What Benelux is and how it works

The union the European treaties allow

Article 350 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union does something the rest of that treaty does not: it names countries. The provisions of the Treaties, it reads, shall not preclude the existence or completion of regional unions between Belgium and Luxembourg, or between Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, to the extent that the objectives of these regional unions are not attained by application of the Treaties. It is a standing permission for a smaller union to run ahead of a larger one, and it is the reason nothing had to be dismantled when the larger one arrived.

The permission nests. Article 37 of the Benelux treaty repeats the same formula one level down, for the economic union between Belgium and Luxembourg signed on 25 July 1921 and running since 1922. A union of two sits inside a union of 3, which sits inside the European Union.

What was signed, and when

The customs convention came first, signed in London on 5 September 1944 by governments that were not at that moment in their own countries, and the customs union it provided for opened on 1 January 1948. The Treaty establishing the Benelux Economic Union followed at The Hague on 3 February 1958 and entered into force on 1 November 1960. Its Article 99 set a term of fifty years, ending on 31 October 2010. The revision that replaced it was concluded at The Hague on 17 June 2008 and entered into force on 1 January 2012, and its Article 35 struck the word Economic out of the title. What the treaty covers moved with the name, into sustainable development and into justice and home affairs.

Belgium signed that revision six times over. The federal government is a party, and so are the governments of Flanders, Wallonia, the French Community, the German-speaking Community and the Brussels Capital Region, each named separately in the preamble and each on the signature page.

What leaving would take

Article 39 concludes the treaty for an indefinite period. Any party may denounce it on three years' notice, which runs from the day the notice is received at the Secretariat-General, and the same article withholds that right for the first ten years after entry into force. No notice could therefore be lodged before 1 January 2022.

What it does not cover

Article 36 limits the treaty to the territory of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and reserves to the Kingdom of the Netherlands the right to write provisions of interest to the other constituent parts of the Kingdom into certain agreements made under it. Article 38 gives the institutions two official languages, Dutch and French. German is official in Belgium and in Luxembourg, and Luxembourgish is official in Luxembourg; the union those countries built works in neither.

The court, the office, the assembly

The Benelux Court of Justice was created by a treaty concluded at Brussels on 31 March 1965 and in force from 1 January 1974. It sits in Luxembourg and answers questions on how rules common to the members are to be read, so that one text does not acquire a separate meaning in each of them.

The Benelux Office for Intellectual Property registers trade marks and designs at The Hague under the Benelux Convention on Intellectual Property, signed on 25 February 2005 and in force from 1 September 2006. There is no Belgian trade mark, no Luxembourgish one and no Dutch one: a mark is registered for the whole Benelux territory or nowhere in it.

The Benelux Parliament is made up of members delegated by national and regional parliaments, 21 from Belgium, 21 from the Netherlands and seven from Luxembourg. An agreement concluded at Brussels on 20 January 2015 put it on its present footing, and that agreement entered into force on 1 August 2019.

Borders, and the control of them

Free movement inside the group is older than the Schengen Area. A Benelux convention of 1960 moved control of persons to the outer frontier of the Benelux territory, and when the agreement of 14 June 1985 carried the idea further it was signed on the Moselle at Schengen in Luxembourg by these countries together with France and Germany. Police cooperation followed the same route: a treaty concluded on 23 July 2018, replacing one of 8 June 2004, entered into force on 1 October 2023.

The boundary itself is still being adjusted. Works to straighten the Meuse for navigation left parcels of each country stranded on the far bank, and a treaty concluded at Amsterdam on 28 November 2016 put the border back down the middle of the normalised riverbed between markers 45 and 49, with effect from 1 January 2018.