September 13, 2003
This photo pretty much sums up one of the things I enjoy the most about mainland Europe. The place is a drinks supermarket in a village called Barle-Nassau/Barle Hertog in both Belgium and the Netherlands. It doesn’t just straddle the border – the main border between the two countries is a few kilometres to the south of this place.
It’s better than that. Barle-Nassau/Barle Hertog is a little enclave of Belgium inside the Netherlands. When the border was being drawn (I think in the 1830s but feel free to check) the local communities couldn’t agree on a common frontier, and ultimately the only way that a settlement could be reached was to work through the scores of individual lots of land one-by-one.
Some went to Belgium, some to the Netherlands, leading to exclaves, as I think they’re known – that is, islands of the Netherlands inside islands of Belgium inside the Netherlands, if you follow.
The whole situation throws up some interesting problems – for a start, you have to be careful to select the right mobile phone network, so that you’re not roaming by mistake when somebody calls. You also have to check which post-box you put your letter in. Use the right one and your letter gets sorted in the village – use the other and it will be sent to Amsterdam or Brussels, flown to the other capital, sorted then dispatched back by train, all for a few hundred yards – or less.
But don’t get me wrong – as much as I love this kind of border-related through-the-looking-glass situation, it’s not really what I’m getting at. The thing which I love is the connectedness – the fact that I’ll soon be living in a bilingual city with four other countries accessible in a couple of hours on the train. The fact that crossing a state frontier isn’t thought of as “abroad”, and doesn’t entail a trip to Going Places. The fact that if you want to make a money transfer to another European bank account you don’t have to fill in a long form and get charged twenty quid.
I could go on, but you get it.
As for the picture - it's "borrowed" from one of fascinating sites about enclaves. I acknowledge the copyright and will remove it on request of the owner.