The European Union Explained*

Translations:

Thank you to all the volunteers who helped add captions to this video in all 24 official languages of the European Union: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovene, Slovak, Spanish & Swedish.

Notes

• While there are many countries that use the Euro I only listed countries with an official agreement with the Europan Union to use and print Euros.
• Sweden's opt-out of the Euro is a bit more complicated than I wanted to go into in the video. TL;DR Sweden was supposed to join, but got out on a technicality in the version of the treaty they signed.

Corrections

• 2:15: Apparently, I have no idea where Lisbon is.
• 3:30 & 5:10: Poland should not be listed in the Eurozone. She still uses the złoty
• 4:34: Mayotte should be listed on the map of overseas territories. (Though it will become an Outermost Region in 2014)
• 5:19: Gibraltar votes as part of Southwest England, not Southeast England.

Script

Where, is the European Union? Obviously here somewhere, but much like the the European continent itself, which has an unclear boundary, the European Union also has some fuzzy edges to it.

To start, the official members of the European Union are, in decreasing order of population:

• Germany
• France
• The United Kingdom
• Italy
• Spain
• Poland
• Romania
• The Kingdom of the Netherlands
• Greece
• Belgium
• Portugal
• The Czech Republic
• Hungary
• Sweden
• Austria
• Bulgaria
• Denmark
• Slovakia
• Finland
• Ireland
• Croatia
• Lithuania
• Latvia
• Slovenia
• Estonia
• Cyprus
• Luxembourg
• Malta

The edges of the EU will probably continue to expand further out as there are other countries in various stages of trying to become a member.

How exactly the European Union works is hideously complicated and a story for another time, but for this video you need know only three things:

1. Countries pay membership dues and

2. Vote on laws they all must follow and

3. Citizens of member countries are automatically European Union citizens as well

This last means that if you're a citizen of any of these countries you are free to live and work or retire in any of the others. Which is nice especially if you think your country is too big or too small or too hot or too cold. The European Union gives you options.

By the way, did you notice how all three of these statements have asterisks attached to this unhelpful footnote? Well, get used to it: Europe loves asterisks that add exceptions to complicated agreements.

These three, for example, point us toward the first bit of border fuzziness with Norway, Iceland and little Liechtenstein. None of which are in the European Union but if you're a EU citizen you can live in these countries and Norwegians, Icelanders, or Liechtensteiner(in)s can can live in yours.

Why? In exchange for the freedom of movement of people they have to pay membership fees to the European Union -- even though they aren't a part of it and thus don't get a say its laws that they still have to follow.

This arrangement is the European Economic Area and it sounds like a terrible deal, were it not for that asterisk which grants EEA but not EU members a pass on some areas of law notably farming and fishing -- something a country like Iceland might care quite a lot about running their own way.

Between the European Union and the European Economic Area the continent looks mostly covered, with the notable exception of Switzerland who remains neutral and fiercely independent, except for her participation in the Schengen Area.

If you're from a country that keeps her borders extremely clean and / or well-patrolled, the Schengen Area is a bit mind-blowing because it's an agreement between countries to take a 'meh' approach to borders.

In the Schengen Area international boundaries look like this: no border officers or passport checks of any kind. You can walk from Lisbon to Tallinn without identification or need to answer the question: "business or pleasure?".

For Switzerland being part of Schengen but not part of the European Union means that non-swiss can check in any time they like, but they can never stay.

This koombaya approach to borders isn't appreciated by everyone in the EU: most loudly, the United Kingdom and Ireland who argue that islands are different. Thus to get onto these fair isles, you'll need a passport and a good reason.

Britannia's reluctance to get fully involved with the EU brings us to the next topic: money.

The European Union has its own fancy currency, the Euro used by the majority, but not all of the European Union members. This economic union is called the Eurozone and to join a country must first reach certain financial goals -- and lying about reaching those goals is certainly not something anyone would do.

Most of the non-Eurozone members when they meet the goals, will ditch their local currency in favor of the Euro but three of them Denmark, Sweden and, of course, the United Kingdom, have asterisks attracted to the Euro sections of the treaty giving them a permanent out-out.

And weirdly, four tiny European countries Andorra, San Marino, Monaco & Vatican City have an asterisk giving them the reverse: the right print and use Euros as their money, despite not being in the European Union at all.

So that's the big picture: there's the EU, which makes all the rules, the Eurozone inside it with a common currency, the European Economic Area outside of it where people can move freely and the selective Schengen, for countries who think borders just aren't worth the hassle.

As you can see, there's some strange overlaps with these borders, but we're not done talking about complications by a long shot one again, because empire.

So Portugal and Spain have islands from their colonial days that they've never parted with: these are the Madeira and Canary Islands are off the coast of Africa and the Azores well into the Atlantic. Because these islands are Spanish and Portuguese they're part of the European Union as well.

Adding a few islands to the EU's borders isn't a big deal until you consider France: the queen of not-letting go. She still holds onto a bunch of islands in the Caribbean, Reunion off the coast of Madagascar and French Guiana in South America. As far as France is concerned, these are France too, which single handedly extends the edge-to-edge distance of the European Union across a third of Earth's circumference.

Collectively, these bits of France, Spain and Portugal are called the Outermost Regions -- and they're the result of the simple answer to empire: just keep it.

On the other hand, there's the United Kingdom, the master of maintaining complicated relationships with her quasi-former lands -- and she's by no means alone in this on such an empire-happy continent.

The Netherlands and Denmark and France (again) all have what the European Union calls Overseas Territories: they're not part of the European Union, instead they're a bottomless well of asterisks due to their complicated relationships with both with the European Union and their associated countries which makes it hard to say anything meaningful about them as a group but…

in general European Union law doesn't apply to these places, though in general the people who live there are European Union citizens because in general they have the citizenship of their associated country, so in general they can live anywhere in the EU they want but in general other European Union citizens can't freely move to these territories.

Which makes these places a weird, semipermeable membrane of the European Union proper and the final part we're going to talk about in detail even though there are still many, more one-off asterisks you might stumble upon, such as: the Isle of Man or those Spanish Cities in North Africa or Gibraltar, who pretends to be part of Southwest England sometimes, or that region in Greece where it's totally legal to ban women, or Saba & friends who are part of the Netherlands and so should be part of the EU, but aren't, or the Faeroe Islands upon which while citizens of Denmark live they lose their EU citizenship, and on and on it goes.

These asterisks almost never end, but this video must.

Canada & The United States (Bizarre Borders Part 2)

Google Earth download.

Script

Canada and the United States share the longest, straightest, possibly boringest border in the world. But, look closer, and there's plenty of bizarreness to be found.

While these sister nations get along fairly well, they both want to make it really clear whose side of the continent is whose. And they've done this by carving a 20-foot wide space along the border. All five and a half thousand miles of it.

With the exception of the rare New England town that predates national borders or the odd airport that needed extending, this space is the no-touching-zone between the countries and they're super serious about keeping it clear. It matters not if the no-touching-zone runs through hundreds of miles of virtually uninhabited Alaskan / Yukon wilderness. Those border trees, will not stand.

Which might make you think this must be the longest, straightest deforested place in the world, but it isn't. Deforested: yes, but straight? Not at all.

Sure it looks straight and on a map, and the treaties establishing the line say it's straight... but in the real world the official border is 900 lines that zig-zags from the horizontal by as much as several hundred feet.

How did this happen? Well, imagine you're back in North America in the 1800s -- The 49th parallel (one of those horizontal lines you see on a globe) has just been set as the national boundary and it's your job to make it real. You're handed a compass and a ball of string and told to carefully mark off the next 2/3rds of a continent. Don't mind that uncharted wilderness in the way: just keep the line straight.

Yeah.

Good luck.

With that.

The men who surveyed the land did the best they could and built over 900 monuments. They're in about as straight as you could expect a pre-GPS civilization to make, but it's not the kind of spherical / planar intersection that would bring a mathematician joy.

Nonetheless these monuments define the border and the no-touching-zone plays connect-the-dots with them.

Oh, and while there are about 900 markers along this section of the border, there are about 8,000 in total that define the shape of the nations.

Despite this massive project Canada and the United States still have disputed territory. There is a series of islands in the Atlantic that the United States claims are part of Maine and Canada claims are part of New Brunswick. Canada, assuming the islands are hers built a lighthouse on one of them, and the United States, assuming the islands are hers pretends the lighthouse doesn't exist.

It's not a huge problem as the argument is mostly over tourists who want to see puffins and fishermen who want to catch lobsters, but let's hope the disagreement gets resolved before someone finds oil under that lighthouse.

Even the non-disputed territory has a few notably weird spots: such as this tick of the border upward into Canada. Zoom in and it gets stranger as the border isn't over solid land but runs through a lake to cut off a bit of Canada before diving back down to the US.

This spot is home to about 100 Americans and is a perfect example of how border irregularities are born:

Back in 1783 when the victorious Americans were negotiating with the British who controlled what would one day be Canada, they needed a map, and this map was the best available at the time. While the East Coast looks pretty good, the wester it goes the sparser it gets.

Under negotiation was the edge of what would one day be Minnesota and Manitoba. But unfortunately, that area was hidden underneath an inset on the map, so the Americans and British were bordering blind. Seriously.

They guessed that the border should start from the northwestern part of this lake and go in a horizontal line until it crossed the Mississippi… somewhere.

But somewhere, turned out to be nowhere as the mighty Mississippi stops short of that line, which left the border vague until 35 years later when a second round of negotiations established the aforementioned 49th parallel.

But there was still a problem as the lake mentioned earlier was both higher, and less circular than first though, putting its northwesterly point here so the existing border had to jump up to meet it and then drop straight down to the 49th, awkwardly cutting off a bit of Canada, before heading west across the remainder of the continent.

Turns out you just can't draw a straight(-ish) line for hundreds of miles without causing a few more problems.

One of which was luckily spotted in advance: Vancouver Island, which the 49th would have sliced through, but both sides agreed that would be dumb so the border swoops around the island.

However, next door to Vancouver Island is Point Roberts which went unnoticed as so today the border blithey cuts across. It's a nice little town, home to over 1,000 Americans, but has only a primary school so its older kids have to cross international borders four times a day to go to school in their own state.

In a pleasing symetry, the East cost has the exact opposite situation with a Canadian Island whose only land route is a bridge to the United States.

And these two aren't the only places where each country contains a bit of the other: there are several more, easily spotted in sattelite photos by the no-touching zone.

Regardless of if the land in question is just an uninhabited strip, in the middle of a lake, in the middle of nowhere, the border between these sister nations must remain clearly marked.

Credits:

Nick Vernon, Mike Baird, Agência Brasil, philippeguillaume, jimleach89, npswear, riebart, mrickard5, nelights, brendankj, fdecomite, cliche, wwworks, albaraa, bsmity13, Mark Stevens, drtobster, bsmity13 & music by Kevin MacLeod

Countries Inside Countries (Bizarre Borders Part 1)

Notes & Corrections:

• If I didn't make it clear enough in the video, this is about land borders and thus doesn't include bridges. (Which is why Singapore isn't listed)
• Lesotho is 70,000 times larger than Vatican City, not 70 times.

Script:

When it comes to neighbors, most countries have several options: like North to Canada or South to Mexico.

But there are countries that don't have this freedom of choice, not because they're islands but because they're trapped in another country. For example: tiny Vatican City, which fits inside of not just Italy, but also just Rome.

How Vatican City got surrounded is complicated, but not unique for there is also the Republic of San Marino, home to 30,000 citizens which Italy also completely surrounds. Italy, apparently, is a country that likes countries in its country.

But trapping nations is not just Italy's thing for there's also Lesotho, in South Africa which is both the largest encircled country at 70 times Vatican City's size and the most populated with over 2,000,000 citizens.

The thing that makes these three countries' borders bizarre is that any path in or out must go through the one and only neighbor they have.

But now take a look at The Gambia, which excluding that tiny ocean border, is as surrounded as any nation can get.

If we amend the previous rule to every land route, now we've made a category of single-neighbored nations. Which includes all four of these and countries like Portugal, where the only way in or out is through Spain. Who else is on this list?

Well, there's Monaco which must go through France, Qatar through Saudi Arabia Denmark through Germany, South Korea through North Korea (though South Korea might as well be an island nation for most practical travel purposes)

East Timor and Papua New Guinea both through Indonesia, Brunei through Malaysia

And there are two sets of twins: there is The Dominican Republic whose only neighbor is Haiti and Haiti, whose only neighbor is The Dominican Republic.

And the second set is: Ireland through the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom through Ireland.

A side note here:

While there are tons of 'British' places around the world, some of which border other nations -- these are not part of the United Kingdom. It's complicated.

Though if you wanted to, you could argue that the United Kingdom technically dug a land border under the channel to the continent, presumably to be closer to France, her best friend ever.

Finally, there's one more country in this category: Canada: the largest single-neighbored, nation in the world.

Credits:

Images: jamiejohn, Alaskan Dude, yeowatzup, little_frank, Di.Malealea

Music: Kevin MacLeod