Border between Belgium and the Netherlands at Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau (2017)
brilliantmaps.com
brilliantmaps.com
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!
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."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/30/belgium-and-th...
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.
They did clean it up a bit a few years ago, because there was some legal uncertainty about a small number of the enclaves.
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.
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...
(Not as hard as it may sound; the border isn’t marked as such, only with the occasional pole here and there.)
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?’
Hence the song “Pass the Dutchie on the left-hand side” :D
-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...)
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.
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.
https://goo.gl/maps/LBreHZLyjqo
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahala_Khagrabari
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.
And international waters; the jargon term for that is semi-enclave (if there hadn't been the border with Myanmar, that is).
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.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/jogger-who-a...
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
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.
Same applied to (then) West Germany. No border controls really. Now, East Germany (where coincidentally I live now) was a whole different story.
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 :)
Tip to the reader: There absolutely nothing supernatural, or extrahuman, going on whatsoever.
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.
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 :) )
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.
So France the (geo)political entity and France the country absolutely has a border with Brasil, and it is its largest land border.
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!
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/point-roberts
It seems to me that Netherlands and Belgium are handling the situation somewhat more pragmatic.
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.
To bad they stopped making new ones.