Europe’s Caribbean Borders: The Peculiar Case of the Sint Maarten/Saint Martin Border

One of the fascinating aspects of the European integration project has always concerned the circumstance that Europe’s borders have never been confined to the continent itself. Along the eternal discussion on the depth of the integration and the scope of enlargement, this too has contributed to the EU’s peculiar ‘limitlessness’. Through the overseas territories of inter alia France, the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the Union comprises of a number of territories scattered far and wide across the globe: thus, the European Union and, accordingly, its values and principles reach from the estuary of the Saint Lawrence river to the shores of Antarctica and from the Caribbean Sea to the Eastern Pacific. These extra-European areas have their own specifics and dynamics, that also shape and form the borders and the identity of the European Union. In this paper, we will focus on the EU’s legal framework from the perspective of the peculiar case of Sint Maarten/Saint Martin; one island with two political identities – a Dutch one and a French one. Nonetheless, the inhabitants of both parts of the island are European citizens. Yet, as we will show, the political division not only leads to numerous specific problems and challenges, but even more paradoxical, recently the very fact that both parts of the island form part of the European Union has widened the divisions between them and have made the Dutch respectively French border on the island a true reality for the first time in over three centuries. Consequently, the project of an ‘ever-closer Union’ instead of removing borders within the Union, has now for the first time created a physical, political border within the European body politic.