclaves.
Front door rule applies. If there are two front doors side by side, its tax jurisdiction is determined by area share and legal enforcement territory of both.
There are no real issues. Belgians and Dutch get along fine. It’s mostly seen as a fun, quaint relic and as mentioned below is a bit of a tourist attraction.
I’ve spent a few days there working for a Japanese television program - it seems everyone there has a quirky story regarding the borders.
The city hall has a border going through it. Both the Belgian and Dutch municipalities are housed there, as are the two police stations. The Belgian and Dutch police share one office, but the border goes right through it.
The police shared plenty of stories with us about how they have to cooperate with each other in order to do their work - since some of the borders are “3D” (eg. where the ground floor of an old house is half Belgian half Dutch, but the upper floors are full Dutch) they sometimes officially need the help of the other police to get access to all of a crime scene.
Then there’s the fact that people in that town consciously choose in which of the two jurisdictions they do something: getting gas, going to school, groceries, all related to tax and regulations.
If your house is located in the two countries at once, the position of your front door decides under which jurisidiction you actually live. Same for stores / restaurants.
They exchanged some pieces of land along the Maas river.
Belgium had a piece of land on the Dutch riverside with no bridge near. There were parties there and the Dutch police had no jurisdiction, while the Belgian police needed at least 45 minutes to get there.
In the end, both governments had enough of this and swapped a bit of land.
Cleaning up isn't trivial - cleaning this up means that some people suddenly life or work in a different country, with different regulation and taxation. For good and bad reasons this will lead to protests.
The ugliest of all borders must have been Dahala Khagrabari at the border between India and Bangladesh. It was the only third order enclave until India ceded the tiny piece of land to Bangladesh in 2015:
It was a piece of India within Bangladesh, within India, within Bangladesh - which itself would be enclaved within India if not for a small border with Myanmar.
How were things before the EU and Schengen area were formed? Has it always been legal to cross Dutch-Belgian border in this town, or did people get in trouble for walking into the wrong street?
Lack of border wall does not mean lack of border. There was a big story here in Canada a couple of months ago about a French woman accidently crossing the border between Canada and the US and having to spend two weeks in detention.
The fact that we don't have an open border between the U.S. and Canada is a real shame. Just a waste of everyone's time to indulge the U.S. border paranoia. I'm not really worried about the US being flooded with poutine and hockey.
Or even better, a sort of super-Schengen area including the EU, the US, Canada, and Japan. Yeah, I know I'm dreaming, but it's not like this set of countries would produce mass migration or security issues that would cause problems beyond the economic benefit of a free migration. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17382400
And one of the main reasons Canada wants a border with the US is that gun control policies between our countries are widely different. But EU countries also have widely different immigration and gun control policies, yet somehow they managed to form a union. I am sure these are not irreconcilable differences.
...and now quarrel among themselves after several waves of refugees want to become immigrants. So the union tried to distribute the refugees somewhat evenly, which led to further quarrels.
It's just as if me and my girlfriend and all of our neighbours have to accept refugees into our apartments, after our senior neighbour, crazy refugee lady, invited them over. The refugees all want to stay in my girlfriend's room because it's nicer, but most our neighbours collectively decided that we should split them between ourselves according to room size. My girlfriend reluctantly agrees, but I'm quarelling with her and the neighbours over the refugee issue. This can only lead to one thing: breakup.
Before the EU and Schengen etc. we (Dutch people) could officially be asked for our passports at the Belgium border. In practice you didn't really notice crossing the border while driving on the highway. No checks, no cops, no customs. Only the roads got worse. (this is a ancient joke between Dutchies and Belgians).
Same applied to (then) West Germany. No border controls really. Now, East Germany (where coincidentally I live now) was a whole different story.
> (this is a ancient joke between Dutchies and Belgians)
It might be universal. People here (in the province of Alberta) always joke about roads in the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan. But it also might be because there are more than 1 million Canadians of Dutch origin :)
the EU grew out of the BENELUX (BElgium-NEderland-LUXemburg)
Crossing the borders was always pretty straight forward, except for the period during WWI when Belgium was occupied and The Netherlands were neutral. So the Germans installed barbwire and guarded the border.
I once heard how the border between the 2 countries close to Maastricht was established: Maastricht was the first city not conquered by the Belgian revolutionaries. There were some military units stationed there, and 1 or more canons. As a result, the border was defined as everything that could reasonably be reached by shooting these canons from Maastricht.
The cannons are still there, they're down the street from my house.
The general who was then in charge of Maastricht was much despised by the locals because of his decision then to be loyal to the Dutch king. So when his remains were ordered to be moved when a new road was build (decades later), the workers who were supposed to do it didn't, and a lamp post was built on his grave. They're redoing that area now and the new park that is being built there, will have an old lamp post in a weird spot as a reminder of this historical quirk.
(Very OT but I find it such a cool story that I thought I had to share :) )
I always get the impression that Belgium never really intended to split off from The Netherlands. Unfortunately, the Dutch king of the time was completely out of touch with what his new subjects wanted, even while heavily investing in his new country.
Efforts to finally get the stubborn guy to at least give some token gestures to a small number of mostly irrelevant demands got so completely out of hand, that people more or less accidentally started a revolution.
The feelings of the newborn Belgium governement seemed more or less : Oh shit, we accidentally liberated this country. How did we become the governemnt in the first place? What are we gonna do? Then asking some French noble to be the king and getting a 'no' from him wasn't helping much either.
That was the original reasoning for the 3 (now 12) mile territorial water limit, which was how far coastal artillery of the time could reach.
The US lobbied for extending this repeatedly, and applies a de facto larger limit to the continental US. This makes sense if you consider that modern coastal artillery uses over the horizon radars and missiles. But a reasonable argument can be made that contemporary coastal defense is not artillery, but air-launched missiles whose range can be considered to be the missile range plus the combat range of the launching aircraft.
Slightly off topic maybe, but it always surprises people that the Netherlands has a border with France. It’s just in the Caribbean on the island of St. Maarten / Saint Martin. Obligatory YouTube clip “Holland vs. The Netherlands” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc
Even more complicated: The country of The Netherlands does not border France, but the Kingdom of The Netherlands does, as St. Maarten is a separate country within the kingdom.
St. Maarten isn't part of the EU, but St. Martin is. But inhabitants of St. Maarten are EU citizens, and there is no hard border between the two parts even though there should be one, as this is a border of the Schengen Area.
This means that I, a citizen of the country of The Netherlands with a identity card but without a passport, am allowed to travel directly to France via Belgium, and I can book a flight and enter St. Martin, but I am not allowed to visit St. Maarten!
Your last part interest me, what do citizens of the netherlands have to do to visit St. Maarten or other parts of the Kingdom of The Netherlands ? Get a visa ?
In France we differentiate between parts of France proper (mainalnd France, Corsica, Guiana), our overseas departments (used to be more complicated but now they're "almost" parts of France), and our overseas collectivity like St. Martin. But as a French citizen I can visit pretty much any that I want without the need to ask anyone for permission.
Additionnaly, how is "your" part of the Island governed; fully autonomous or has the royal family (real/actual) oversight or is the governement of the Netherland overseeing it or ... ? Our way is mostly "they have their local governement but if the French one tells them something they do it".
It's interesting to me, especially since New Caledonia being the only dependance who didn't ask to be integrated but to move away will have to decide between autonomy or independance
"Someone" got it right, you need to have a passport. A visa is only required for stays exceeding 180 days a year. You also need to book a return ticket.
The Netherlands (the country) also has overseas territories, namely Bonaire, Saba, and St. Eustatius. They are considered regular municipalities, but you still need to have a passport to visit them. They also have some duration limitations to prevent migration from the mainland.
About the governance: Long story short, it's complicated. Some laws apply to the Kingdom so they're for both continental and overseas, but most laws are made only for country of The Netherlands. The other countries are mostly self-governing, including making their own laws, but stuff like international treaties and military is done on the Kingdom level, which in practice means it's done by the Country.
To give an example: after Irma, St. Maarten had to formally ask The Netherlands for help, otherwise the military would not have been allowed to give any assistance, as it could be considered an invasion. In general, any form of intervention is seen as a form of neo-colonialism. We try to intervene as little as possible.
I think ”with a identity card but without a passport” is the essential phrase. EU citizens don’t need a passport to travel within the EU. St Martin is in the EU, so crote can freely travel there. St Maarten is not, so crote will need a passport to travel there.
The difference between mainland France and overseas territories is administrative, not constitutional (with the exception of New Caledonia as you pointed out).
Note that while St Martin is an oversea collectivity, whereas we consider Guiana to be an actual part of France not a territory or collectivity or dependance or ... (the same way we did with Algeria).
So France the (geo)political entity and France the country absolutely has a border with Brasil, and it is its largest land border.
> I also wonder if the story about the restaurant clients needing to change table is true tho. In theory, sure, but come on. Do you really expect police to come in with a map of the border and enforce the fact that clients should not be sitting at table #4 but table #5 is ok? That seems a little ridiculous too.
It seems far fetched, as you would expect a restaurant to have one legal address, and which rules apply depend on the rules of that country.
As locals in a town of several thousands and ~2Km at the widest part the police wouldn't really need a map to know every single place. Also the border is literally drawn on the pavement in most if not all places.
The concept of "one legal address" makes no sense when legally one would assume they are two completely separate blocks of land registered separately in each jurisdiction.
Police can come and search you to see if you have any dried plant matter on you. I can't see how switching tables is any more ridiculous than that and this is "accepted" as "normal".
I also wonder if the story about the restaurant clients needing to change table is true tho. In theory, sure, but come on. Do you really expect police to come in with a map of the border and enforce the fact that clients should not be sitting at table #4 but table #5 is ok? That seems a little ridiculous too.
Also, does that imply that business on the border have to be incorporated in both countries? If not, does the Belgian business have to comply to Dutch laws since it's in part physically located in the Netherlands? In that case, is it really only subject for what's physically in the Netherlands? What if the kitchen is on Belgium side, The Netherlands are not allows to do proper health and safety inspection?
As I write this I realise that it brings a lot of interesting questions and everything must be very complicated over there!