The Village in Two Countries

There is a town on the Dutch and Belgian frontier called Baarle. It is one town. It is also two municipalities, Baarle-Hertog in Belgium and Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands, and the territory is not two blocks with a line between them. It is a patchwork: Belgian parcels inside Dutch territory, several Dutch parcels inside those, more than thirty fragments in total.

The border runs through buildings. House numbers carry small flags showing which country the front door is in. Where a door sits on the line, it has been known for the house to have two numbers. Both postal services deliver. Both municipalities meet. It is a minor tourist attraction and a long-running administrative joke, and nobody there is in any difficulty.

Now the same geometry somewhere else.

Until 2015 the India-Bangladesh frontier in the Cooch Behar region contained more than a hundred and fifty enclaves, left over from holdings of the princely state of Cooch Behar and the Mughal empire that predated both modern countries. Some were enclaves inside enclaves. One parcel was Indian territory inside Bangladeshi territory inside India.

Around thirty-seven thousand people lived in the Indian enclaves and about half that number in the Bangladeshi ones. For decades they had, in practice, almost nothing. The surrounding state had no duty to provide schools, courts, policing or registration. Their own state could not reach them without crossing an international border they had no legal right to cross. There was no address a utility could connect, no court to register a land sale, no police force with jurisdiction, and in many cases no documentation of birth.

Identical geometry. Opposite outcomes.

The difference was never the map. Baarle sits between two states with functioning administrations, an open frontier, no territorial grievance against each other, and no interest in using the anomaly as leverage. The Bengal enclaves sat between two states with a contested border, restricted movement, and periodic reasons to make a point.

What makes a border benign is the pair of administrations on either side of it, and almost never its shape.

The 2015 settlement proves the same thing in reverse. Under a boundary agreement first signed in 1974 and finally enacted after India passed a constitutional amendment in May 2015, 111 Indian enclaves went to Bangladesh and 51 Bangladeshi enclaves went to India. India gave up more land than it received, roughly forty square kilometres net. Residents were given a choice of citizenship. Of the roughly thirty-seven thousand people in the Indian enclaves, all but about a thousand took Bangladeshi nationality and stayed exactly where they were.

Nothing moved. No fence was built or removed. No house changed hands. What changed was which government registered the births, ran the school, answered the police call and issued the identity card.

That is what the border had always been. Not a line on the ground, not a wall, not a fact of geography: an administrative claim about who is answerable for the people living there. Take the claim seriously and a patchwork is a curiosity. Leave it unresolved and a patchwork is statelessness, in the same shape, on the same scale, for seventy years.