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The Strangest Country Borders That Have No Difference
Jul 13, 2020
We’re not trying to get political, but it’s a simple truth that most borders are arbitrary. Whether established by tribal loyalties, quirks of geography, or a line scrawled on a map during the collapse of an empire, nations are defined by imaginary lines, and this can inevitably pose some imaginative problems.
These are the world’s weirdest frontiers, from a buffer zone bristling with machine guns, to an island that looks into the past…
Netherlands-Belgium
Bear with us, because this is going to take some explaining. Baarle is a village on the Dutch-Belgian border, which, due to a rent dispute between medieval lords, is split into a patchwork of tiny territories divided between the two countries. 
The town is filled with second order enclaves – part of one country, inside another country, which is itself surrounded by the first country – some so small they’re mapped out house by house.
There are families that sleep in different nations, supermarkets in which each aisle flies a different flag, and a ring road which switches between traffic laws. It’s just as well both countries are in the Schengen area, or residents would have to show their passports several times while queuing for the post office.
Until recently, it wasn’t even the most complex border of it’s kind. Prior to a land swap in 2015, the Indian-Bangladeshi border in the Cooch Behar region was so messy it contained a third order exclave – a piece of India within an area of Bangladesh, inside a piece of India, within Bangladesh. Phew.
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