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Comment by colanderman | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly this is not an exclave swap: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2012/11/the-curious-case-of-baa...

Well, it's un-inhabited, so it's a lot easier to swap, as opposed to exclaves who usually have inhabitants who would not be too happy to switch nationality.

You would not switch nationality, just the country where you live. If I move to another country, my nationality stays the same.

However, if another country moves to you, it makes several things awkward.

There are plenty of exclaves with country borders out there. For instance, here's a bit of Germany inside Switzerland:

https://goo.gl/maps/bw3PwD19JhR2

The village is called Büsingen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCsingen_am_Hochrhein

In United Arab Emirates there is an Omanian exclave called Madha, which in turn contains a UAE exclave called Nahwa:

https://goo.gl/maps/REXtsfb3gHs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahwa

And there's even one third-order enclave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahala_Khagrabari

Dahala Khagrabari is a piece of India, surrounded by Bangladesh, surreounded by India, surrounded by Bangladesh.

And things stay this way because it is quite awkward to change places where people live to belong to another nation - however impractical these exclaves may be.

Dahala Khagrabari is no longer an exclave. India and Bangaldesh executed a wide-ranging land swap in 2015 to resolve a large number of these tiny exclaves.

Ah, thanks for information. So, border adjustments are possible there as well (India and Bangladesh are on friendly terms, unlike India and Pakistan).

The thorniest question seems, to me, to be how to integrate local government on the city or county scale. Citizenship is fairly straightforward - make the inhabitants citizens of both countries, and let them renounce one and live in the other if they wish. How to ensure that a village has the zoning regulations they want when it was handled by a county in another country seems trickier.

The Netherlands do not allow dual citizenship, so simply allowing all the Belgians/Dutch to chose during an Enclave/Exclave swap wouldn't be possible.

It wouldn't be necessary really, as citizenship is more dependent on your parents. Both of them being EU member states also makes residence somewhat irrelevant too, except maybe with taxes.

The Netherlands do not allow dual citizenship

Are you sure? There are plenty of second-generation immigrants here that have both the Dutch and parental (mostly Turkish/Moroccan) nationality.

My kids have both German and Dutch passports but that's because their parents are from these countries.

Scroll a bit further north, and you will find a single, small German farm just inside the Belgian border. Apparently it's abandoned because the occupant got sick of trying to convince the German authorities that his land actually was in Germany when he needed this or that.

https://www.google.fi/maps/place/Switzerland/@50.5972041,6.2...

Scroll a bit further south from the farm, and you'll see a Belgian trainline cutting off (much larger) bits of Germany.

Yeah, but choosing to move to another country just isn't the same as the country changing under your feet against your will.

Yes, parent should have written "country they live in" rather than nationality. But the basic point holds of course.

Lots of people would be unhappy to suddenly live in a country where they're not a citizen and subject different laws, taxes, and health care. In fact, it's not hard to see why it would be pretty much a non-starter politically.

pretty sure that the residents of baarle hertog quite like the status quo. If one country does something they don't like (e.g. tax policy), they can redesignate their "front door" as being in the other state, and thus be under the other state's jurisdiction.

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