Erik Springelkamp
Member
Also totally off-topic, but quite interesting:
The Netherlands and Germany still have a border dispute over the Ems estuary, a dispute that started in the 1490's between the city of Groningen and the city of Emden.
Groninger traders claimed that they were not subject to the staple right of Emden over the trade over the Ems to Westphalia, through old traditional rights. Yet during the early 1500's ships were detained in Emden and a decades long court cases was started at the Habsburg court in Brussels, which was won in consecutive verdicts, but execution could not be forced, because of international complications of higher importance.
And when Charles V abdicated and his son Philips II of Spain didn't become Emperor, the new German Emperor changed the verdict and declared the Ems an Imperial river, that as such would fall completely to Germany, and not divided in the middle.
And still today that is the German position on the matter: all of the Ems is German.
The Dutch government disputes this and states that an international river border runs through the middle of the river.
And they failed to formalize this in 1945, when it would have been an easy correction, probably because nobody thought about it.
So today the river is still disputed, but in a practical move both states have created a special bi-national administrative body that handles all practical aspects of the estuary, like traffic control, and new issues like wind turbines in the North Sea. They have agreed to disagree, and currently a large wind energy park is built where people just don't talk about in which country it is situated.
The Netherlands and Germany still have a border dispute over the Ems estuary, a dispute that started in the 1490's between the city of Groningen and the city of Emden.
Groninger traders claimed that they were not subject to the staple right of Emden over the trade over the Ems to Westphalia, through old traditional rights. Yet during the early 1500's ships were detained in Emden and a decades long court cases was started at the Habsburg court in Brussels, which was won in consecutive verdicts, but execution could not be forced, because of international complications of higher importance.
And when Charles V abdicated and his son Philips II of Spain didn't become Emperor, the new German Emperor changed the verdict and declared the Ems an Imperial river, that as such would fall completely to Germany, and not divided in the middle.
And still today that is the German position on the matter: all of the Ems is German.
The Dutch government disputes this and states that an international river border runs through the middle of the river.
And they failed to formalize this in 1945, when it would have been an easy correction, probably because nobody thought about it.
So today the river is still disputed, but in a practical move both states have created a special bi-national administrative body that handles all practical aspects of the estuary, like traffic control, and new issues like wind turbines in the North Sea. They have agreed to disagree, and currently a large wind energy park is built where people just don't talk about in which country it is situated.
