CROSS-BORDER REVIEW

YEARBOOK 2016

European Crisis and its Consequences

for Borders and Cooperation

Editor-in-Chief

Dr. hab. James Scott

Professor of Regional and Border Studies – Karelian Institute,

University of Eastern Finland

Editorial board

Martin Barthel

Comparative Research Network, Berlin, Germany

Prof. Henk van Houtum

Department of Geography, Radboud University,

Nijmegen, Netherlands

Dr. hab. Jarosław Jańczak

Lehrstuhl Europa-Studien, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Germany

Dr. Jussi Laine

Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland

Prof. Iwona Sagan

Department of Economic Geography, University of Gdańsk, Poland

Dr. Christophe Sohn

Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research, Luxembourg

JAMES W. SCOTT: Editorial Introduction

FEATURE ARTICLES

JAMES W. SCOTT: Rebordering Central Europe: Observations on Cohesion and Cross-border Cooperation

JUSSI P. LAINE: An alternative politics of borders: the EU-Russia Interphase a space of Encounter

MARTIN BARTHEL: Milking the border – cohesive strategies in respond to the crisis of the periphery in border regions.

VIRPI KAISTO: Cross-Border Areas Facing Europe’s Crises: Problems in Measuring Territorial Development with Statistical Data and Analyses

TEODOR GYELNIK: Cross-border Health Care Cooperation in the European Union: an Effective Strategy of Mitigating Regional/Local Limitations through Cooperation

REZA KHEYRODDIN, SEYED ABDOLHADI DNESHPOUR, MEHDI RAZPOUR: How border trade contributes to the development of Baneh and helps to fight the economic crisis of the peripheral region. A case study from the Iranian-Iraqi border

Research Report

HENK VAN HOUTUM, JUSSI LAINE AND JAMES SCOTT: EUBORDERSCAPES - Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts

Commentaries

NIRA YUVAL-DAVIS, GEORGIE WEMYSS, AND KATHRYN CASSIDY: Changing the racialized ‘common sense’ of everyday bordering

CATHAL MCCALL: How ‘Brexit’ Could Destabilise the Irish Peace Process

Book Reviews

Ieda Osamu, Susumu Nagayo eds. (2014, 2015): Transboundary Symbiosis over the Danube Slavic-Eurasian research center, Hokkaido University, 133 + 195 pp. (T. GYELNIK)

Phil Allmendinger, Graham Haughton, Jorg Knieling, Frank Othengrafen, eds. (2015): Soft Spaces in Europe: Re-negotiating governance, boundaries and borders. Routledge, 248 p. (M. PETE)

European Crisis and its Consequences

for Borders and Cooperation

A Short Introduction to the 2016 Yearbook

Border studies are still enjoying a remarkable renaissance. But perhaps partly for the “wrong” reasons. We can take, for example, the present questioning of interdependence as a political and ethical principle. As far as many of us can remember, internationalism and the emergence of a global consciousness have been self-evident realities. The Cold War, environmentalism, the “oil crisis” and, then, the dramatic collapse of East-West confrontation all made us aware of just how interconnected our national societies and communities are. To think globally, and holistically, was logical. It just made sense. For those of us who study International Relations, borders, conflict resolution and matters related to security, there seems no way of escaping the reality of mutual reliance in an interdependent world. And yet, what we now see in the world, and read in social media, among other places, is an increasing denial of interdependence, as if we could just shut out the noise from the outside world and get on with our everyday lives. What many appear to desire, in other words, is independence, not interdependence.

Why is this? Why this dramatic shift in focus? It is important to better understand the interrelated nature of local, national and global security, the move to a more insular view seems at first glance counter-intuitive. But we can find reasons for it in a wider globalization backlash which involves fear of a loss of local control and domination by transnational economic interests. In addition, as Paul Arbair forcefully argues, we are facing a crisis of complexity, in which a desire for clear and decisive action based on simple solutions has complicated political debate.[1] This helps explain the “Brexit” referendum, Donald Trump’s surprising electoral victory as well as increasing populist sentiment within the EU.

Turning away from interdependence may have major consequences for security, both locally and more globally. For example, without global action, the repercussions of a deteriorating environmental situation many threaten the stability of many states: drought, flooding and rising sea levels could translate into more forced migration and regional conflict. While emerging countries are certainly more vulnerable, Europe and North America will not be shielded, even by higher walls or border fences. Furthermore, the industrialised countries are facing unprecedented economic challenges. Many of the promises of job creation, e.g. through protecting local markets, simply cannot be kept, and popular frustration over decreasing material security could play into the hands of authoritarian leaders. The consequences of weakened democracy could in fact be dire. In a rather alarming tone George Monbiot of the Guardian writes[2]: “Eventually the anger that cannot be assuaged through policy will be turned outwards, towards other nations (…) I now believe that we will see war between the major powers within my lifetime.”

Alternative scenarios to increasing conflict require an honest political debate about the global impacts of local action and the commitments and responsibilities that we share. Independence, if understood as greater citizen participation, democracy, inclusion and capacity-building could in fact be a vital resource. However, denial of mutual reliance and reluctance to engage in common action will have higher social, economic and environmental costs that we perhaps presently imagine.

Closer to home, the EU’s present crisis – comprised of a number of specific dilemmas – is at once a crisis of identity and of Europe’s borders. A major exceptionalist narrative of the EU has been the achievement of open borders within the EU as well the institutionalisation of permeable but secure borders with neighbouring states. These achievements are under threat as EU-member states clamour for a greater degree of local control and the EU is accused of losing control over its external boundaries.

Given this negative backdrop, the 2016 yearbook can only confirm the importance of cross-border and regional cooperation. For this reason, case study essays feature prominently in this yearbook, providing insightful and critical discussion regarding the benefits and wider significance of CBC in different regional and local contexts.

Consequences for Border Policies?

One common understanding that links the rather different case study contexts presented here is that of border-making, or bordering, as an everyday process of interaction between different groups and social needs we argue that it would be possible to foster innovative policies capable of promoting a more comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and challenges that open borders signify. The ways in which we theorise borders have a very real implication for the borders we practice. Today’s methodological advances point out the need to overcome oppositions between narratives and theories, between theories and practices, by highlighting, instead, how it is in their interplay that a new “emotional” knowledge could be produced.

Border policy should pay much attention to the specific contextual and historical conditions of contemporary borderlands, thereby advancing a perspective which gives voice to a multiplicity of individual and group stances on contemporary borders. This entails identities, perceptions, beliefs, and emotions. We need to inquire about people’s practices and experiences of dealing with the border interactions, both political and territorial, as well as symbolic and cultural. At the same time, this grounded diversity of perspectives and practices should be related back to the broader economic, political and geopolitical shifts defining contemporary flowing borders, in order to better understand the dialogue between the various scales of action through which borderscapes are made and experienced.

We should involve different and sometimes new actors who can constitute nodes of cooperation networks across borders, to exploit opportunities for new forms of interaction and thus improve dialogue. A bottom-up perspective (“policy-from-below”) should be adopted in order to avoid reproducing a Eurocentric vision and simply projecting and replying European values. We also need to develop tools for improving communication and cooperation among different actors, to strengthen existing relations and to add new actors previously not included.

A relational perspective would take into account complementary perspectives considering the interaction between political visions and everyday socio-cultural practices as well as social representations and artistic imaginaries. This would help to advance border policy based on complementary perspectives capable of grasping the dialogic nature of bordering processes and imaginaries, as well as the tension between institutional formal modes of political agency and social non-formal modes of agency that co-constitute contemporary borderscapes.

Finally, we need to shape and foster innovative border policies that engage and critically address the multilevel complexity of borders – from the geopolitical level to the level of social practices and cultural productions. This would represent a significant shift in border policy perspective that might offer a real opportunity to fully capture the many implications that the constantly changing historical, political, and social contemporary world’s contexts imply at different scales.

JAMES W. SCOTT

1 Available at https://paularbair.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/brexit-the-populist-surge-and-the-crisis-of-complexity/

2 Available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/23/donald-trump-climate-change-war?INTCMP=sfl

Rebordering Central Europe: Observations on Cohesion and Cross-border Cooperation

JAMES W. SCOTT

Introduction

Central Europe’s post-World War I history – and destiny – is inextricable from the emergence and transformation of state borders. With the 1993 division of Czechoslovakia into two independent states, the question of “rebordering” Central Europe appears now to have been generally settled. Yet border politics are still very much alive in this part of the world, despite eastern enlargement of the European Union and Schengen Area and more than 25 years’ experience in using the tools of local and regional cross-border cooperation. One explanation for this is the idea that nation-building in Central Europe represents unfinished business, a process that was curtailed by war and its geopolitical aftermath and that now coincides, often uncomfortably, with the simultaneous project of European integration. Consequently, this essay reflects research on the significance of borders in Central European borders, interrogating, among other things, the impacts of European integration and EU Cohesion Policy. Concretely, the objective is to consider rebordering processes as a post-1989 Central European development context. This also involves studying tensions between normative elements of European policy agendas and their application as Cohesion policies. In a normative, policy-oriented sense this is a question of borders as framing conditions for regional development. In a more critical and analytical sense this involves interrogating the actual use of borders in politically and ideologically framing national development within a wider European context.

Within the EU context, the development of a “post-national” sense of community has been understood to be an overlying goal. In fact, the project of building a European Union has involved attempts to transcend national divisions and thus create conditions for durable peace, prosperity and more effective interstate co-operation. At the same time, the EU seeks to create a supranational community based on a shared sense of political, social and cultural identity. As a result, processes of “Europeanization” – defined in terms of a gradual diffusion of transnational understandings of citizenship, territoriality, identity and governance – are closely related to changing political understandings and uses of Europe’s many state borders (Scott and Liikanen 2011). In addition, the development of the EU has gone hand in hand with the emergence of shared policy agendas and policy instruments that have created much closer links between member states. Since the end of the 1980s, cross-border co-operation has been firmly embedded within EU structural policies, Cohesion Policy in particular

State borders reflect and thus help us interpret tensions as well as points of connection within intercultural and interstate relations. They can also indicate tensions and contradictions inherent in Europeanization processes that have taken place since 1989. A major assumption informing this research is that the symbolic meanings, functional impacts and socio-political significance of borders are in fact central to understanding the overall significance of European Union as a project of political community building. Consequently, the global objectives of the essay are to interrogate the significance of cross-border cooperation in the re-bordering and Europeanization of Central Europe. Due to its geographical location and experiences with many Central European border contexts, Hungary will receive specific attention. For historical and geographical reasons, Hungary can be understood to be a laboratory of Europeanization, both in terms of the local adaptation of EU norms and practices (Ágh 2003), progressive legislation regarding minority rights (Vizi 2009) and practices of cross-border co-operation (Baranyi 2008, Hardi 2010). Having championed a “spritualization” of borders well before the end of the Cold War, the country has advocated greater political and cultural opening but also a politics of outreach to Hungarian ethnic communities in neighbouring countries– a goal not shared by its neighbours.

The essay begins with a brief discussion of Europeanization processes understood in terms of the promotion of cross-border cooperation and then proceeds with an overview of factors conditioning the post-1989 re-bordering of Central Europe. Particular attention will be drawn to the significance of cross-border cooperation within EU Cohesion and regional policies. As EU policies and their local adaptation are a major focus within regional research, I will seek to explore the links between the notion of European Cohesion and cross-border (territorial) cooperation as an indicator of the scope and local impacts of Europeanization. One result that will be presented here is the confirmation of the hypothesis that while EU-European principles of cross-border cooperation have been partly mainstreamed into regional development policies they have at the same time been superimposed by the domestication of EU policies in the interest of nation-building. This is clearly evident in the case of Hungary: the sizable Hungarian ethnic minorities in neighbouring counties (a legacy of the June 1920 Treaty of Trianon) and the loss of major second-tier cities after WWI partly explain Hungary’s interest in more dynamic cross-border relations, but rather at a more formal political level in terms of interstate cooperation.

Europeanization, Cohesion and Cross-border Cooperation

Since the end of the 1980s, cross-border co-operation has been firmly embedded within EU structural policies, Cohesion Policy in particular. It is also an important element of the new European Neighbourhood Programme operating at the EU’s external borders. Consequently, questions of territoriality, regional policy and cross-border cooperation (CBC) have been central to the emergence of the European Union as a political community. According to Manzini and Mendez (2009: 9), regional policy has been “perceived as a crucial instrument for the identity of a European model of society, and for the legitimacy and viability of the whole political process of integration.”

However, in order to signify something more than the sum of national concerns, the EU has needed an exceptionalist and idealist narrative that goes beyond state-centred political thinking and that is open-ended – territorially and conceptually. I thus argue that a major element of the EU’s political identity lies precisely in reconciling flexible idealism - breaking down borders between societies - with more fixed or what could be called realist territorial perspectives. EU Cohesion Policy has thus emerged concurrently with paradigms of cross-border cooperation and notions of territory based on spatial relationships, cross-border and transnational networks and supranational geostrategies rather than exclusively on administrative and legalistic frameworks. A central aspect here is the recasting of national spaces as integral elements of an international political community; from this also emerges the attempt to create a common set of discourses in which various political and social issues are negotiated.

Formally introduced by the Single Act of 1985, partly in response to the regional challenges posed by southern enlargement, the notion of “Economic and Social Cohesion” has become a central unifying idea legitimising an EU role in territorial development. Furthermore, Territorial Co-operation (TC) within the European Union is understood as a form of local and regional promotion of Cohesion that transcends state borders. In academic debate, territorial co-operation is most generally known as “cross-border cooperation” but generally both terms have equivalent meanings. More pointedly, I define CBC/TC in terms of political projects carried out by private, state and, to an extent, third sector actors with the express goal of extracting benefit from joint initiatives in various economic, social, environmental and political fields. This has been associated with state-society paradigms that suggest that new forms of politically relevant action can (or must) increasingly take place beyond the seemingly inflexible territoriality of the state (see Faludi 2013). Through new forms of political and economic interaction - both institutional and informal - it has been suggested that greater cost-effectiveness in public investment can be achieved, economic complementarities exploited, the scope for strategic planning widened and environmental problems more directly and effectively addressed.

The concept of CBC in the European context is not new; it began as a number of subnational political projects already in the 1950s between Dutch and German communities. However, it is the context of Post-Cold War change that has elevated CBC to the paradigmatic status it has enjoyed in EU policy. As such, CBC has been appropriated by the European Union as a unique social innovation and as part of the EU’s new and progressive political identity (Perkmann 2007, Scott 2014). CBC is thus an element of Europeanization – which can be understood as a diffusion of supranational notions of post-national stateness and a hybrid, multilevel sense of governance, citizenship and identity (Scott and Liikanen 2011). Through its support of CBC, the European Union has promoted a self-image of role model for intercultural dialogue and local/regional development.[1] With specific regard to Europeanization and its role in the construction of cross-border co-operation contexts, European policies have been aimed at networking cities and regions within a theoretically borderless European space (but without violating the formal space of administrative regulation). This is evidenced by a proliferation of initiatives aimed at promoting transnational networking, including Research, Training and Development schemes (such as the multibillion EURO framework programmes), the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), Visions and Strategies for the Baltic Sea Region VASAB, INTERREG, and the ESPON (European Spatial Planning Observatory Network) programme.

Cross-border co-operation has been promoted by the EU on the assumption that national and local identities can be complemented and goals of co-development realized within a broader European vision of community. As such, borders have been used as explicit symbols of European integration, political community, shared values and, hence, identity by very different actors (Langenohl 2015, Lepik 2009, Perkmann 2005). Consequently, the Euroregion concept has proved a powerful tool with which to transport European values and objectives to Central Europe and beyond (see Bojar 2008). Cross-border associations and territorial cooperations are now a ubiquitous feature within the EU’s many border regions. Euroregions, cross-border city partnerships, European Groupings for Territorial Cooperation (EGTCs) and similar cooperation vehicles have also come into being (Medve-Balint and Svensson 2013, Lepik 2012, Popescu 2008, Zhurzhenko 2010). Thus, a significant degree of “de-bordering” through CBC appears to have taken root within the enlarged and wider European Union context.[2] Nevertheless, in order to go beyond a more normative understanding of cross-border cooperation it is essential to interrogate the complex nature of borders and border-related identities. These reflect, for example, “europeanizing” and “nationalizing” influences upon cross-border interaction as well as opportunity structures providing CBC incentives.

Central Europe has been attributed a crucial role in promoting Cohesion and CBC within the context of the EU’s enlargement process. Given its historic significance, Central Europe’s post-1989 de-bordering was a milestone, indeed a major challenge, in the development of European Union as a political community. The elimination of border defenses and barbed-wire between East and West was, for example, highly symbolic in that it portended a reconstitution of a pan-European space and good neighbourhood relations between individual states. For citizens of Central European countries, and in terms of everyday life, de-bordering was perceived as a new liberty to travel and to express oneself as a “normal” European. The momentum of European enlargement and process of pre-accession, accompanied by large development subsidies, served to de-emphasize the significance of borders as barriers. This was also promoted by the gradual integration of Central Europe into the logic of European Cohesion Policy, which strategically targeted local and regional cross-border cooperation.

A (Re)Bordering Perspective on Central Europe

As the above discussion suggests, the European Union has had an important impact on the nature of cross-border relations in Eastern and Central Europe (Hajdú 1998, Hardi 2003, Lados 2005, Scott 2006, Zhurzhenko 2010). In preparing Central and East European countries for membership, the EU adopted a strategy based on institutionalized CBC and aimed at a gradual lessening of the barrier function of national borders. These policies have also been aimed at integrating previously divided border regions in order to build a more cohesive European space. Indeed, the popularity of the Euroregion concept during the 1990s and early 2000s was undeniable, given the generous incentives offered to local and regional actors. Nevertheless, research suggests that this normative political language of Europeanization (e.g. as a process of de-bordering regional development) has in several ways contrasted with realities at CEC borders – a situation where cross-border co-operation (CBC) has reflected competing territorial logics at the EU, national, regional and, local levels and conflicting attitudes towards more open borders.

It is also clear that instead of an across the board de-bordering, different processes of re-bordering have taken place in Central Europe after 1989 (Janczak 2011). Herrschel (2011) has suggested that the momentum of European integration has contributed to overlapping processes of border transcendence and confirmation, not least because of deeply rooted historical memories that continue to imbue national borders with highly symbolic meaning. Following the bordering approach now widely utilized in comparative border studies (van Houtum and Naerssen 2002, Newman 2006, Scott 2012) the making of borders is not only understood as the traditional process of confirming state sovereignty but is something that takes place in everyday situations: it involves the creation of socio-spatial distinctions based on different and often shifting criteria.[3] Furthermore, this approach emphasizes the roles of borders in framing social action. For the sake of this discussion it is important to distinguish between normative de-bordering, which was vital for the orchestration of a new democratic European order, and political, social and cultural re-borderings that resulted from Central European states repositioning themselves within changing regional and wider European context.

While there is no room here for a detailed discussion of the research state of the art on cross-border cooperation in relation to Cohesion Policy in Central Europe, it is possible to arrive at a number of important generalizations. As Orlowski (2010) has suggested, the consequences of enlargement have been stark; the clear lack of East-West convergence has in fact cemented divisions within Europe as a whole and with Central Europe in particular. As several EU Reports on Social and Economic Cohesion document, despite increases in general welfare the imbalances between Europe’s core areas and its vast peripheries remain and depopulation of many rural zones continues unabated.[4] Furthermore, regional disparities as well as cultural and political heterogeneity are certain to increase as a long-term result of enlargement. Gorzelak and Smetkowski (2010) have also shown that, in stark contrast to the objectives of Cohesion Policy, a consolidation and “petrification” of territorial patterns based on core-periphery inequalities is taking hold in Central European states.[5] This process of growing territorial differentiation is based on relative abilities to, first, attract/generate investment, especially into innovative sectors; and, second, relative proximity of and accesibility to economically dynamic urban centres. As a result, regional polarization has been a fact of life since the political transitions since 1989 and large dynamic cities have virtually detached themselves from their regional contexts Future prospects for Central European regions are thus interpreted in terms of continuing polarization and a danger of stagnation of internal and external peripheries. In Central Europe, both EU internal and external borders are with a few notable exceptions characterized by pronounced maginalization, regions at these borders are relatively underdeveloped in both quantitative and qualitative dimensions and continue to lose highly qualified workers to metropolitan cores. As a result, domestic polarization reinforces structural conditions of West-East dependence, and this, in addition to ethno-political tensions, has tended to fragment the region and thus limit the overall impact of cross-border cooperation.

Another impact of socio-economic and territorial divisions is that, having achieved general de-bordering goals in a functional sense, impetus for greater social and socio-economic interaction across Central European borders has diminished (Janczak 2013). In fact, and as will be elaborated below, it is national consolidation, rather than cross-border cooperation, that has taken overall priority within the Cohesion policies of CECs. Indeed, as Gorzelak (2006) was able to document in the Polish-German case, the main benefit of CBC according to Polish local actors was the accumulation of experience in working with EU programmes and funding opportunities, rather than the results of cooperation projects. While the functional de-bordering of Polish-German relations was indeed vital, the step towards more substantial partnerships has remained tentative (Balogh 2014). Moreover, the situation of local and regional cross-border cooperation at other Polish borders has been generally difficult as well: in specific areas of social interaction (education, culture) progress has been documented, but CBC has not come close to satisfying expectations- or contributing to a more profound de-bordering of Central Europe (Böhm 2015, Domaniewski and Studzińska 2016, Janczak 2015). In the case of Central Europe, important shifts in appropriations and practices of cross-border cooperation have taken place since 1989. While avid learners of EU norms and governance practices – and thus of CBC – during the 1990s and early 2000s, Central European countries have developed a much more localized and nationally focused interpretation of CBC and Cohesion.

To sum up, CBC is an area where Europeanization has exerted considerable adaptive pressure in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. However, these countries have not merely reacted to EU policies but have duly domesticated and incorporated them into specific national development strategies in ways that have not always conformed to EU expectations. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of national reinterpretations of EU Cohesion Policy is that of Hungary, which has gradually converted Europeanization into a national development strategy with geostrategic border/crossing implications.

Cross-Border Cooperation and Europeanization in the Hungarian Case

Hungary’s borders in the years directly after 1989 are an excellent example of attempts on the part of local, national and EU actors to appropriate CBC as a multilayered exercise in regional development and historical de-bordering of Post Cold-War Europe. Through the use of symbolisms of the border as a bridge between neighbours, Hungary’s relationships with its neighbours was recast in a wider European context of overcoming the “scars of history”.[6] Political co-operation, and most certainly cross-border co-operation, was closely intertwined with rapprochement and a desire to develop a culture of mutual goodwill, underlined by the Hungarian government’s decision to resist any form of revisionist political initiative that might result in new border-related tensions.[7] Conversely, the 1990s reflected a “drive for convergence” of Central and East European countries (CECs) to European standards and the universal adoption of overall Cohesion policy goals as a means to secure EU membership.

Europeanization – and the extent of the EU’s influence on Hungary with particular reference to CBC and Cohesion Policy – can be roughly divided into three phases: 1) the period of systemic transition that brought in external political perspectives new models of domestic governance (1989 – 1993), 2) the phase during which Hungary prepared for EU accession (1994-2003) and 3) the post-accession period (since 2004). During the first phase, the impact of the EU was rather indirect. Elite views were focused on the “completely new” situation and on “forgetting the past”. Only abstract notions of Europe were present at that time (as the national development policy document of 1993 gives evidence of). The period was also one of overcoming the odium of state socialism and of rejecting the socialist past and its legacies.

The second phase (1993 - 2004) was one of preparing Hungary for EU accession and was the most decisive in terms of Europeanization. The 1993 agreement signed with the EU introduced and intensive period of political, social learning and the impact of pre-accession was crucial (SAPARD PHARE). Regional policy and CBC were part of this learning process and these policies were developed and executed more or less strictly according to EU guidelines – unlike the situation today. EU experts were directly involved in a period of tutelage in which Hungarian actors carefully followed EU directives and counselling. Furthermore, a process of regionalization was implemented which created new decision-making structures and programming bodies at the subnational level (Kovács Pálné 2009) One example of this was the Plan for South Transdanubia and the creation of a Regional Development Agency for the region, both financed out of PHARE funds.

During this phase, openness to EU notion of de-bordering and regional cooperation was at its apogee and within the post-1989 context of European integration Hungarian borders were conceptualized as regional development contexts in close alignment with a wider European reading of Cohesion Policy (see Barta 2006). For example, in the case of Hungary, “post-socialist” regional studies since the first studies of Rechnitzer (1990) very much focused on the development of new local economic networks between Hungary and its neighbours and the roles that border regions play in their creation. As development trends in the early 1990s clearly indicated, post-socialist economic transformation and differential border effects contributed to the exacerbation of core-periphery relationships. Distinctions were made in terms of characterizing Hungary’s borders between successful and dynamic Western border areas (those with Austria and Slovakia) and declining eastern border regions neighbouring Romania, Eastern Slovakia and Ukraine (Baranyi 2001, Bihari and Kovács 2005, Kukorelli et. al. 2000). Similar to the regional development context, specific Hungarian borders have also been conceptualized within a wider European context of economic integration and Cohesion. The Concept of Border as National Periphery was perhaps most vigorously expressed by Baranyi (2001) who depicted Hungary’s eastern border regions as “peripheries of the periphery”. Baranyi developed a number of arguments in which border areas and settlements were clearly identified as regional development problems where cross-border co-operation held out prospects of linking in to more general EU development processes.

However, the years following accession in 2004 have seen the impact of the EU considerably weaken – perhaps paradoxically, Hungary now an EU member, a “good learner”, began to appropriate Cohesion Policy and CBC more intensively in terms of domestic concerns regarding the situation of ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries. By the same token, EU insensitivity to Hungary’s needs did represent a major stumbling block to a more balanced “learning process” between the two partners. One principal source of disaffection with the EU is the lack of support for Hungary’s attempts to promote linguistic and nationality rights for ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries.[8]

Smaller-scale CBC projects were relatively effective in the pre-accession phase as a learning process in obtaining resources and CBC actors were much more open. After 2004, however, the scale and significance of CBC decreased appreciably. Reasons for this included: less money (and thus less local interest) and the fact that National Operation Programmes OPs became much more important in guiding regional development and development strategies of local actors. This shifted the emphasis away from CBC and more towards domestic development. With Romanian accession in 2007 a further element came into play. Romania became much more active in CBC and Hungarian actors lost their privileged status. In addition, as CBC declined in importance with regard to Hungarian minorities as more nationally defined and oriented programmes emerged.

Given the above, what can be said about CBC as a force for regional development? The opening of borders has certainly lead to greater functional interrelationships within the Carpathian Basin and cross-border labour markets and shopping patterns indicate (Mezei 2008, Nagy 2011). Generally speaking, however, CBC at Hungary’s borders has not been significant in direct economic and infrastructural terms, but rather in “soft” areas of development. CBC provided and still provides an important level of institutional learning but the lack of strong subnational governments limits the actual ability of these actors to engage in development projects across borders. The only true working CBC institutions are in the West, on the border with Austria as well as the Istergránum EGTC between Hungary and Slovakia (Esztergom-Komárom-Komarno). Most Euroregions appear to have outlived their functions as regional mediators – made redundant by a combination of institutional flux (recentralization), a lack of institutional support, EU bureaucracy and political uncertainty in Central Europe (Interview). It is remarkable, for example, that Gábor Nagy (2011) in his study of cross-border urban networks makes almost no mention of Euroregions and institutionalised forms of CBC. Instead, he focuses on functional networks and relationships as drivers of CB interaction between Hungarian and Romanian towns. Nagy also states that the cross-border centrality of Hungarian cities such as Gyula is not a mere function of ethnic relations but involves Hungarian – ethnic Romanian interaction as well.

At the same time, shifts in European Union priorities and approaches in programming Cohesion and Territorial Cooperation Policy have also played an important role in conditioning Hungary’s “domestication” of European Union policies. There is in fact little doubt that since the historic turn of events of 1989/1991 and the heady days of a “new European order” there has been a shift in the EU’s focus on CBC. EU rhetoric about the benefits of CBC is today a far cry from the prosaic language of the 1990s. Most recently, CBC has been subsumed within the more inclusive notion of Territorial Cooperation (TC) and its main aim remains to reduce the negative effects of borders as administrative, legal and physical barriers, tackle common problems and exploit untapped potential.”[9] It is clear from recent debate on European Cohesion that the EU stakes much of its political capital on more traditional instruments of redistribution that are nationally oriented even if subject to supranational guidelines. Indeed, the 2007-2013 budget of €8.7 billion for Territorial Cooperation amounted to a mere 2.5% of the total Cohesion Policy budget. Furthermore, a major overall share of Cohesion funds are targeted to Central and Eastern European countries where there appears to be less enthusiasm for CBC as a regional development resource.

Divergent Patterns in the Appropriation of CBC as a Cohesion Policy

In the case of Hungary, instrumental understandings of CBC characterise the present situation and there appears to be a lack of understanding of the border as a resource; regional cooperation has also tended to be weak. In addition, the trend of Hungarian recentralization has made CBC more complex – there is a further reduction in institutional capacity and political will to engage in cooperation projects has diminished. Nevertheless, one means to counteract the marginalization of cross-border cooperation and insensitivity to specific regional situations at and around Hungary’s borders could very well be the recognition of transsovereignty which understands rights to nationality and national identity as independent of and/or even complementary to state-based citizenship. This is a form of national belonging that would uphold the spirit of European integration but that has been frustrated by national/political tensions, new administrative borders, questions of linguistic rights and inaction at the European level with regard to minority rights. Local autonomies based on a transsovereign model (see Bakk and Öllös 2010) would be a major potential means of empowering local CBC but also improving prospects for more general economic and social integration within Central and Eastern Europe.

Hence, as argued above in the case of Hungary, CBC is certainly understood in terms of European Cohesion but is heavily influenced by overlying political goals of “nation-building”. Hungarian interests are clearly defined by a desire to improve connections between Motherland and Hungarian communities around the country as well as improve the living standards and stabilise the conditions in neighbourhood areas as a means to keep Hungarians thriving there – effectively de-bordering to create new (trans)national spaces. However, this has also engendered the distrust of Hungary’s neighbours who at times have interpreted CBC as a means to extend Hungarian extraterritorial sovereignty claims. Indeed, a partial resurgence of national rivalries and historical animosities has taken place between several EU member states and has, for example, affected local co-operation between Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. Different regional interpretations of CBC thus indicate a highly variable appropriation of Europeanization policies. Concretely, there is a notable East-West divide in the acceptance and adaptation of CBC as a set of regional development practices.

However, since 2004 the situation has changed markedly. Rather than reflect conformism to “Core Europe”, Hungary (as well as Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and other Central European countries) now appears to interpret the construction of Europe in terms of a redoubled focus on national development priorities. Batory (2010) in fact argues that Hungarian political interpretations of European integration (and Europeanization) have become are rather formal and statist whereas Hungary’s political identity with regard to its neighbours is seen in affective, i.e. ethnic, cultural and historic rather than European terms. In the case of Hungarian national development strategies of 1998 and 2007 we in fact see a marked change. While in the first document Hungarian border areas and regional development issues related to cooperation with neighbouring states received generous coverage, the 2007 National Development Strategy (National Development Agency 2007) only gives very brief mention of CBC. In practical terms, CBC remains as a minimalist exercise – national strategic plans generally consider it as an extension of national development.

The minimalist, instrumental Hungarian approach indicates a relative lack of policy mainstreaming as well as a focus on national consolidation. Reasons for difficult CBC contexts in the Hungarian case also include: lack of local capacity to promote co-operation, cumbersome EU regulations and project management rules, frequent interstate tensions regarding ethno-linguistic issues, as well as local orientations to national centres and European core regions rather than to neighbouring states (see, for example, Baranyi 2008, Hajdú et. al. 2009, Hárdi 2010, Mezei 2008). Furthermore, as my research has suggested, EU inspired strategies of institutionalized CBC – an area of complex social, economic and political diversity – have tended to be “co-opted” in Hungary by specific nationally defined interests: Euroregions have generally been “top-down” creations, inhibiting processes of region-building through local initiative. At the same time, institutional legacies, such as strong central control, have contributed to variegated Europeanization processes (Kovács Pálné 2009). Hence, CBC in the Carpathian basin (which involves Hungary, Romania and Slovakia) is not a self-evident phenomenon and appears to have lost momentum since the days of PHARE-INTERREG.

These observations confirm that political and social de-bordering in Central Europe has been a patchy, selective process and that the transcendence of “mental”, historically contingent borders remains challenging. Resentment, a lack of engagement and in some cases fear have all played a major role in reducing the role of de-bordering in the reconstitution of Central Europe as a cooperation space (e.g. the Carpathian Basin). At the same time, the focus in the region has been focused on nation-building, on repositioning Central European states within a wider European context. Highly symbolic cooperation vehicles, such as the Visegrad 4 and the Euroregion Carpathia have proved too weak to actually form a basis for concrete interstate projects and initiatives, networking. As has been suggested above, de-bordering has also brought with it a new East-West orientation rather than a reconstitution of neighbourhood relations. This process has also been influenced by core-periphery relations and market competition which weaken a sense of common purpose between Central European countries.

In stark contrast to these developments in Central Europe, CBC in Western Europe is no longer as dependent on external funding as it once was. Here, we see a routinization of local and regional cross-border cooperation that is generally embedded within multilevel governance structures. It is therefore no coincidence, as the ESPON-TERCO project has shown, that EGTCs are concentrated in western areas of the EU. In the most “successful” – that is, the most well-organized – border regions (e.g. the Dutch-German Euroregions), public-sector and NGO co-operation has been productive in many areas, especially in questions of environmental protection, local services and cultural activities. Additionally, successful cases (e.g. German-Dutch) seem to involve a process of pragmatic incrementalism, with “learning-by-doing” procedures and a gradual process of institutionalization. As working relationships have solidified, experience in joint project development has accumulated and expertise in promoting regional interests increased, as has the capacity of regional actors to take on large-scale problems and projects.

Concluding Thoughts on Cohesion and European Borders

The transcendence of borders as barriers to interaction and cooperation remains an inherently EU-European idea, recent crisis situations notwithstanding. However, in terms of de-bordering Central Europe this idealistic European message is domesticated in specific ways that give evidence of a reluctance to fully engage in cross-border cooperation. Admittedly, there has been a general shift away from prioritising CBC and to refocusing on core “national” goals of European Cohesion Policy. However, while CBC has become routinized and even independent of structural fund support in western European contexts, it is seen more in instrumental, even opportunistic, terms in Central and European countries. Arguably therefore, we find a notable East-West divide in the acceptance of CBC as a set of regional development practices.

Viewed from a contemporary perspective it appears that the normative language of (European) integration has contrasted with local realities. At the local level cross-border co-operation reflects competing territorial logics at the EU, national, regional and, local levels and conflicting attitudes towards more open borders.[10] As a result, cross-border co-operation within Central Europe has been a difficult undertaking. A resurgence of nationalism (e.g. in Slovakia and Romania) and a new focus on national development has also tended to de-emphasize local forms of co-operation in the Hungarian case (as well as in Poland and Slovakia).[11] Conflicts between “europeanizing” and “re-nationalizing” conceptions of borders can in fact be identified. interpreted in terms of identity politics serving specific groups within border regions. The research background reveals that but CBC was never a prioritized area of political endeavour or a privileged element of transformation.

This reflection on CBC thus takes into consideration the longue durée nature of creating cross-border political practices at the local and regional level. Indeed, CBC has rarely produced rapid results in terms of economic growth and regional development. Furthermore, local and regional actors develop cooperation mechanisms situationally and in ways that reflect both political opportunities and social and structural constraints. Despite all the shortcomings of the EU model of institutionalized CBC, institutional change elicited by EU policies and funding mechanisms has led to a degree of “Europeanization” of co-operation contexts and thus of spatial planning and development dialogue. This is evident in the discourses, agendas and practices of cross-border actors; they very often legitimise their activities by referring to the wider political, economic and spatial contexts within which their own region must develop. Nevertheless, actual patterns of CBC practices indicate a rather disjointed and complex reality. The European Union itself cannot provide a central template for de-bordering Europe. This will rather depend on how a post-national Europe is interpreted, negotiated and constructed “at the margins”.

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1 This is reflected, for example, in the EU’s Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (subtitled ‘Turning Territorial Diversity into Strength’) in which the need to develop strong cross-border linkages as well as more robust forms of regional and local co-operation with neighbouring states is emphasized (see Commission of the European Communities 2008).

2 See, for example, Scott and Liikanen (2011); the special issue of Regional Studies, Vol. 33, No. 7, 1999, edited by James Anderson and Liam O’Dowd, J. Scott (2006), as well as European Research in Regional Science, Volume 10 (2000).

3 This perspective is based on a notion of conceptual change that involves shifts from largely functional to cognitive and symbolic perspectives on borders. Bordering can take place, for example, as an everyday construction of borders through ideology, media representations, policy agendas and political institutions, popular attitudes, everyday forms of border-crossing, etc.

4 European Commission (2014) Investment for Growth and Jobs. Promoting Development and Good Governance in EU Cities and Regions. Sixth Report on Social, Economic and Territorial Cohesion, Brussels: European Commission; European Communities (2007) Growing Regions, Growing Europe. Fourth Report on Economic and Social Cohesion. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities; (2004) A New Partnership for Cohesion, Convergence, Competitiveness, Cooperation. Third Report on Economic and Social Cohesion. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.

5 Gorzelak, G. and Smetkowski, M. (2007) “Regional dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe”, Paper presented at the International Conference “Regional Development in Central and Easter Europe”, 20-22 September 2007, University of Warsaw, Poland.

6 Robert Schuman’s pronouncement that national borders in Europe represented scars of history (“Les cicatrices de l’histoire” ) has become an evocative political discourse in the processes of European integration and enlargement.

7 See Csaba L., Jeszenszky, G. and J. Martonyi (2009) Helyünk a világban. A Magyar külpolitikái útja a 21. században, Budapest: Éghajlat Könyvkiadó

8 See for example, the article titled “Elfelejtett magyar kisebbség” in Magyar Nemzet of 17.05.2006: in conjunction with the EU accession of Romania the Hungarian government voiced complaints that the interests of the Hungarian minority were not been appropriately taken into consideration. As Gál Kinga exclaimed: “how did one-and-a-half million ethnic Hungarians disappear in this (EU Commission’s) report?” Only the Roma population were named in the EU Commission report that was released in May 2006. Both government and opposition expressed their dismay at the EU Report’s omission of Hungarian minority rights.

9 http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/cooperate/cooperation/cross-border/index_en.cfm

10 See Popescu (2008) who comments the case of Romania.

11 See Bürkner (2006). In its edition of 20 October, 2009, the Hungarian daily ‘Népszabadság’ (‘Nem jött létre a ‘régiók Európája’, reporter: István Tanács) lamented a lack of true cross-border cooperation with neighbouring states, citing national particularisms and limited European vision.

An alternative politics of borders:

the EU-Russia Interphase a space of Encounter

JUSSI P. LAINE

Introduction

In today’s increasingly tense geopolitical climate, the connective potential of borders is easily overshadowed by their capacity to divide, and we regress into state-centric thinking. Represented as lines, the analysis of borders easily becomes fixated on its opposing sides, rather than on the system in which it can have meaning (Salter 2012). To counter that trend, this article underlines the role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in bridging the gaps created by borders and bordering, and suggests that they provide a powerful driver for building neighbourly relations and an alternative avenue for maintaining them, even in a tense political climate.

This article depicts the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) as a bordering policy and as such its success as tenuous amid the ongoing tensions. The portrayal whereby EU is seen to own the Neighbourhood links it too closely to the EU’s geopolitical identity and policy and thus to EU’s ontological security, overshadowing much of the subtler processes. Motivated by the failure of the ENP to deliver its expected results, this article calls for alternative conceptions of Neighbourhood to be considered. The conventional epistemological suture between political practices of inclusion/exclusion and the images created to support and communicate them needs to be thoroughly deconstructed. The traditional understandings of borders – and the policies based on them – must be challenged, because the context in which they were created has also changed.

The paper provides complementary to the neighbourhood as a space of encounter that contributes to the political and sociocultural framing. It alludes to an alternative politics of borders based on societal needs, new conversations about migration, citizenship, solidarity, and an alternative border imaginary denoting real-and-imagined space for cooperation. An alternative notion of both space and border, might be better equipped to deal with the overall context within which EU-Russian cooperation takes place. A more civic understanding of neighbourhood is built on a more apolitical approach: it springs from pragmatism and works with the contradictions inherent in Europe’s external borderland. The proposed model downplays the relevance of the spatial, geographical borderlines focusing attention on the fluidity of movement along networks across, beyond borders. As the distinctions between internal and external, domestic and international become more blurred, so does the division between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ transcending thus the traditional views of borders.

Borders as Multifaceted Constructions

Against the backdrop of optimistic scenarios of globalisation and increased levels of international cooperation, the significance of borders has been fluctuating. The premature enthusiasm during the 1990s for a ‘borderless world’ was, it seems, short-lived, and has been superseded by greater realism and securitisation, underlining the increasing complexity and instability in the world system. While political borders have proven their endurance, their contemporary role has become increasingly contested. The politics of the line endures (Walker 2010), but borders are now commonly understood as multifaceted social institutions rather than as solely formal political markers of sovereignty. Even political borders are themselves not only political, but, as already Raffestin (1993) claimed, political borders must also be understood as a bio-ethno-social constant of human society’s life. Within the political, there are thus also subtle social and cultural processes at work as a result of everyday forms of transnationalism, border-crossing, border-negotiating, and networking.

If the complexities of the current era are to be understood, and its broad socio-political transformations interpreted, a nuanced and critical re-reading of borders both as challenges and as resources in terms of the exercise of power, the management of conflict, identity construction, cross-border cooperation, networking, and the everyday forms of transnationalism and negotiation of borders will be required. Appropriately, research interests have gradually moved from their early focus on borders as territorial dividing lines and political institutions to borders that are regarded as sociocultural and discursive practices, and bringing to bear a more processual understanding of borders. There is, therefore, an apparent need to study not only what borders are, but also how they are perceived, understood, experienced, and exploited as political and social resources. The nature of borders is changing, as are their strategic, economic, and cultural implications. We are witnessing the emergence of complementary forms of border that depart from the norms of territorial linearity by becoming embedded into flows that can travel and be monitored continuously across space.

A conscious effort has thus been made to ‘decentre the border’ from its anchorage in the apparatus of the state and problematise it as a taken-for-granted entity (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 728-729). Globalisation does not erase borders, but it does erode some of their constitutive functions. We are witnessing substantial changes in the geographical imagination from rigid, fixed, and unchanging borders towards a more polyvalent perspective. Reconceptualising borders as a set of performances injects movement, dynamism, and fluidity into the study of what are otherwise often taken to be static entities (ibid.). Such fluidity of movement along global networks takes little account of fixed borders if and when the network requires greater (or lesser) intensity of movement in any particular direction. Accordingly, classical dichotomies typical of the territorial world of nation states have been overcome by understandings of borders embedded in new spatialities.

Borders are in flux, but instead of shifting from one form to another they are becoming increasingly multiple. They must be understood as complex and multidimensional, yet dynamic, entities that have different symbolic and material forms, functions, and locations (Brambilla et al 2015; Laine 2016). Borders have migrated from being merely nation-state lines and have become considerably more diffused throughout society (e.g. Balibar 2002; 2003); they look different depending on from where they are viewed (Sidaway 2015); and are more porous for some than for others (Salter 2012). For these reasons, the scholars of so-called Critical Border Studies in particular have sought to problematize the traditional ‘line in the sand’ (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 728) approach in their call for more ‘alternative border imaginaries’ (Andersen, Kramsch and Sandberg 2015). Borders mean different things to different people. They are not substantive, but rather structural, entities and as such they can generate different effects in different circumstances; borders can enclose as well as relate, facilitate, and divide, and function equally well in encouraging and hindering movement (Piliavsky 2013).

At the same time borders themselves are products of a social and political negotiation of space; they frame social and political action and are re- and deconstructed through institutional and discursive practices at different levels and by different actors. Borders are not only the business of state, and there are many other borders than simply those of states. Borders are not given, but are made, remade, and unmade. As such they are products, but also processes, ceaselessly practised, performed, produced, and reproduced through various bordering practices. This understanding allows us to transform the border from something that merely exists in an objective, unmediated way into a site of investigation, and move the analytical frame from the state to the border itself (Rumford 2012).

Borders are not just a by-product, but as Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, vii) assert, they possess a productive power of their own, thus playing a strategic role in the fabrication of the world. Accordingly, Rumford (2012) proposes that instead of ‘seeing like a state’, as earlier suggested by Scott (1998), border scholars should dispense with an exclusive nation-state frame and move towards ‘seeing like a border’: i.e., disaggregate the state and the border in order to conceptualise the multiple actors and sites of what he calls ‘borderwork’. With his broader call for multiperspectival border studies, Rumford (2012) provides a non-state-centric approach to borders and bordering which is sensitive to the multiplicity of borders as well as the range of actors who create them. The argument he advances underlines that borders cannot be properly understood from a single privileged vantage point and bordering processes can be interpreted differently from different perspectives.

EUropean Neighbourhood

In addition to the internal consolidation of a political community, EU geopolitics focuses on the development of regional partnerships with external states, i.e., the creation of a ‘neighbourhood’. The introduction of the ENP epitomized a political attempt to extend the ‘debordering’ momentum of the late 1980s and 1990s beyond the territory of ‘Core Europe’. The EU embarked on an ambitions mission to look beyond its internal borders and create a transnational space extending beyond its external borders by engaging neighboring states in a new process of cross-border regionalization. Despite being marketed as ‘Ring of Friends’, this approach embodied an apparent shift whereby the 1989-2003 ‘scars of history’ discourse that had attempted to transcend borders became to be replaced by a securitization discourse.

Particularly the external borders re-emerged in practical and discursive and symbolic terms as markers of sharp – to an extent civilizational – difference (van Houtum and Pijpers 2007). The emphasis of cultural-civilizational difference in defining ‘European’ became mainstream political discourse and led to a heightened demand for more defensive borders for the EU as a whole. On the level of member states, the reclamation of national identity and sovereignty, often termed as a ‘re-bordering’ of national-states within the EU, led to the national governments proposing policies of their own in so doing challenging the EU’s top-down supranational thrust. With the less powerful, but still active local institutions in border regions, reacting to national and supranational policies affecting them, a complex political-territorial environment for CBC was formed.

Suffering from a serious form of enlargement fatigue, the EU moved to stabilize and consolidate itself as post-national political community. Formal relations with the neighbouring countries were privileged at the expense of local cooperation, which as a consequence become increasingly ad hoc based on context and need. This transformed the integrative role of the borderlands to that of a buzzer zone or a filter. While the new forms of regional co-operation were promoted to be based on mutual interdependence, the EU’s restrictive border and visa regimes gave an unambiguously exclusionary impact making the EU seem as a contradictory international actor with a considerable gap existing between the proposed geopolitical vision and its translation into action.

The idea of a European Neighbourhood is telling in itself. Here, a sense of inclusion and belonging to a working political community is implied despite the fact that direct membership is not an immediate or probable option for several states that consider themselves very close to the EU (Smith 2005). Therefore, bordering is taking place in the form of the creation of distinctions between groups of people according to varying degrees of ‘Europeanness’. This is a logic informed by security and control concerns, a logic very much associated with state-centered politics of interest (Dimitrovova 2010). Furthermore, while the EU expresses a desire to avoid new political divisions, new visa regimes and other restrictions of cross-border interaction threaten to exacerbate development gaps between the EU and its neighbours.

The alternative spatial, sovereignty challenging, imaginaries of neighbourhood as shared space of regional cooperation transfers surprising rapidly into a rather clear-cut division between EU and the target area of its policies. instead of shared space, the post-Treaty of Lisbon development of the Common Security and Defence Policy has projected a union with sharpened territorial characteristics and revealed a rather obvious transformation from the previous ‘Ring of Friends’ rhetoric towards a more secure neighbourhood. The Eastern Partnership policy has been seen to back track the rhetoric even further in signalling a turn back to classical geopolitics, traditional spatial imaginaries of East and West, and Russia as the ‘other’ instead of being anymore a part of this space (Liikanen 2016).

In addition to its increased security focus, the ENP’s success has been jeopardized by its Eurocentric orientations (Bürkner and Scott, forthcoming), elitist-statist approach in terms of target groups (Laine 2016), unilateralism and the sense of paternalism (Scott 2016), lack of sensitivity towards social sensibilities and development needs of neighbouring states (Laine 2013), as well as being too closely connected to EU own geopolitical identity and its understanding of ontological security (Natorski 2015; Rumelili 2015a/b). Taken together, these fouls have eroded EU’s political image and resulted in reduced level of genuine local engagement. The disappointing results ENP has achieved to date has furthermore led the EU to respond to the contemporary border phenomena with short-term approach favours its own security interests, distancing in so doing itself from the most far-reaching tasks attached originally to the ENP (Scott 2016).

Civil Society Engagement

In order to manage the transnational space extending beyond external borders, the EU policies have placed unseen premium on the role of civil society cooperation. EU documents have praised CSOs, and they have become increasingly trusted in the EU’s attempts to mitigate the effects of both the old and new dividing lines (Laine 2013). Strengthening civil society provides a means of spreading the ‘Western’ values of democracy, the rule of law, and the free market. CSOs are therefore needed not only for the enhancement of the EU’s international influence, but also for the strengthening of its identity as a stabilising element in the world system with ‘exportable’ democratic values (Emerson 2004).

A key feature of the EU’s cooperation with Russia is support for civil society. Its involvement is grounded in the implicit Western understanding that a strong civil society not only promotes public interests but is also an essential aspect of the transition to democracy. The EU documents continue to see CSOs in somewhat normative terms, as agents of Europeanising and democratising Russia. This predisposition is only furthered by increasingly assertive Russian power politics and defiance of the EU’s attempts to steer its development through conventional governmental relations. Using CSOs as an alternative avenue for communication and to channel assistance to Russia, the EU bypasses the Russian state and acts in the absence of consent-building, based on the assumption that small non-political changes will eventually lead to larger political ones. While the CSOs certainly tend to have a number of qualities that make them suitable for this task, given that the concept of civil society is inherently linked with the concept of the state, the Russian reading of the situation has been that EU support is not targeted at civil society alone, but also comes with an agenda for reshaping the state-civil society relationship.

The European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI) seeks to strengthen and promote the role of civil society actors in reforms and democratic changes through increased financial support, but also through strengthening the capacity of local organisations to engage with public authorities (European Parliament 2014). The external action partners, including CSOs, are involved in preparing, implementing, and monitoring EU support, and are called upon to participate in the development of cooperation programmes. In addition, EU support for civil society initiatives in Russia is channelled through various thematic budgetary lines, such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR), Civil Society and Local Authorities (CSO/LA), and the Civil Society Facility. Through the EIDHR the EU has supported, for example, the EU-Russia Civil Society Forum, a joint platform for the cooperation and co-ordination of civil society organisations from Russia and the EU.

Therein lies the problem. The Kremlin has made it more than clear that it is displeased with foreign CSOs becoming excessively involved in the promotion of democracy and civil society in Russia. It views the ENP with suspicion, depicting it as a Trojan horse for EU interests in its sphere of influence. The federal authorities have also repeatedly shown their suspicion of various forms of citizens’ associational activity, claiming that certain CSOs are deliberately undermining the Russian state with the help of Western funds. The most striking manifestation of this is the repeated tightening of Russian NGO legislation with amendments that contradict both Russia’s commitments under international law and its own constitution. The 2006 law gave the authorities free rein to close down organisations perceived as threats to Russia’s sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity, unity, cultural heritage, or national interests. The 2012 amendment obliged organisations receiving foreign funding to register with the Justice Ministry as ‘foreign agents’ or risk heavy fines and imprisonment. In 2014 the Russian parliament amended the law by authorising the Ministry of Justice to register independent groups as ‘foreign agents’ without their consent, and in May 2015 a new law was passed that allows the authorities to ban foreign CSOs that it deems ‘undesirable’ and prosecute their employees, who risk up to six years in prison or being barred from the country.

Several issues also remain to be tackled on the EU side. The role of CSOs is now widely acknowledged, yet the EU still lacks effective means to channel its assistance to where it is needed most. Instead, many CSOs receive their shares through public agencies or private firms that have also invested in CBC. The number of CSOs that have managed to break into EU circles is strikingly small. Being institutionally incapable of acknowledging the nuances of various national civil society cultures, laws, and policies, the EU prefers to deal with ‘organised civil society’, which often equates to large, professional, and usually Brussels-based CSO platforms, some of which may be regarded as somewhat elitist, unrepresentative, and detached from their constituents. The EU’s new rhetorical commitment to facilitating transnational civil society networks is thus not only subordinated to the dictates of geopolitical realism, but also clearly downplayed by the apparent gap between Brussels and the grassroots. The EU is very selective regarding those to whom it talks and listens; it is the EU that has the power to shape the discussion and dictate what kind of CSOs are needed. This begs the question of the extent to which the involvement of civil society really strengthens democracy. Who is selected, and on what basis? And, consequently, who in reality is represented?

Within the EU framework, the dual movement of integration and securitisation has led to contradictory bordering practices whereby a considerable gap exists between the projected geopolitical vision and its translation into action. The EU seems to have lost some of its faith in its ability to influence the transformation process in Russia, and to some extent also in the capacity of CBC to serve as a means to this end. This tendency has only been reinforced by the Eurozone crisis, which has made the EU more introspective at the expense of its external relations. Consequently, the EU has begun to retreat from sociocultural communication and has assumed a newly realistic stance in its policy towards Russia. A telling indicator of this is the apparent imbalance in resources allotted to CBC: while the EU’s Cohesion and Regional Policy for 2007–2013 had an operating budget of €347 billion, the ENPI budget for the same period amounted only to some €11 billion, of which only some five per cent was allocated for CBC. This was also significantly less than the EU invested in security research under its wider R&D budget for 2007–2013. The ENI’s budget of €15.4 billion for the period 2014–2020 represents an increase compared to the previous ENPI instrument’s budget, reflecting the ENP’s prominence in overall EU foreign policy. However, to repeat, only up to five per cent of the budget is allocated to CBC programmes. Accordingly, the EU’s promise of a ‘privileged partnership’ is undermined by the fact that while the current funding instrument does provide limited co-funding for non-EU members, the sums are much less than what was available through previous programmes.

Since early 2014 EU-Russia relations, which were already deteriorating, have been aggravated by the Ukraine conflict, and particularly by the role played by Russia. The on-going tensions have led to various sanctions, travel bans, asset freezes, and other restrictions with a number of negative spill-overs in many areas of cooperation. The EU-Russia summit scheduled for 3rd June 2014 in Sochi was cancelled and the planned G8 summit became a G7 meeting, having been relocated from Russia to Brussels. EU member states decided not to hold regular bilateral summits with Russia, and bilateral talks on visa matters and negotiations on the new EU-Russia agreement, as well as Russia’s potential accession to the OECD and the International Energy Agency, were suspended, as were the implementation of new projects in Russia through the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB). The EU sanctions sparked retaliatory action by Russia.

Furthermore, in July 2014 the European Council invited the Commission to reassess EU-Russia cooperation programmes with a view to deciding, on a case-by-case basis, on the suspension of the implementation of EU bilateral and regional cooperation programmes (Council of the EU 2015). While several projects have been suspended, projects dealing exclusively with CBC and civil society have been maintained (European Council 2014). As has been repeatedly acknowledged by the EBRD, Russia’s economic dive, resulting from Western economic sanctions and falling oil prices, has been having ‘larger-than-expected negative spill-over effects on countries with which it has strong economic links’ (EBRD 2015, 1).

In short, the crux of EU-Russian relations in general is that what the EU advocates as being imperative for the stability of its external borders is perceived by Putin as a threat, penetrating Russia’s age-old periphery and sphere of influence (Averre 2009). While the EU and Russia have had competing agendas over the ‘shared neighbourhood’ since the ENP’s inauguration more than a decade ago (Gower and Timmins 2009), it is only recently that Russia has overtly asserted itself as a countervailing force against the EU’s structural foreign policy, and in response to what it perceives as Western encroachments into its ‘near abroad’ by demonstrating its hard power (Popescu and Wilson 2009). Assertive Russian power politics and the alternatives to European integration (such as the Customs Union and broader Eurasian Union) it projects have challenged the EU’s influence and caused some ENP partners (Belarus, Armenia) to drift further from the EU (Dragneva and Wolczuk, 2012; Lehne 2014).

Towards Alternative Politics of Borders

The process of building a ‘EU’ropean neighbourhood, as well as the way it is received in the ‘Wider Europe’, depends greatly on what the EU is expected to be. It makes a difference whether we are talking about a clearly defined buffer around the European super-state, the backward hinterlands of Imperial Europe, the economic functionalist catchment area, or, for example, the transnational space of a community of shared values. To focus simply on the EU would, however, be a statement in itself. While the EU has certainly been successful in its political making of space, Europe has yet to be subsumed into the European Union. Whereas the very structure of EU foreign policy discourse is grounded in the political distinction between ‘Europe’ and its ‘neighbourhood’, the idea of a civic neighbourhood is open to broader, more inclusive definitions of Europe.

Being receptive to alternative notions, as Sakwa (2006; 2010) suggests, allows us to consider development paths not tied to a particular policy framework and the restrictions defined by it. Whereas the mainstream ‘EU’ropean story situates Russia within Wider Europe, in the margins as a semi- or close outsider (Aalto 2006), the Pan-European dimension provides a ‘half-way house’ approach for integrating Russia by providing some sort of institutional framework, but falling short of a fully-fledged supranational transformative agenda (Sakwa 2010, 18). If, in turn, the civilizational approach is used, Russia must be included, for ‘there can be no doubt that Russia is part of a broader European civilisation’ and that this ‘cultural unity transcends political divisions and geographical barriers’ (Sakwa 2006, 24). This certainly requires us to ask where the borders of Europe are. However, the real question might be whether European unity needs to be confined to a certain geographical or territorial limit to begin with.

Transnational civil society links have effectively fuelled the breakdown of the Cartesian geography of the nation-state system that has for centuries depicted space in absolute terms, and sustained an inflexible worldview consisting of mutually exclusive territorial blocs. The resulting political maps are poor representations of reality, but of even more concern is that they retain a strong influence on how space and ‘reality’ are perceived. While strict borders serve to delimit the space of the state’s sovereignty, thus making space easier to manage and control, they also create the illusion that various social processes should neatly unfold within these ossified lines and find rational explanation. However, the real world – whether in nature or society – knows few rigid lines: it is more common for two parts to be divided by transitional spaces in which one set of attributes and features are gradually replaced by another (Kolossov 2012).

As the nation is inevitably a social construction, so too are its borders. To better understand the broad socio-political transformations taking place, we must abandon our exclusive and rigidly static geometrical thinking and become receptive to alternative interpretations. It has become widely accepted that borders are complex and multidimensional structures, diffused throughout society. What remains, however, is a tendency to look at borders from the perspective of the state. The default representation of global borders continues to show 19th century state borders as if nothing has changed (van Houtum and Eker 2015). The emphasis of border studies on nation-state borders, Rumford (2012) explains, has been implicated in ‘representing divisions’. The recent critical perspective in border studies has, however, attempted to challenge this trend by decentring the border and has emphasised that rather than being stable, objective ‘things’, borders are in a constant state of becoming and are defined by various bordering practices (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012, 728).

The enduring state-centric projection largely ignores the fact that we have recently witnessed a remarkable change in geographical imagination towards a more polyvalent perspective, which acknowledges the relational nature of space and, also, therefore, the emergence of complementary forms of border that depart from the norms of territorial linearity. Political borders are no longer necessarily the principal, and certainly not the only, manifestation of divides and connections; nor is the nation-state the only concept of space that can be applied in explaining human interaction (Laine 2014). We have moved towards a ‘portal-like’ logic of border imagination that brings people and places together by connecting them directly across space. This is more in tune with a topological notion of space defined by flows, nodes, and hubs, and is thus qualitatively different from the modern topographical notion of space, defined by territorial proximity and distance decay (Popescu 2014). The suggested spatial diffusion of the border makes the classic outside-inside border-based territorial distinction obsolete, because the spatial ‘outsiders’ can be physically inside the flow belt (Amilhat-Szary 2014). Of course, such an understanding goes very much against the geographical idea of territorial exceptionality, but it forms a fitting premise for a transnational network-space that is not tied to the traditional structural logic of civil society.

Such a readjustment allows us to turn our gaze away from the line to what Salter (2012) calls the suture. He emphasises that borders unite rather than separate, and that the suture – the process of knitting the inside and the outside together and the resultant scar – better evokes their performative aspects. Certainly, borders remain as markers of sovereignty, but anchoring our analysis exclusively to the apparatus of the state leads to a depiction of the border as something that separates the inside from the outside. A departure from state-centric thinking would allow us to shift our focus to where the greatest potential is and consider perspectives from those at, on, or shaping the border (Rumford 2008; 2012). Seeing like a border perspective unveils the potential various civil society actors have to construct, shift, or even erase borders. If the border is no longer seen in national terms, and if interaction is deemed not to occur between two states but among people from these two states, we can move beyond issues of national belonging or citizenship and allow expressions of transnational mobility and genuine political actorhood, independent of state or EU-supported agendas (ibid.). This would also liberate us from having to contemplate whose concept of civil society is actually being promoted. In its nature civil society is not a stand-alone concept, but has conventionally been paired with the concept of the state: in many countries civil society structures remain embedded in their respective national frameworks and informed by different societal contexts.

But as the state has been redefined, so too can civil society (Laine 2013). As an arena it has become increasingly transnational; the share and scope of organisations and networks operating across the border and beyond the state is growing. This tendency suggests that the time has come to approach interaction in post-national terms and conceptualise a cross-border space, a civic neighbourhood, through linkages of civil society actors. It is at the border, where actors from two very different traditions of civil society meet and face each other, that different understandings of state and civil society meet, overlap, and intermesh. It is thus at the border that the greatest connective potential is also found, as it is not only where the different models have evolved into something more hybrid, but also – despite its historical lop-sidedness – where a number of functional CBC practices have been developed during the years of trial and error.

The differences that inevitably arise need not be taken automatically as barriers or something to be fixed by cooperation: in many cases it is very much the difference that fuels cooperation. If a model is merely transplanted from one context to another, it is unlikely to take root and gain acceptance – as the current problems at the EU-Russia level indicate. The focus must thus be on action rather than rhetoric. Experience shows that a much more fruitful premise can be built on pragmatic cooperation that brings real life benefits to both sides. The first aim is not to change Russia or to lure it towards Western democracy and values: the steps must be smaller. The most successful examples are to be found when the actors themselves feel that CBC is not only a means to an end, but that there is added value in the process itself. It is these processes and the networks they create that weave the border together. They extend the mandate and action space for CSOs beyond national confines, also creating a cross-border public sphere for debate regarding issues of common concern that necessitates cross-border cooperation, or that may be caused by its very existence. It is not that the national embedments would thereby lose their meaning, or that the concept of civil society would suddenly become global and all-encompassing, but that the focus needs to be on what is actually being done, rather than on its organisational form and philosophical premise.

While governments tend to have fixed views of national borders – because this is where their jurisdiction ends – CSOs are better able to move back and forth across international borders, and are less restricted from entering into transnational relationships. If only at an asymmetrical level, CBC is about mutual learning: it attenuates our tendency to think in normative and categorical terms about what civil society is and what it should do. It opens up new perspectives for understanding why civil society actors develop specific practices and provides insights into the specific social identities of civil society organisations. While the concept of civil society is heavily NGOalised, what is needed is a framework that places less emphasis on organisational forms and allows for a broader focus on the functions and roles of informal associations, movements, and instances of collective citizen action that make it more difficult to dictate who is in and who is out (Laine 2014).

The representation of a party’s interest may no longer need to take an associational form as ‘specific activity is more important than the framework within which it is carried out’ (Wollebæk and Selle 2005, 214). It is thus more important for civil society actors to detect common social and political problems and ‘thereby, perhaps be of service to the citizens in their efforts to find common solutions’ (Stenius 2003, 17). Much depends on individual actors, who are able to shoulder the implementation of agreed programmes and to solve emerging problems and disagreements.

Given the ever-tightening climate for civic action in Russia, the general reaffirmation of state sovereignty that has characterised the Putin presidency, and the post-Lisbon securitisation emphasis of the extensive new ‘realism’ of EU foreign policy, it is no surprise that the importance of cross-border cooperation has been overshadowed by high politics. The EU has been losing its faith in CBC as a means to have an impact on the transformation process in Russia, and the Russian government, in turn, has repeatedly tightened the screws on civil society, not only marginalising Russia’s own nascent civil society to the point of extinction, but also making it increasingly difficult for any foreign organisation to operate in Russia. At such times it is, however, important to acknowledge that when high-level relations sour it is civil society connections that provide an alternative avenue for cooperation and play a vital role in the eventual reestablishment of relations. CBC is especially necessary at the EU’s external borders to maintain an adequate level of dialogue and cooperation between local communities, institutions, and populations, and to promote balanced social development and economic growth. This cannot be based on superficial rhetoric, but careful planning is needed in order to move beyond formalities and successfully maintain cooperation.

Conclusions

The potential for success of the hegemonic EU understandings of neighbourhood has been greatly diminished by the ongoing geopolitical tensions, but also because it tends to pre-empt views from outside, both in terms of geography and decision-making practice. The ENP’s discourse of common values ‘is structured in such a way that the neighbours are the subjects of the ENP policy rather than partners’ (Dimitrovova 2010, 477), creating an image of an inferior neighbour that desperately needs to move towards European, higher, standards. The EU’s external borders are not, however, merely political, but also cultural and social in nature (see Boedeltje and van Houtum, 2011), and it is on this realisation we must focus, for in defining Europe’s neighbours we also define where Europe’s borders are.

The concept of ‘neighbourhood’ is not reserved for the EU to use. A more civic neighbourhood proposed here is a non-Eurocentric bottom-up concept open to broader definitions of what is meant both by Europe and by border. It is receptive to observations that Europe’s meaning remains heavily contested, and that, while political borders continue to have considerable relevance today, few social processes unfold neatly within them. The previously stable border concept has been shaken, and even at ‘EU’rope’s external borderlands, which differ qualitatively from those between EU member states, borders have come to be understood as multifaceted social institutions rather than only as formal political markers of sovereignty. More novel borderings are at play, and they entail partial denationalising of what historically has been constructed as national, a process that unsettles the meaning of geographical borders (cf. Sassen 2009; 2015).

Civic neighbourhood is not about national belonging or citizenship, but about transnational mobility and actorhood. The operational preconditions of civil society continue to be linked with the operations of the broader society surrounding it, yet there is no reason to suppose that this should automatically be understood within the framework of the nation-state. While the territorial sovereignty of nation-states continues to form one of the leading principles upon which international (border confirming) relations are based, transnational (border eroding) relations are run by actors and organisations whose ability to function do not stop at the border. This is not to say that the border would simply be transformed from one to the other, but rather to underline that the same border may seem very different to different actors. Borders can divide as well as connect.

Spaces along the EU’s external border are contradictory sites in which transnational, cross-border, and Europeanist aspirations become entangled with national and local needs and interests, and in which border eroding and confirming forces continuously challenge one another. The civic neighbourhood works with the existing inherent contradictions, and introduces us to a model of bordering which is not governed by consensus. It provides an alternative border imaginary that seeks to discount neither contemporary realism nor geopolitical tensions, but rather – to follow Rumford (2012) – fashion an operational model that may indeed be invisible or irrelevant to many, but very pertinent to a few. It transforms the role of the border from a line that separates to a tissue that connects. Like Salter’s (2012) suture, the process may never be completely successful, just as stitches in a wound may lead to healing, but also leave a scar. Nor is there a guarantee, just as there is not with the official ENP, that the civic neighbourhood will be recognised by everyone. It does not need to be. It is enough if it is meaningful and operational for those concerned.

Civic neighbourhood cannot be confined within any strictly defined territorial limits. Rather, it depicts a transnational network-space that is more relational than it is geographically bound. More than uniting states, the emergence of civic neighbourhood is about uniting people. It is a manifestation of debordering, a postmodern projection of the deterritorialisation discourse. In contrast to the geographical idea of territorial exceptionality, it advocates a more spatial diffusion of the border than the archetypal outside-inside distinction would imply. Instead of dwelling on one’s status or mere location, a focus on interdependencies would allow cooperation when and where it is not only necessary, but sensible. Understandings of civic neighbourhood are not based on specific policies or official definitions, but arise from more pragmatic – less normative – cooperation exercised through informal channels. It aims to normalise relations by drawing from dialogue, rather than dialectics, and by focusing on common, rather than merely external, interests and challenges. As such, its realisation depends greatly on its perceived usefulness: both sides need to feel that they are gaining something.

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Milking the border – cohesive strategies in respond to the crisis of the periphery in border regions.

MARTIN BARTHEL

Introduction crisis, peripheral and border regions

The media discourse on the crisis in Europe has shifted lately from the financial crisis in Greece to the challenges of accommodating refugees and migrants. The crisis of the periphery, the major target of the cohesion policy of the European Union, has became a neglected issue.

In spatial science periphery is conceptualised as a marginalised location which has to be understood in the relation with a centre. Peripherality is characterised by dependency and deprivation from the centre. Spatial science uses to explain this dependency the centre-periphery model. The model, first used by economics in the fifties of the last century, describes the interdependencies that favour the development of the center and disfavour the periphery, leaving the periphery compared to the center in a permanent disadvantaged location (Bernadotte et.al. 2005). The model can be applied at all regional levels, whether global, national, regional or local. Following this logic, a remote place might be easily situated in a multiple periphery.

The Sociologist Wolfgang Hein has coined the term ‘crisis of the peripheries’. Here he refers to the global contrast between the developing and underdeveloped periphery and the industrialised world as the developed centre. He understands the crisis of the periphery as a process in which any attempt to overcome the crisis leads to further underdevelopment, resulting in the development of underdevelopment. The periphery is thus left in a permanent crisis (Hein 1998: 17). Leaving the global level and considering the nation-state, mostly rural and border regions are described as peripheral. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the political geographer Albrecht Haushofer understood limits as peripheral organs of the state organism. Leaving aside the highly disputable geographic deterministic perspective, he defined the border as a remote, weak region, which is exposed to influence from beyond the state organism. The centre has thus consider the foreign influence, in order to maintain a ‘healthy state body’ and strengthen its borders to immunise the state as a whole of foreign influences. In this understanding border regions are need, unlike the internal peripheral special strategic attention (van Houtum, Scott 2005: 20).

In post-modern research methods similar assumptions regarding peripherality can be found. In Saskia Sassen’s description of the Global Cities, the Theory of Spaces of flow of Manuel Castells or the concept of liquid modernity by Zygmunt Bauman, periphery is characterized as a place between the global nodes, which is under the risk of being detached from the spatial and social development of the globalising nodes. Border regions, which traditionally suffer from weak economic development and infrastructure are de-connected even more. While the trans-national flows are directed through the border regions, they do not profit from them. With the weakening of the nation state in the Globalisation, the role of borders is weakened too. However, border regions are crucial as contact zone, markers of identity and geopolitical symbols. Thus border regions keep a higher strategic potential, than inner peripheries (Sassen 2005, Castells 1996, Bauman 2000).

At the European level, it is fair to conclude that the permanent crisis of the periphery is particularly pronounced at the external border. Towns on the border may be in multiple peripherals. They could be located in the European, national and regional margin, suffering development handicaps to three centres. This peripheral border trap is further worsened by the current discourses on responding to the perceived migration crisis, which is favoring a closure of the border. Border regions are caught in between the debates on softening and hardening the border. In border research strategies are discussed which can help to alleviate the peripheral disadvantages. One strategy is to use the border as a resource. The political geographer Liam O’Dowd for instance describes the variety of functions of borders. Limits could serve as a separating barrier, a filter and control mechanism of the nation state or as a symbol of national identity. Borders may be used as bridges and open doors to the neighbours with intensive exchange or facilitated as resources.

Liam O’Dowd understands borders as resources for local populations that help mitigate disadvantages of border regions. Limits thus contribute to weakening of the peripheral disadvantages which result purely from the existence of dividing line (O’Dowd 2001). He recognises that borders can have different functions for different stakeholders. As in the case of the current discourses, the border may be a resource for development for local residents, who favour the tendency to soften the impact of bordering. At the same time other discourses like migration or geopolitical threats increases the notion of a symbol for the nation state, leading to discourses on hardening the border. The result can be the creation of a feeling of being left-behind, favouring the construction of a local borderland identity. This perceived marginalisation causes in extreme cases a notion of otherness and separateness. The creation of a border identity is however, inevitably. Oscar Martínez argues that border residents learn from their birth to use the border as a resource for legal and illegal activities. These activities include smuggling, the exploitation of legal or price differences and the utilization of grants and subsidies, provided by the centre to accommodate the peripheral border regions (Martinez 1994).

One of the most common forms to “milk the border” for regional development is tourism. The American tourism scholar Dallen J. Timothy is picturing borders as appealing ‘unlikely tourist attractions’. The boundary itself stimulate various forms of tourist activities. The most common form is shopping tourism, which exploit differences in quality, availability or costs of goods and services across the border line (Timothy 2011). The practice of cross-border shopping tourism can have a major impact on borderland economies and borderlanders perception of the other. Studies from the German – Polish and German – Luxembourg border have underlined this notion (Mathä, Porpiglia and Ziegelmeyer 2014: 11; Powęska 2008). Furthermore, as a contact zone between cultures, border regions s can be regarded as an attraction. Border regions gain attractiveness due to their disputed history, which have often led to changing notions of national and cultural belonging. Culture, cuisine and dialect often reflect this history. These cultural contact zones gain a certain exotic appeal as a tourist destination – offering the known and the unknown at the same time (Timothy 2011).

The theme of disputed borderlands, whether it might be the trenches of Verdun, the Berlin Wall or the demarcation line in Korea attracts tourists. So-called ‘dark tourism’ exploits the notion of grief, sorrow and death. It is not limited to border regions, but occurs often at existing or gone demarcation lines or battle fields (Lennon, Foley 2006). Last but not least Timothy (2011) stressed that an advantage of the peripherals, particularly near the border, is the more intact nature leading to the creation of national parks. Border regions utilise this fact for developing active and ecological tourism.

The four tourism forms of shopping, cultural contact zone, dark past and ecology are closely linked to the everyday experience at the border. They are likely to be perceived as resources to help border regions to develop. However, the question remains if those potentials are realised and facilitated locally. Still, even if the potential is realised, how are the strategies implemented locally and how does the notion of the border as a resource is competing towards the notion of the border as a national symbol of sovereignty? Does the local discourse tend towards cross-border connectivity or dis-connectivity?

This paper will investigate those questions on the basis of a case study on the Polish border town Przemyśl. The case study consists out of a number of field works with expert interviews and an analysis of the local development strategies.

Przemyśl - a border town in the triple peripherals

Manuel Castells stressed that those places are cut off from the rapid economic development of globalisation, which are located in the periphery to the global nodes. While the nodes connect ‘flows’ of people, services and goods, the periphery is dis-connected. Peripheries do not have to be located at geographical margins, since the space of flows is determined by connectivity and not by space (Castells 1998).

The spatial aspect should however not be underestimated. Przemyśl is a border town on the Polish-Ukrainian border with about 64.000 inhabitants. The border is located 20 kilometres east of the city centre on the road to the former regional centre Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg) in Ukraine. The border crossing is the busiest along the Eastern EU border, combining a street, rail and pedestrian crossing. The importance however, has diminished since in 2011 a new crossing opened on the highway connecting Lviv with Kraków 40 kilometres north. The town became disconnected from the trans-national flows (Kaliński 2013).

Przemyśl has to handle due to its geographical location, its socio-economic and demographic development a triple peripherality. The town is located at one of the EU’s most easterly points at the semipermeable ‘hard’ outer EU border. The city is thus far off Brussels, but has as well development deficits in relation to Warsaw and to the regional center, the voivodship capital Rzeszów. Historically, the city was connected with Lviv, being in the natural hinterland of the Galician metropolis. As an important regional centre Przemyśl had itself an extensive hinterland. The town was the until 1947 the cultural centre for the Ukrainian population, with the archeparchy seat of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. After the Second World War the town was cut off from both, its traditional regional centre, but as well of its own hinterland. With the repatriation of Ukrainians, the city lost its cultural and religious functions. Located at the hermetically sealed Soviet border, the city suffered from the poorly developed infrastructure and a lack of investment (Stokłosa 2013).

Thus, the town became dependent on the public sector. With the 1999 Polish administrative reform, the town lost its status as voivodship capital and consequently a large number of jobs in the public sector. The loss of work places resulted in a population decline. Just between 2010 and 2012 the city population shrank by 4.9 percent, with mostly young, good educated citizens leaving, creating a serious brain drain (Ustat 2014).

The situation in a triple periphery is reflect as well by the economic indicators. Poland experienced as a state an enormous economic development. Compared with all EU countries, the country is, however, in the back field. Within Poland the gross domestic product (GDP) of Podkarpackie is significantly lower than those of any other Polish province. In 2008 the voivodship reached only 64.8 percent of the national GDP. Within the province, there is no powiat that has a lower GDP than Przemyśl. The city attracted 2012 nine percent less investment than the average of the voivodship, having one of the highest unemployment rates in Poland (Ustat 2014).

The city is haunted by its contested past with changing locations of the border and forms of border regime. Until 1772 Przemyśl was situated in one of the central regions of Poland. After the last Polish Partition, the region was until 1918 part of the remote Eastern provinces of the Habsburg empire. The city was along with Lviv, the main economic center of the province of Eastern Galicia. The region was multiethnic, with Ukrainian dominated villages and Polish-Jewish dominated cities. From 1918 on the border was redrawn around Przemyśl several times. While the peace treaty of 1918 draw the border along the so called Curzon Line, which ran east of the city, Przemyśl became part of the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic, situating the border west of the city (Eberhardt 2012).

After Poland won the Polish-Ukrainian (1918-1919) and Polish-Soviet (1919-1921) war, the town became until 1939 again part of Poland. The border was far east and played no role for the city. In 1939 the city was divided in the middle by the Molotov Line which partioned Poland between the German Reich and the Soviet Union. In 1941 in the course of the German military campaign against the Soviet Union, the whole town became reunited under German control. With the border the multiethnic identity of the city disappeared as the Nazis extinguished the Jewish population. In 1945 the border between Poland and the Soviet Union was drawn on its current location east of the town. The border was hermetically sealed. In order to homogenise the population, the region witnessed a huge population exchange. Ukrainians were moved to the Soviet Union or Western Poland while Polish from the east replaced them. Simultaneously escalated a violent guerrilla war between the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Polish Army, which was finished only in 1947 when during the Akcja Wisła the last Ukrainians had been deported (Buzalka 2007: 66pp). The city did not just lose a huge part of its hinterland and its connection towards the regional center Lviv but as well its cultural identity. The so called “Friendship line” between the Soviet Union and Poland became a massive obstacle for the daily lives of borderlanders and for the development of the region (Barthel 2010).

With the independence of Ukraine in 1991 the border became open and Poland facilitated the exchange with Ukraine by bilateral agreements granting visa free movement. The border served as a bridge between the two countries and the Polish government aspired to become a pilot for the western integration of the neighbour. The EU accession of Poland in 2004 on the one hand hardened the border regime which led to a limited connectivity between the neighbouring regions, while at the other hand tools like the Neighbourhood program became available supporting cross-border cooperation (Scott 2016: 84). Nowadays EU citizens can travel visa-free to Ukraine, while with the exception of Borderlanders in a 20 kilometres zone along the border, Ukrainians need visa. Thus the border region witnesses an asymmetrical connectivity (Szejgiec, Wisniewski 2008: 121).

Figure 1: Przemysl and the border. Location and border regime.

Source: the author

Since the border functions for locals as a resource this function is contradicted by its symbolic value. The Polish-Ukrainian border is both a symbol of national but as well of EU sovereignty. Therefore, the control and surveillance of the border has been intensified and new frontier fortifications had been installed, dis-connecting the regions across the divide. Still, the border region is not alienated. There is a certain amount of connectivity and interdependence, where to a certain degree interaction take place (Martinez 1996).

Functions of the border

Oscar Martínez describes borderlanders as people who live in and are influenced by the proximity to the border. The design of the border regime and the relations across the border have a far greater importance for them, than for the rest of the state. The border is for them not just an everyday reality but as well a resource to overcome other disadvantages of the divide. This can lead to conflicting interests or even new regional identities to which Martínez referred as otherness and separateness (Martinez, 1996: 227).

Liam O’Dowd stated that the border might have just one function, but generally multiple functions are facilitated by distinctive actors, providing different meanings for different groups of people or administrative levels, which influence the perception of openness and connectivity. The interests of the nation state or the EU are often conflictive to the interests of border landers. While the nation-state has the interest to turn the border into an effective controlled filter, the borderlanders interest is to cross the border frequently and without obstacles. However, the filter function desired by the nation state affects the borderlanders, as they might perceive those measures as forming a barrier for cross-border activities. The barrier function can be imposed by the national level, since it has an interest in ensuring the perception of the border as a symbol of sovereignty. Depending on the foreign policy orientation of the neighbour’s limits can be perceived either as bridges, filters or barriers. For the local population, however, the limit is mainly an everyday resource that can be exceeded best with the least barrier effect possible (O’Dowd et. al. 2004: 24).

The activities associated with exploiting the border as a resource includes legal, grey and illegal practices. They reach from normal shopping tourism, which is taking advantage of legal or price differences on both sides of the border to illegal activities such as smuggling. The exploitation of the border as a resource is used by the borderlanders to alleviate the negative impact on their everyday life. The exploitation can be understood as a strategy to face the crisis in the periphery (O’Dowd 2002). This paper will concentrate on the legal activities, which are used to facilitate the border for regional development.

The city council of Przemyśl published 2014 the ‘Strategia Sukcesu Miasta Przemyśla na lata 2014-2024’ (the success strategy for Przemyśl in the years 2014 to 2024), in which the state-of-the-art of the city and its future development potential are examined in a SWOT analysis.

The analysis identified the following potentials connected to the location of the city at the border (Rada Miejska w Przemyślu 2014):

1. The untouched nature along the border

2. The multi-ethnic history of the city and its region

3. The historical fortifications and border facilities

4. The cross-border trade

5. Przemyśl as inland port and hub for Ukraine

6. The border crossing infrastructure in Medyka

Based on the strategy, it can be noted that local policies understand the border rather as a resource than a barrier. However, most of the potentials relay on tourism. Thus it is important to analyse the economic potential of tourism for the development of the region.

The economisation of the border through tourism

In the understanding that economisation is the act of using resources to the best affect, it is necessary to explore how the border as a regional resource is valorised. Timothy understands international borders as a natural tourist resource since every international traveler has to cross it and thus border become an integrated part of the experience of traveling. Border regions irrespective of their attractiveness provides facilities that meet these needs and become ’unlikely tourist destinations’. The border itself can become an attraction too, if it is marked by signs, monuments or memorials (Timothy, Saarkinen 2013: 64).

In border regions tourist might experience cultural diversity or the notion of otherness, which could be exploited through regional branding. Border regions are often places of past or current conflicts, which might appeal to certain tourists’ groups. The geographer John J. Lennon describe this phenomenon as dark tourism. He states: “What is on offer on Either side of this border is a twin reflection of the shared past: in a most literal form the interpretative display offers a mirror image of a dark past on Either Side.” (Lennon, Foley 2006: 137)

Timothy (2005) identified further activities that could turn borders into an attractive tourist destination. Hence most of them are not connected to the borderline itself, but to price difference and/or differing legal regulations. Among those activities are gambling, prostitution and drug use. In general, those activities are locally performed and assume quick consumption. Shopping tourism or border trade are connected to the phenomena, although shopping tourism is rather understood as personal consumption and connected to touristic activities during the shopping.

The Strategia Sukcesu Miasta Przemyśla na lata 2014-2024 identifies tangible aspects in which the border can be utilised as a touristic resource:

1. Przemyśl as a destination for ecotourism

2. Przemyśl as a border town and hub for Ukraine

3. Przemyśl as a place of shopping tourism

4. Przemyśl as a place with multicultural and military past

A brief summary of the strategies will showcase their relevance for regional development.

Przemyśl and ecotourism

In the strategy the city government identified the untouched nature as a development potential for the region. The city laid up to 1991 at the heavily fortified border with the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of the Second World War villages have been resettled and agricultural activities restricted. Up to date, the border region is characterised by a low population density. The Polish geographer Marek Wieckowski states that particular in Polish cross-border regions national parks are prominent tourist attractions. Consequently, the city advertises their proximity to the Bieszczady National Park (Wieckowski et. al. 2013). The city created hiking and biking trails along the fortress ring of the First World War and with the support of the Euroregion Carpathia Polish-Ukrainian routes, which promote cross border active tourism. The history of conflicts and clashes on the border are fairly utilised to capitalise active and ecological tourism.

Przemyśl as the last city in the EU

Medyka, the nearest border crossing to Przemyśl is increasingly becoming an unofficial travel terminal to Ukraine. The crossing is the only at the the Polish-Ukrainian border, which can be crossed by car, rail and foot. Regarding the statistics of the Polish Border Guards in 2014 more than 4.6 million travellers passed the checkpoint (Bieszczadzki Oddział Strazy Granicznej 2015).

Minibus Shuttle permanently connect both sides of the border with the railway stations in Przemyśl and Lviv, supplementing the rare cross-border train links. The border-crossing and its vicinity are starting to facilitate the travellers needs. The village Medyka developed since 2006 from a trading centre with a lively bazaar to a transfer hub for travellers with an increasing number of restaurants, services and bars. The local government is aware of the potential. In interviews during a fieldwork in 2006, local representatives stated, that a transformation would be likely to occur, since a new highway opened 50 kilometres north of the city, diverting bazaar trade to other locations. They underlined however, the importance of the crossing as a hub for more profitable activities towards Ukraine – tourist from Western Europe. The city understood the upcoming 2012 UEFA European Championship as a chance for the city. Consequently, the city launched a campaign to position itself as a hub within the EU for foreign tourists making day trips to Lviv. With the motto ‘Become a Fan’ a city marketing brochure targeted in English and German Western tourists: “Are you going to the Euro 2012? Are you a football fan? So we are! We would like to invite you to picturesque Przemyśl [...] on the main route to Lviv directly on the EU border.” (Urzad Miasta 2012)

The nearest matches where hosted in Lviv – being the only close destination for football fans. Still the city organised a fan zone with public viewing and a special cultural program for tourists. Alas studies shown that Poland as a tourist destination benefited from the EURO 2012, the local impact on Przemyśl has not yet been studied. Still, the city marketing campaigns currently uses the slogan and continues to position Przemyśl as the last city in the EU – offering tourist known EU standards and a feeling of security, from where the neighbour, like an uncharted territory, can be explored. The strategy exploits the notion of exotic and adventure, occurring in a contact zone where cultures meet. At the same time the city is utilising the EU Border as a resource for the region (Wieckowski 2010).

Figure 2: Transport Hub Medyka - Minibus waiting for a tour to Przemysl at the border.

Photo: the author

Figure 3: Przemysl as first/last city of the EU. Welcome sign at Medyka.

Photo: the author

Shopping tourism in Przemyśl - from the bazaar to the Mall

According to Timothy cross-border shopping occurs in borderregions, where the contrast between the local offer and the offer from the other side of the border differ. The difference has to be noticeable at least regarding selection, quality and price of acquisition. At the same time people have to be aware of the difference in order to get motivation for crossing the border. The willingness to travel is emerging from curiosity, interests, wishes and personal mobility. The motivation for crossing the border can be stimulated or not, by the transport infrastructure and safety they would benefit on the other side. The infrastructure depends on the border cross procedures. They have to be rather easy and unproblematic. The motivation for cross-border shopping depends further on the costs and time afford, the clients have to consider. Thus the extend of shopping tourism depends on the available market. The volume increases, if there is at least one bigger urban centre in the proximity, generating customers (Timothy 2005).

Przemyśl has intense experience and expertise regarding border trade with Ukraine. The city developed since 1991 to the major bazaar city on the border, where trade and smuggle dominated the local economy. The nearby Lviv, a city with nearly 700,000 inhabitants, is the main engine for trade, since most traders at the bazaar and an increasing numbers of customers are originated from there. In 2013 Ukrainian citizens purchased products worth 1.36 billion zlotys in Poland (Gazeta Wyborcza 2014).

Figure 4: Multinational Chains on the road to Medyka. Tesco hypermarket in Przemysl.

Photo: the author

Figure 5: Bazaar trade. View into the Bazaar in Przemysl.

Photo: the author

Since 2008 it became apparent that the importance of shopping tourism increased, while the importance of the bazaars shrink. The transformation to a shopping destination was anticipated by multinational chains. Media Markt, Tesco or Carrefour opened large stores while North of city centre the Galeria Sanowa, a large shopping mall, opened. The mall contains mostly textile brands such as C&A or H&M forming a direct competition to the stalls at the bazaar. It is noteworthy that all outlets are located either direct or in close proximity to the road to Medyka. They are convenient located for customers from Ukraine, offering free parking and special duty free services.

The extent of shopping tourism is however, very dependent on external factors. The current political and economic crisis in Ukraine threatens local tourism and trade. The town became de-attached from traditional transport routes, when the new motorway was opened. While Lviv received a reliable and fast connection to southern Poland, the significance of Medyka for road travel shrunk. As a result, Przemyśl has to compete with Rzeszów and even Kraków for Ukrainian clients. As described in Castells spaces of flows, the town faces the risk of a further peripheralisation in the shadow of major transport nodes.

Two world wars and the Soviet Union - Dark Tourism in Przemyśl

Lennon and Foley defined Dark Tourism as visiting places associated with conflict, death and tragedy. This kind of tourism can be performed educational and commercial, depending on the motivation of the local decision-makers and visitors (Lennon, Foley 2006). In extreme cases commercial dark tourism might be perceived as Disneyfication questioning the authenticity and reverence of local memory practices. Sybille Frank notes that in a positive way a new perspective on authenticity might be created, through which tourism contributes to the renegotiation of local traditions and perspectives. (Frank 2009: 297) This often chaotic negotiation process can lead to conflict with and among the local society, if it is perceived that ‘the macabre is milked too much’ (see Lennon, Foley 2006).The local acceptance of Dark Tourism is closely linked to the respectful handling of local history. This is particularly important in border regions, which often have a complicated and largely unresolved history. (Frank 2009).

In order to utilise the history of a border region, a careful consideration of local discourses has to be performed. The city government of Przemyśl realises the potential of the violent and contested past for developing tourism.

The city marketing promotes three specific areas of the local history:

1. The fortress and the First World War

2. The Curzon and Molotov line with the history of the Second World War

3. The multicultural past during the Habsburg empire, connected with the interwar notion of Kresy

One of the most visited attraction in the city is the Museum of the fortress (Muzeum Twierdzy Przemyśl). The museum recalls not just the construction of the structure, but especially the time of the First World War, when the city witnessed heavy battles. Tourists can explore the outer fortification on before mentioned bike trails or can visit re-enactments of battles of World War I. While the history of the fortress and World War One are rather trivialised by referring to the brave soldier Swejk, the utilisation of the history after 1918 is more disputed.

When the First World War ended, the Curzon Line determined the Eastern border of the reestablished Polish state. The line was drawn roughly at the place of the nowadays border and was never excepted by the Polish state. The city is referring to the line in some of their brochures but does not publicly highlight the attraction. The Molotov line however, that divided Poland in 1939 into a German and a Soviet occupation zone is exploited. The division ran right through the city and still today bunkers, fortifications and facilities are present in the cityscape. The city advertises walks along the Molotov Line in official brochures in various languages and refers to this military-historical heritage (Urząd Miasta 2008).

While fortifications reflect the contested past of the border region, Przemyśl is moreover trying to position itself as a place of the Kresy. The Kresy is circumscribing the former territories of Poland, which were annexed in 1945 by the Soviet Union. The notion of Kresy has for Poles a specific cultural and heritage dimension. Regarding the Polish geographer Marek Koter one of the most distinctive features of Kresy is the romantic ethos associated with the life of frontier people. The borderlanders are idealised as the conquerors of new frontiers and are imagined as incarnating some specific qualities such as courage, rashness, power, enterprise and patriotism, creating a frontier spirit full of patriotic adventures. The adventures are enveloped in an aura of heroism, grandeur and victory as ‘missionaries’ bringing the civilisation to savage lands. While the Kresy idealised heroes with a nimbus of glory, it had always been an inspiration for countless novels and movies (Koter 2001: 145).

This territory ‘disappered’ in the aftermath of World War 2 and nowadays Kresy is referred to as a Polish Atlantis with a lost multicultural past. Interestingly the notion of Galicia, the former Habsburg province, is interlinked with Kresy. The notion of nostalgia and exploring a lost world is utilised by local enterprises (Buzalka 2007: 204p). The linguistic landscape of the town is dominated by references to Galicia, the Habsburg Empire and Kresy. The city exhibit reminiscences of the Jewish and Ukrainian heritage. The multicultural appeal is however contradicted by the national rhetoric, underlining the claim of the Polishness of the city (Buzalka 2007: 97).

In conclusion, the city is beginning to use dark tourism to promote its heritage. In this initial phase it is not yet clear if an educational or commercial approach will be used. Currently locals understand dark tourism as an opportunity. However, some historical events, like the Curzon Line and connected to it the attack on Ukraine leading to a local civil war are excluded from exploitation. While the Jewish heritage is used for tourism, the past of the Ukrainian minority is mentioned, but not too much showcased alas the deportations of 1947 had been a major turning point for the city. It remains to be seen to which extend this form of tourism can contribute to the development of the border region without a reconciliation process between Ukrainians and Poles.

Figure 6: Dark tourism. Flyer in German, promoting the Molotov line. Urzad Miejski

Figure 7: Signs of the multicultural past. Bilingual sign at the house of the Ukrainian minority.

Photo: the author

Figure 8: Underlining national identity in the cityscape. Monument to the Przemysl Eagles.

Photo: the author

Summary - border tourism as a development strategy

The Municipality of Przemyśl has realised that tourism is a key driver for developing the region. The the border is providing the following development potentials (Rada Miejska w Przemyślu 2014):

1. The untouched nature, providing opportunities for eco-holidays

2. The proximity to the border and to Ukraine

3. Trade relations and connections in the neighbouring border region

4. The history of the city, with your multicultural and military-historical heritage

The four aspects are implemented in four strategies:

1. The border region and historic fortifications had been made accessible by bike and hiking trails

2. The town advertises itself, initiated by the European Football Championships EURO 2012, as a hub for day trips to Ukraine at the EU border

3. The city supported the influx of international retail chains and shopping malls in order to promote shopping tourism

4. The fortification and the Molotov Line are used for facilitating dark tourism, exploiting the contested past.

The four strategies are reflecting directly or indirectly the peripheral location of the city in a border region. The ecological tourism benefits from the rural landscape which has emerged due to the strict regime along the Soviet border. The proximity to the EU’s external border enables the city to promote itself as the first city in the EU and a save haven to explore the ‘adventurous other side’ in the spirit of the Kresy. Shopping tourism from Ukraine is enabled due to the connection across the transport hub at the border crossing in Medyka and the existing differences on prices, quality and choice. The history of the town as a place in a cultural contact zone enables dark tourism. The limit is thus activated in the understanding of O’Dowd and Martínez as a resource for regional development. The border plays a dominant role in the everyday economic life of the city and its inhabitants.

It remains to be investigated how these strategies work out. The shopping tourism is highly dependent on the economic development in Ukraine. It is further questionable whether Przemyśl manages to attract international tourist, especially since the city is getting de-attached from transport corridors. There is the risk that the region might be further marginalised in the spaces of flows. It may be further discussed if the disadvantage of being in a triple periphery may outweigh the benefits of utilising the border as a resource. It is questionable if concentrating purely on tourism can overcome the disadvantages of peripheral and instead it might offer just relief from the socio-economic underdevelopment.

However, the most important determinant for regional development relates to the evolution of the border regime. The mentioned strategies to economise the border relay on an open and easy to overcome border. The local desire for connectivity across the border are in contrast to the national and European notion of borders as symbols of sovereignty. The interest to control access and thus limit the connectivity are not well perceived in the region. Still the border has legitimacy for the local borderlanders. A total opening of the border, as between the Schengen countries, would in their understanding severely restrict the function as a resource. There are constantly protest at the border, when there are threats to introduce a stricter border regime, but at the same time interviews underlined that the population does not want the border to vanish.

Przemyśl lives with and from the border, it is not only a constant for regional development, but also a symbol of local identity. The feelings of separateness and otherness provides the city with a special atmosphere and ensure that the image as a border town will be utilised to attract tourists as well in the future.

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Cross-Border Areas Facing Europe’s Crises: Problems in Measuring Territorial Development with Statistical Data and Analyses

VIRPI KAISTO

Introduction

The European Union has been facing a deep economic and political crisis during the current decade. The financial crisis, which has its roots in the world-wide financial crisis, weakened economic performance of almost all the EU member states, and some (in particular, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal and Spain) have been aided by the EU and the IMF in their public debt problems. This crisis unsettled internal relations between the EU member states, which have been further challenged by how different states have responded to the large number of refugees destined for Europe from the Middle East and Africa. Some countries have reintroduced border controls to internal borders and some have ended up in building fences to their borders. Partly due to the financial and refugee crises, the anti-EU campaign in Great Britain succeeded, and the EU is now for the first time in its history having one of its member states leaving the Union. With respect to external politics, the events in the Crimean Peninsula and Ukraine have led to the polarization of EU-Russia relations and the introduction of restrictive measures between the two, including EU’s embargo against Russia in certain sectors of economy and Russia’s counter-sanctions. All the above mentioned developments have given rise to instability in the Union and challenged EU’s role and identity both internally and towards the rest of the world (Laffan, 2016, p. 915–916).

In terms of regional development, these changes have challenged EU’s cohesion policy because they have affected the member states and their regions in an asymmetric manner (Laffan, 2016, p. 916). The cohesion policy has its roots in the Treaty of Rome signed in 1957 and it is concerned with a balanced development in the EU (Eskelinen, 2009, p. 17). The Union distinguishes three types of cohesion; economic, social and territorial cohesion. The aim of territorial cohesion is to pay attention to regional strengths, and to contribute to sustainable and spatially balanced development of the EU. Considering economic development, the increasing regional disparities that before the economic crisis had been counterbalanced in many countries by the convergence in the GDP level of European countries, have been brought to a halt (Camagni, Capello, Caragliu & Fratesi, 2015, p. 191). The introduction of border checks on internal borders complicates movement of people and goods across borders, and is predicted to increase trade costs and harm trade especially for peripheral countries (Felbermayr, Gröschl & Steinwachs, 2016). The impact of the sanctions against Russia and Russia’s counter-sanctions on EU economy has in general remained limited, but the EU has recognized that certain countries and sectors have been affected more significantly than others (Szczepański, 2015).

Border regions have been considered crucial test areas for territorial cohesion and the European Regional Policy (Ruidish 2014, p. 95). The EU aims at territorial integration in cross-border regions, both on internal and external borders, because it “can create a critical mass for development, diminishing economic, social and ecological fragmentation, building mutual trust and social capital” (EC, 2011). One of the main strategies that the EU has introduced to tackle uneven territorial development is cross-border cooperation (EC, 2001b, p. 4). There exists a large body of scholarly literature focusing on cross-border cooperation (Liikanen, 2010, p. 26–27; Newman, 2000, p. 68–69; Perkmann, 2003, p. 153–154; Scott, 2011, p. 132–134). In comparison, there have been surprisingly few studies to illustrate, with statistical data and analyses, what the territorial development of European border areas actually looks like (for exceptions see Euborderregions, 2015; Grozea-Helmenstein & Berrer, 2015). In the times of the crises, this task is especially crucial, because it points out certain problems in measuring territorial development in border areas and in analyzing how the border affects development patterns.

This paper discusses the development of European cross-border areas (CBAs) from the perspective of statistical data and analyses, and illustrates the specificities and challenges of studying territorial development in this way. The study makes use of data and methods developed in the Ulysses research project, which was carried out during 2010–2012 as part of the ESPON 2013 program (Feliu et al., 2013). The project examined the development of European CBAs and carried out six full-scale case studies across internal and external EU borders. The studied CBAs were (1) the Upper Rhine Trinational Metropolitan Region along the land borders between France, Germany, and Switzerland, (2) the CBA along the Spanish-French land border (Pyrenees), (3) the CBA along the land border between Greece and Bulgaria, (4) Euregio Karelia on the Finnish-Russian border, (5) Euroregion Pomerania along the borders between Poland, Germany (land border), and Sweden (maritime border), and (6) Extremadura-Alentejo along the Spanish-Portuguese border. (Feliu et al., 2013.) This paper gives a brief summary of the main conclusions of the study, focusing on European scale development trends. In addition, it uses the case study of Euregio Karelia to give a more detailed analysis of some of the underlying problems faced by the statistical analyses of CBAs. Euregio Karelia is located at the EU’s external border, and therefore it offers additional challenges to statistical analyses as the Russian Federal State Statistics Service data does not necessarily correspond with the Eurostat data. Since much of the data in the Ulysses project reaches only until 2011, some additional data and analyses were included in this paper to explore more recent territorial development.

Scholars have commonly approached border areas as peripheral, non-core regions, and studied how border regions could overcome their locational disadvantages and turn these into competitive advantage by engaging in cross-border relations and exchange (Makkonen & Williams, 2016, p. 362). Van Houtum (2000, p. 60) reasons that this approach has its roots in the works of classic regional and economic scholars, who studied the impact of borders on the flow of economic activities, and modelled the impact of borders as if it increased the physical distance. Hansen (1977) scrutinized these classic theories (including location theory and the growth pole literature) and concluded that the literature emphasizes the fragile and threatened nature of border regions, but recognizes that a stable frontier can also have advantages for the economies of the adjacent regions. Recently, scholars have been inspired by the ‘debordering’ processes on EU internal borders and studied demographic patterns of border regions across Europe. Brakman et al. (2012) explored how the EU integration has affected the distribution of population in cities and regions along national borders. The results of the study revealed that the EU integration process has had a positive effect on the growth in population share along the integration borders, with the population increasing in large cities and regions in particular. However, border areas remain poor performers compared to more central regions, and even the positive effect of the EU integration process is not sufficient to reverse the relative decline of the population in border areas. Sohn and Stambolic (2015) scrutinized urban development of European border regions, and confirmed that competitive urban centers can develop in border regions. Among these studies, the Ulysses project was the first one to take a multi-thematic approach to territorial development in CBAs.

Conceptual framework

The conceptual framework of this article evolves around the concepts of “border area” and “border effect.” Without a proper understanding of these concepts, it is not possible to comprehend the challenges of studying the territorial development of CBAs using statistical data and methods. In previous studies, border areas have been defined as “subnational areas, whose social and economic life is directly and significantly affected by proximity to an international frontier” (Hansen, 1977, p. 1), or as “geographical areas situated along state borders” (Popescu, 2012, p. 20). These definitions are loose in the sense that they do not specify how far the border area reaches from the actual borderline. In statistical studies of territorial development, data is generally collected by geographical units (of different scales). Accordingly, the border area has to be defined as a fixed territory that consists of selected statistical units. The researcher has to consider which regional units to include in the analysis in order for the studied area to correspond to the actual area influenced by the border. In this undertaking, the question of scale is of utmost importance: Is it possible to examine the development of border areas or the “border effect” (how the border affects the territorial development) if the statistical units are too large and cover areas that are not affected by the border?

Popescu (2012, p. 20) defines “border effect” as the influence a border has over the surrounding areas. His definition is of a general nature, while the concept has mainly been applied by economists in a more limited sense. For them, the border effect signifies a certain theory of how borders influence trade, and it includes the conundrum of why countries trade more with themselves than with other countries. A significant amount of literature has investigated the border effect in different countries since McCallum’s (1995) seminal paper, in which he discovered that Canadian provinces trade more with themselves than with US states. These studies have applied a variety of statistical indicators and analytical methods aiming at improving the econometric analysis of calculating the border effect. What is of interest for this article is that, recently, these studies have highlighted the importance of the geographical component of the border effect. Andresen (2010) has illustrated how regions within Canada and the United States show great variation in trading patterns, while Llano-Verduras, Minondo, and Requena-Silvente (2011) have concluded that if the analyzed sub-units (regional units) are too large, trade between sub-national units may not pick the reduction in value that occurs at short distances. They observed a very large reduction in the border effect when the analysis is performed with smaller spatial units. The following chapters describe how the Ulysses project defined the concepts of border area and border effect, and the lessons learnt from the study.

Research materials and methods

The Ulysses research project included three parts, starting with a multi-thematic analysis. It focused on the main topics of the territorial agendas of the European Union (EC, 2001a; EC, 2007; EC, 2011), namely (i) cross-border polycentric development, (ii) patterns of urban/rural relationship, (iii) levels of accessibility and connectivity, (iv) effects of demographic change and the level of attainment of (v) Lisbon/Europe 2020 and (vi) Gothenburg objectives. The first four topics represented the territorial profile and the two later ones the territorial performance of the CBAs. The territorial performance referred to the capacity of the cross-border regions to achieve the Lisbon/EU 2020 and Gothenburg strategy goals (Feliu et al., 2013); the Lisbon/EU 2020 objectives focus on competitiveness and growth, while the Gothenburg agenda stresses sustainable development and the protection of nature (EC, 2001a; EC, 2007; EC, 2011).

The second part of the research was a cross-border governance analysis that aimed at differentiating the various contexts in which cross-border governance is tackled in the European CBAs. In the third part of the study, the findings from the multi-thematic and cross-border governance analyses were fed into an integrated analysis to identify key problems and development challenges in the CBAs. Finally, the outcomes were translated into strategies and policy options for local stakeholders. (Feliu et al., 2013.)

This article focuses on the data and the analyses performed in the first part of the Ulysses study, namely the multi-thematic analysis. The following table represents all 56 statistical indicators included in the analysis to represent the six topics of the territorial agendas. The data was collected from various sources as indicated in the table, with most of it gleaned from the Eurostat database, national databases, and previous ESPON projects. Besides the variables in Table 1, additional data was collected to analyze the effect of the border on territorial development (Tapia, Wolf, & Chilla, 2013).

Table 1: Indicators of the multi-thematic analysis in the Ulysses study.(Tapia, Wolf, & Chilla, 2013)

(i) Cross-border polycentric development

(10 indicators)

Morphological (MUAs) and functional urban areas (FUAs), Population in FUAs, % effective FUA population change 2001‒2006, Compactness 2001 (MUA pop. / FUA pop.), Slope of rank size distribution (population), Slope of rank size distribution (GDP), Primacy rate (population), Primacy rate (GDP), Gini coefficient thiessen polygons (%), % population in FUAs

Data sources: ESPON 1.4.3 study, Eurostat, national and regional databases

(ii) Patterns of urban/rural relationship

(6 indicators)

Urban-rural typology, Agricultural areas, Urban fabric, Artificial surfaces, Gross value added in agriculture, forestry and fishing, Employment in agriculture, forestry and fishing

Data sources: ESPON DB, Eurostat, Corine Land Cover, national and regional databases

(iii) Levels of accessibility and connectivity

(4 indicators)

Potential accessibility road, rail, air and multimodal indexed to ESPON average, Potential accessibility road, rail, air and multimodal indexed to CBA average, Potential accessibility road, rail, air and multimodal index change 2001‒2006, Households with broadband internet connection 2009

Data sources: ESPON DB, European Commission 5th Cohesion Report, Regional Innovation Scoreboard

(iv) Effects of demographic change

(15 indicators)

Total population, Total population by sex, Total population by age, Population density, Total population change, Population growth rate, Annual population growth rate, Natural population change, Net migration, Crude rate of natural increase, Crude rate of net migration, Total fertility rate, Total, old and young dependency ratios, Commuters to other regions among / by active population, Commuters to a foreign country among / by active population

Data sources: Eurostat, national and regional databases

(v) Lisbon/Europe 2020 objectives

(12 indicators)

GDP per capita, Gross value added by NACE, Employment by NACE, Total intramural R&D expenditure, EPO patents by millions of inhabitants, Employment in medium and high tech manufacturing, Unemployment rate, Long term unemployment, Youth unemployment rate, Population at risk after social transfers, Infant mortality rate, Population aged 25–64 with tertiary education

Data sources: Eurostat, ESPON DB (Regional Innovation Scoreboard), national and regional databases

(vi) Gothenburg objectives

(9 indicators)

Soil sealed area, Ozone concentration exceedances, Urban waste water treatment, Share of Natura 2000 areas, Solar energy resources, Wind energy potential, Physical sensitivity to climate change, Social sensitivity to climate change, Economic sensitivity to climate change

Data sources: European Commission’s 5th Cohesion Report, ESPON Climate project

For the cross-border polycentric development indicators, data was collected by Morphological (MUAs) and Functional Urban Areas (FUAs).1 For the other indicators, data was collected according to NUTS units. (Tapia, Wolf, & Chilla, 2013.) The NUTS classification is a nomenclature of territorial units for statistics established by Eurostat. In it, the EU territory is divided into four hierarchical levels: NUTS 0 (states), NUTS 1 (major economic regions), NUTS 2 (basic regions for the application of regional policies), and NUTS 3 (small regions for specific diagnoses) (NUTS, 2015a). Smaller territorial units have their own classification as Local Administrative Units (LAU), which is compatible with the NUTS system (NUTS, 2015b). In the Ulysses study, the data was collected on all available NUTS levels. Most of the European-wide regional data exists on NUTS 2 or 3 levels, and therefore the lower-level data (LAUs) could only be collected for some of the demographic variables. The data included both standard statistical indicators and indicators developed in previous ESPON projects, which were often based on complex methodologies. The time-frame of the data varied depending on the indicator, but the focus was on the latest available data (in most cases the 2000s up to 2010). (Tapia, Wolf, & Chilla, 2013.)

The data for each indicator was represented on the following scales: (1) the EU27 average/the leading region of the EU27; (2) the national averages of the countries to which the cross-border regions belong; (3) the cross-border regions; and (4) their sub-regions. The different scales facilitated comparisons and allowed understanding of how the cross-border region or its sub-regions were performing in relation to other regions, and to national and EU averages. The other aim was to contribute to understanding how borders affect the regions’ performance. (Tapia, Wolf, & Chilla, 2013.)

Territorial development trends of European cross-border areas

The multi-thematic analysis produced a vast amount of information concerning territorial development in the analyzed CBAs. Since it is not in the scope of this article to review all the results, only the main conclusions based on the case studies and the factor analyses are discussed in the following (For a full report, see Feliu et al., 2013).

The Ulysses study concluded that territorial development of the studied CBAs differs widely, depending above all on where in Europe they are situated. Their location at state borders is not as significant to their development as their overall location in Europe. For example, CBAs situated in Central Europe have a central location and, among other things, their demographic and economic development has been more favorable than that of the CBAs situated in peripheral parts of Europe. Territorial development of the CBAs thus follows the development of other similarly located regions. Further, state borders divide CBAs into differently performing national parts. Therefore, borders continue to play a major role in the development of the CBAs, and the national level maintains the determining factor in the regions’ development. This is also evident in the levels of cross-border commuting, which remain low compared to commuting between regions in the same country. (Feliu et al., 2013, p. 2.)

Finally, the Ulysses study stated that “the border condition seems to be more relevant at the regional than at the local level. For example, while the position of the total CBA in the national or European context is clearly relevant, the settlement patterns at the LAU 1 or 2 levels seem often to be indifferent to the border” (Feliu et al., 2013, p. 2). In the following chapter, this statement is challenged by taking a closer look at one of the case studies, that of Euregio Karelia on the Finnish-Russian border. This case illustrates the crucial role of the definition of the “border area,” and the data and methods applied in studying the “border effect” when analyzing the territorial development of CBAs.

Capturing the border effect: The case study of Euregio Karelia

Euregio Karelia was one of the six CBAs studied on a full scale in the Ulysses project. It is a cooperation area, situated along the Finnish-Russian border, established in 2000 in order for the Finnish and Russian regions to cooperate in improving the well-being of their inhabitants. The CBA has a total area of 270,600 km² and in 2010 it had 1,325,000 inhabitants. Territorially, Euregio Karelia includes three Finnish provinces: North Karelia, Kainuu, and Northern Ostrobothnia. In the east, all of these provinces border the Republic of Karelia in the Russian Federation, which is the only Russian region of Euregio Karelia. (Euregio Karelia, 2015.)

Figure 1: NUTS 3/SNUTS 2-level map of Euregio Karelia.

(Kaisto, 2013)

From the perspective of the NUTS division, Euregio Karelia appears as follows. On the Finnish side it includes three NUTS 3-level regions: North Karelia, Kainuu, and Northern Ostrobothnia. Two of these regions – North Karelia and Kainuu – belong to the NUTS 2 region of Eastern Finland, and Northern Ostrobothnia belongs to the NUTS 2 region of Northern Finland. Russia does not apply the NUTS divisions to its territories, and therefore a SNUTS (“Similar to NUTS”) classification was created following the Russian administrative structure. According to this classification, the Republic of Karelia is a SNUTS 2-level region. There is no regional division in Russia that would correspond to the NUTS 3 division, and therefore municipal regions of the Republic of Karelia were aggregated into SNUTS 3 regions, which have around 200,000 inhabitants and thereby fulfill the NUTS 3-level requirements set up by Eurostat. However, the SNUTS 3 regions were used only in the demographic analyses because data had to be aggregated from SLAU 1-level data, and this was not available for most indicators. (Kaisto, 2013.)

Rather than giving a shallow review of the whole multi-scale analysis (a full review is available in Kaisto, 2013), we concentrate here on the economic performance and demography analyses. Between 1997 and 2008, GDP per capita was growing steadily in all the regions of Euregio Karelia. The region with the highest GDP per capita was Northern Ostrobothnia (19 000 € in 1997 and 31 300 € in 2008) and the region with the lowest GDP per capita was the Republic of Karelia (484 € in 1997 and 4580 € in 2008).2 Differences in GDP per capita between the regions were large, but the coefficient of variation shows that the disparities were decreasing during the studied period. The main reason behind this trend was the increase in GDP per capita in the Republic of Karelia. The higher the coefficient of variation is, the higher are the disparities within the analysed geographical unit. In Euregio Karelia, the coefficient of variation was 54 in 2008, which was above the average deviation (51) of ESPON NUTS 3 regions. This signifies that the disparities in GDP per capita were higher between the regions of Euregio Karelia than the regions of ESPON countries.

The economic performance of the regions was compared to the leading European region, that of Greater London. GDP per capita of the regions was indexed to the value of GDP per capita of Greater London on a scale from one to six; the regions were classified as “very rich regions”, “rich regions”, “middle income regions”, “less developed regions”, “laggard regions” or “very laggard regions”. Northern Ostrobothnia as the best performing region in Euregio Karelia was classified as a “middle income region” while the Republic of Karelia as the weakest performing region was a “very laggard region.”

The catching up analysis evaluated the speed of catching-up with the leading region and distinguished converging regions from diverging regions on a scale of seven trajectories: “Leading regions” were the ones that already had a GDP per capita close to that of Greater London. “Fast converging regions” had a growth rate allowing them to reach the leader in less than 20 years, “steady catching-up regions” in 21 to 50 years, “slow catching-up regions” in 51 to 100 years and “slow converging regions” in 101 to 250 years. “Non-converging regions” had a great distance to the leader in terms of GDP per capita and were growing at a rate equal or slightly superior to the leader, and “diverging regions” were growing less than the leader. In Euregio Karelia, the Republic of Karelia was classified as a “steady catching-up region”, but the growth of GDP per capita had been more modest in the Finnish regions. Northern Ostrobothnia was the only region that was classified as a “slow converging region”, while North Karelia and Kainuu were “non-converging regions.” The catching up analysis revealed large differences in the growth rates of regions in Finland. The leading Finnish region Uusimaa was according to the analysis a “fast converging region” and had five years to the leader, while the strongest region of Euregio Karelia, Northern Ostrobothnia, would need 218 years to catch up with Greater London.

In order to understand how Europe’s crises have affected economic performance of Euregio Karelia, we performed the above described analyses to the latest available set of data (2009–2013)[3]. The economic crisis had caused a decline in the GDP per capita in Euregio Karelia in 2009, but after that the growth had continued in all the regions, except for a negative growth between 2012 and 2013 in Kainuu. The region with the highest GDP per capita was again Northern Ostrobothnia (29 500 € in 2009 and 32 100 € in 2008) and the region with the lowest GDP per capita the Republic of Karelia (3500 € in 2009 and 6640 € in 2008). The coefficient of variation showed a decrease in the regional disparities that also during this period derived from the increase in GDP per capita in the Republic of Karelia. The regions in ESPON countries showed an opposite tendency, as the coefficient of variation, and consequently regional disparities, had been increasing between the studied years.

The index number analysis showed that North Karelia had improved its performance in relation to Greater London. In 2008 it was classified as a “very laggard region”, but in 2013 a “middle income region”. All the other regions of Euregio Karelia had kept their classifications from the previous period, even if the Republic of Karelia was approaching the threshold of being classified a “laggard region” instead of a “very laggard region”. The catching up analysis revealed that all the Finnish regions of Euregio Karelia were growing less between 2009 and 2013 than the leading region of Greater London and showed a weaker relative performance than during the previous period. Thus, they were all categorized as “diverging regions”. The Republic of Karelia continued to perform as a “steady catching-up region” in relation to the leading region. In contrast to the previous period, also the leading Finnish region Uusimaa was diverging from the leader.

As the above account on economic development in Euregio Karelia illustrates, the applied statistical analyses had the power of yielding a general picture of development trends in the studied CBA. When returning to the research questions posed in this article, it is necessary, however, to ask what role the border plays in the development of Euregio Karelia. First, we need to consider the concept of “border area” and look at Euregio Karelia as a territorial entity. From the NUTS 3/SNUTS 2-level map, it becomes obvious that not all territories of the statistical regions are border regions. On the Finnish side, the NUTS 3 region of Northern Ostrobothnia actually stretches across the whole of mainland Finland from the Swedish maritime border to the Russian land border. It would therefore seem problematic to study the development of border regions on a NUTS 3-/SNUTS 2-level in the case of Euregio Karelia. Much of the territory is not located in the vicinity of the Finnish-Russian border, and in the case of Northern Ostrobothnia it remains unclear as to which border affects the territorial development. If one sticks to the definition of “border areas” as territories located close to state borders, one should use lower-level statistical data. Second, the results of the analyses presented above do not allow for assessing the “border effect” on territorial development: What trends in the development are related to the border?

These problems were acknowledged in the Ulysses study, and an attempt was made to apply lower-level statistical data and to capture the “border effect.” This concerned the demographic analyses, as LAU-level data was available only for demographic indicators. The multi-thematic analysis had shown that there was a negative population change in Euregio Karelia between 2001 and 2010. The only NUTS/SNUTS 3 regions with a positive population change were Northern Ostrobothnia and the City District of Petrozavodsk in the Republic of Karelia. The Functional Urban Areas of Euregio Karelia had been attracting more inhabitants than the rural regions.

A method was developed to study settlement patterns and to discover whether the border is attracting or repulsing population (Tapia, Wolf, & Chilla, 2013.) In the case of Euregio Karelia, the analysis was performed only on the Finnish regions; it used LAU 1-level data and considered three indicators: annual population growth (between 2000 and 2010), population density, and distance to the border as the crow flies (air distance). The result of the analysis was that population growth and density in the Finnish LAU 1 regions of Euregio Karelia are not related to border distance, and thus there is no significant “border effect.” (Kaisto, 2013, pp. 51–53.)

Figure 2: Results of the LAU 2-level mapping exercise in the Finnish regions of Euregio Karelia.

Considering the low population density in Euregio Karelia, it is possible to question the method of studying the “border effect” with relation to population density. Hence, an additional mapping exercise was carried out and data was gleaned from Statistics Finland and Kareliâstat. On the Finnish side, it considered the share of foreign inhabitants, the change in the share of foreign inhabitants between 2000 and 2010, and the country of origin, mother tongue, and citizenship of the population in the LAU 2 regions. The exercise illustrated that LAU 2 regions located in North Karelia close to the border crossing point of Niirala-Vârtsilâ had been increasing their share of foreign inhabitants more than other regions. The largest share of foreign inhabitants or inhabitants with foreign origins were from Russia or the former Soviet Union. On the Russian side, the exercise considered net migration on LAU 1-level between 2001 and 2010, and detected that migration flows were concentrated on the city district of Petrozavodsk and the two regions (Prionežskij municipal’nyj rajon and Prâžinskij nacional’nyj municipal’nyj rajon) surrounding it. (Kaisto, 2013, pp. 51–53.)

A complementary analysis with the latest available data confirms that these demographic tendencies have persevered between 2011 and 2015. In 2015, seven out of ten LAU 2 regions with the largest share of foreign inhabitants were located in North Karelia. Among these regions, Tohmajârvi had the highest share of foreign inhabitants (5 %) and it is the region where the border crossing point of Niirala-Vârtsilâ is located. Similarly, five out of ten regions with the largest increase in the share of foreign inhabitants were situated in North Karelia. The region of Lieksa had the highest growth and there the share of foreign inhabitants increased from 3,5 % in 2011 to 4,2 % in 2015. In the Republic of Karelia, migration to the city district of Petrozavodsk and the two regions bordering it continued. Based on the mapping exercise, it would be correct to claim that a “border effect” exists in Euregio Karelia, and that it concerns settlement patterns in the regions located along the Finnish-Russian border in North Karelia.

Findings and Discussion

In the turmoil of Europe’s crises, the objectives of territorial cohesion are put into a test because the crises affect countries and regions unevenly. In this test, border regions provide an ultimate challenge because of their diverse socio-economic performance and inherent differences and disparities. There has been a lack of research scrutinizing territorial development of border areas with statistical data and analyses, and illustrating how border areas have actually been developing. The Ulysses study, realized in the framework of the ESPON program, was among first such studies.

The aim of this paper was to discuss challenges related to studying CBAs with statistical data and analyses, especially in the times of great changes such as the current crises in Europe. Using the Ulysses project as an object of study and the Finnish-Russian CBA of Euregio Karelia as a case study example, this research points out that statistical data and analyses have the ability to present regional development trends in CBAs. However, statistical methods should be further developed. First, it is important to pay attention to how the “border area” is defined. If the regional scale is too broad and the applied units include territories outside the actual border area (or even territories across the country), the results do not portray the development of border areas, but of regions in general. Thus, if the border area is understood as a territory close to the state border, the scale of analyses should be adjusted accordingly. This finding is supported by studies examining the “border effect” on trade, which also discovered distortions in results if overly large geographical sub-units (regional units) were used in the analyses (see Andresen, 2010; Llano-Verduras, Minondo, & Requena-Silvente, 2011). In their study of the urban development of European border regions, Sohn and Stambolic (2015) refrained from using the NUTS 3 regions considering them too heterogeneous for a comparative analysis.

In statistical analysis, distortions related to the spatial units are referred to as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP). The ESPON 3.4.3. -project studying the MAUP illustrated how the study of border regions and the effect of the border on regional development is sensitive to the size of the spatial units and to the spatial extent of the study region. MAUP could be reduced, among other things, by applying smaller spatial units to the analyses. (Ben Rebah et al., 2006.) The problem in the Ulysses project was that the study had to produce European-wide research results, and low-scale data was available only for certain indicators. Thus, there exists a need for comparable low-scale data.

Further, the methods applied in studying the “border effect” influenced the results. Border areas with high and low population densities could not be studied using the same methods when determining border effects on settlement patterns in border areas. In this sense, the study of border areas faces the same challenges as European-wide comparisons of territorial development in general. Eskelinen and Fritsch (2006, p. 54) have pointed out that the existence of significant regional disparities is one the most relevant and challenging aspects when positioning a certain region in a European context. The Nordic countries, for example, have taken it into their agenda to highlight how analyses performed on NUTS 2 level obscure the different types of geographical zones within the Nordic territorial structure (Damsgaard et al. 2008, p. 10). The diversity of border areas, thus, necessitates the development of analyses that are able to capture how the border affects regional development in different territorial contexts.

Without such analyses, it remains unclear what role the border plays in regional development. And yet, it is of essence to understand how different borders and border regimes impact the generation of income, growth and welfare in a given territory (Danson & de Souza, 2012, p. 258), and how prevailing geopolitical conditions are reflected in the development of borderlands (Eskelinen, 2013, p. 49). The Finnish-Russian border is an external border of the European Union and in contrast with EU internal borders there exists cross-border data, which helps in determining how the current crises influence development. The crises (in particular the economic crisis in Russia and the low exchange rate of the Russian ruble) have reduced the amount of cross-border traffic, and tax free trade in the Finnish regions. The development of cross-border indicators and collection of cross-border data also on EU internal borders would enhance the study of “border effects”.

Scholars have recently started to question the possibility and need for a spatially balanced pattern of territorial development. Hudson (2009, p. 14) states that “uneven development is an integral component of capitalist economies and while some regions will exceed national (or other) growth rates and targets, others will not.” He argues for rethinking the ‘economy’ and ‘development’ by not limiting its to growth per se, but by considering what values and principles underlie these concepts. Border scholars have also demonstrated that border regions are marked by important and long-term imbalances, and border differentials create new opportunities for companies and individuals in terms of comparative advantages of each of the states (Nelles & Walther, 2011). These thoughts provide additional food for measuring territorial development in CBAs.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the partners of the Ulysses project for their work and collaboration. The author would like to thank Heikki Eskelinen and her former colleagues at Lappeenranta University of Technology for commenting on the earlier versions of this paper.

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1 The MUAs are municipalities with more than 650 inhabitants/km², or municipalities with more than 200,000 inhabitants and a clear concentrated urban core. The FUAs consist of MUAs as cores and the surrounding commuter catchment areas.

2 The value for the GDP per capita in the Republic of Karelia was calculated from the Gross Regional Product per inhabitant, obtained from Kareliâstat (Federal State Statistics Service Regional Agency for the Republic of Karelia). Rubles were converted to Euros using the annual mean exchange rates of the European Central Bank.

3 The amount of GDP per capita used in the analyses cannot be directly compared with the values used in the Ulysses project due to a different set of data. The Ulysses project applied “Gross domestic product (GDP) at current market prices at NUTS level 3” (nama_r_e3gdp) data set, while we used “Gross domestic product (GDP) at current market prices by NUTS 3 regions” (nama_10r_3gdp) data. We chose this data set, because the data set used in the Ulysses project included values only until year 2011.

Cross-border Health Care Cooperation in the European Union: an Effective Strategy of Mitigating Regional/Local Limitations through Cooperation

TEODOR GYELNIK

Introduction

Cross-border health care cooperation represents one of the most important aspects of cross-border interaction and cooperation since it explicitly and directly influences the daily life of those citizens who live near the borders. Subsequently, it is important to reflect upon these important happenings and development, to analyse them and to inform people and other border regions about achievements that have been achieved in other parts of the European continent because they may function as source of inspiration and ideas.

This study examines cross-border health care cooperation as it is one of the most important cross-border interactions nowadays. The gathering of information was based on desk research methodology, whereby the research consisted of systematic gathering, reading, categorizing and evaluating information about cross-border cooperation (CBC), interactions, obstacles and solutions. The basic hypothesis of the study is that cross-border cooperation, especially cross-border health care cooperation, is highly influenced by limitations at the regional level. Subsequently, this limits of regional health care can be effectively, functionally remedied and relieved by optimizing cross-border cooperation, thus the two sides of the border perform a complementary function towards each other. Hence, this form of cooperation always takes a win-win situation, where both involved sides gain and win from cooperation.

The study is divided into four separate parts. The first part of the paper gives a theoretical and philosophical prologue into the idea of differentiation and separation. This part is included in the study because it underlines the philosophical development and emanation of differentiation and separateness, while cross-border cooperation explicitly attempts to bridge and to link performed separateness. The second part contains a theoretical continuation of the first part; nevertheless, it moves away from the philosophical line and it situates differentiation and separateness within the economic and political realm. The third part of the paper works with cross-border health care cooperation and it gives an insight into the general beginning of this cooperation within the European Union. In other words, this part looks at the cooperation from above. The final, fourth part of the paper, introduces innovative, creative ideas and practices in the field of cross-border health care cooperation. It involves eight specific health care cross-border interactions. Numerous cases of cross-border health care cooperation can be found in Europe, but all the described cases of the study were selected on the logic that their interaction should contain some innovative idea that can inspire and influence other cross-border cooperation in the European Union. That means the following interactions appear in the research: cooperation between Braunau and Simbach, this interaction was included in the study since it represents an important beginning of this kind of cooperation in Europe, thus it simply could not be ignored; ZOAST as breakthrough within health care cooperation; Cerdanya hospital that represents an innovative approach because of its EGTC frame; cooperation in the region of Meuse-Rhine as a union within a little micro-cosmos; interactions inspired by tourism like cooperation between Malta and the UK, and in the Veneto Region; interactions between Călărași and Silistra as an utilization of cross-border cooperation to harmonize professional imbalance and to prevent the negative consequences of this imbalance in the region; finally an imaginary cooperation in the Eurocity Chaves-Verín EGTC.

Inside vs. outside, a prologue to the idea of differentiation and separation

Geographical space is differentiated by political borders and lines, thus space is divided between central areas and peripheral/borderland areas. Nevertheless, this dichotomist division is not a unique phenomenon but is an integral part of everyday life. Greek philosophy made a huge and decisive step by introducing a strict separation of “Man” from “Nature” which opened a dichotomist route that continues to influence philosophical thinking.

The Greek separation was driven by the environment around the Aegean Sea that was harsh and nasty, the islands disposed with low quality of soil which did not support cultivation, thus the environment did not support an easy existence; subsequently, agriculture suffered from shortages and handicaps. Sea routes were often hit by storms, thus hardening shipping, fishing and commerce in the Greek region. Consequently, the unfriendly environment was seen as a substantial life challenge, hence “Man” became separated from “Nature”, and “Nature” was turned into an object of “Man” and his human study (George 1989). What is more, Michael Bradley moves on similar grounds when he explains the aggressive and disjunctive attitude of Europeans. To be specific, the rise of the Europeans needs to be understood within the context of the ice age, glaciers, caves and fire which supported the emergence of xenophobic and aggressive behaviour toward strangers in order to protect the vital substance, namely fire (in Asante 2008). Although, on the other side, the Chinese understanding of “Nature” was influenced by a mild climate and support for agriculture, thus environment/land was the basic “satisfier” of human needs. The “Man” was not threatened/challenged by “Nature”; subsequently, the Chinese culture took a “human-centered” approach which was rooted within an intimate relationship between “Man” and “Nature”. The Chinese understanding and philosophy did not separate the “little cosmos” of man from the “great cosmos” Tian-Di (Heaven-Earth), but they shared the same feature. Simply, they became correlative, cooperative and corresponding to each other. Consequently, the intimate relationship between “Nature” and “Man” founded the notion of “natural man” (Kuide 1989).

Moreover, the categorical differentiation between “Self” and “Other” was confirmed by the Hebrew transcendental idea, too. The Hebrew dualism, influenced by harsh environment and racial surrounding, started to differentiate between two categorically opposing kind of people, namely, the “chosen people of God” and “Others”. That means dualism was not only developed in relation with human societies of Self and Other, but it separated the earthly life, which was seen as punishment, from the appreciated next life. Simply, this has created a transcendent cultural psychology with deep separation of God versus man and heaven versus earth.

The Greek separation of “Nature” as object versus “Man” as subject provides the basic epistemic framework for further categorical separation, such as God versus man, cause versus effect, theory versus practice, spiritual versus material, reason versus experience, abstract versus concrete, mind versus body, rational versus irrational, science versus sorcery and/or general versus particular. The objective study of nature definitely removed the subject from the studied object and placed the researcher/investigator in a different dimension as the studied object. Simply, they mutually became outsiders in each others´ dimensions. This categorical dualism has become a constitutive structure in further western philosophical approaches; subsequently, dualism appeared in the philosophy of Plato, namely, the dichotomy of reality versus appearance, ideas versus sensible objects, reason versus sense perception, and soul versus body (Lysý 2006). However, the construction of these binary logic schemas is not based on mutual equality and reciprocal respect, they are instead linked together through the dualism of superiority and inferiority, what Ernesto Laclau (2007) would call as “essential inequality” that establishes so called “ontological privilege”.

The arrival of Christianity completed the categorical separation, by establishing ascetic morality of soul and body as two transcendentally different spaces (Bertrand 2009). The dualism is clearly visible during the medieval world, such as the binary logic of clergy and laity, spirit and flesh, or Pope and Emperor. Saint Paul and Christianity established a unique or radical universality, by making the universality explicit and freeing from the rigidity and cultural enclosure of Judaism (Badiou 2003). Moreover, Saint Augustine accepted the western epistemology of dualism and he continued it within his own philosophical/theological approach, specifically, constructing division between the City/Kingdom of God and the Earthly City/Kingdom of Earth which mutually excluded each other from their own space. That means Christianity offered universality and it banished any human difference (e.g. in language, sex, wealth, age, etc.) before God, “There is neither Jew nor a Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all b one in Christ Jesus.” (The New Testament – Galatians 3, 28); however, the Christian motto: “all man are brothers” can also mean that those who do not want to be my brothers, those who do not want to accept the offered salvation, are simply excluded from the category of man (Žižek 2009b; Pap 2015). In other words, everybody is my brother, but those who do not want to be my brothers are totally excluded from humanity, and this approach was explicitly demonstrated by Judeo-Christianity when it encountered different people in the American continent, either through narration of Rubios, Sepúlveda or Vittoria that opened legal actions/wars against the non-believers (see e.g. Anghie 2004; Dussel 1998; Inayatullah, Blaney 2003; Todorov 1999; Wallerstein 2006). In other words, the Western dualism together with Christianity have established a ground for dualistic, mutually excluding morality that differentiated between good and evil as non-comparable excluding categories.

That means that the road established by the Greeks, Plato, continued by Judaism and Christian theology was further developed by later Western philosophical imagination and thinking. One of the greatest steps was made by René Descartes, when he divided his own existence (the existence of the subject) and thoughts which are superior to the external world, “Everything, in Descartes” system, is to be explained in terms of this dualism of mind and matter. Indeed, we owe to Descartes that we think of mind and matter as the two great, mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive, divisions of the universe we inhabit.” (Kenny 2006, 208). Moreover, the obsession and the binary logic were reinforced by Hegel and by his master versus slave dialectic (e.g. see Buck-Morrs 2009), where the two entities became mutually impermeable to each other. Hegel had an enormous influence on social science and his ideas deeply penetrated European approaches toward the others (Simpson 2004). Robert Young (2004, 6) notes this phenomenon brilliantly, “The real difficulty has always been to find an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic – difficult because strictly speaking it is impossible, insofar as the operation of the dialectic already includes its negation. You cannot get out of Hegel by simply contradicting him, any more than you can get out of those other Hegelian systems, Marxism and psychoanalysis, by simply opposing them: for in both your opposition is likewise always recuperable, as the workings of ideology or psychic resistance.” and/or as Emmanuel Lévinas (1986, 346-347) aptly articulates it, “Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other – with an insurmountable allergy.... Hegel”s philosophy represents the logical outcome of this underlying allergy of philosophy.”

To conclude, constructions of mutually excluding categories which were triggered by the Greek philosophy still dominate the social sciences and global thinking. This separateness and dichotomist logic is especially visible and dominating in the field of international relations, see for example Acharya and Buzan (2010) claiming that non-Western, alternative thinking and imagination is fundamentally missing from international relations theory and from social sciences, thus only the exclusionist and dichotomist European thinking can be found there; or by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) who writes that even if a non-Western thinking is present it is fully dominated by Western epistemology. After performing a brief prologue of differentiation and separateness within philosophical line, the study partly continues the theoretical path by describing differentiation and separateness within economic and political realm.

Centrum vs. periphery: economic and political differentiation

Centralisation and peripherialisation in the field of economy and capitalism are deeply studied and reflected in the domain of social research. Karl Marx (Capital, Vol. 1, chapter 25) offered analytical, theoretical approach where he underlined the tendency of centralization and peripherialisation within capitalist method of production, later this approach was developed further by dependency theorists, like Andre Gunder Frank (e.g. 1996; 1998), Immanuel Wallerstein (e.g. 2011), Giovanni Arrighi (e.g. 2008) and/or by Samir Amin (e.g. 2010; 2011), claiming that centralisation is an inevitable feature of capitalist method of production. This process of centralisation and peripherialisation of capital was developed into profound theories, like “uneven and combined development”, settled by Leon Trotsky (e.g. in Chibber 2013; in Morton 2007) and/or “uneven geographical development” by David Harvey (2006). Although, the process of centralisation and peripherialisation is not only a feature of capitalist method of production, but a very similar tendency is also visible within the relationship between central areas and borderlands, where the former can be characterized by profound concentration and centralization of development, economic capacity and capital, while the latter is often neglected and only a limited and peripheral economic, development capacity and capital are clustered there. That means borderland areas often experience shortcomings and limitedness; consequently, border areas and border studies should receive higher attention in this field and they should explicitly reflect the process of centralization.

Cross-border cooperation and interaction are highly realistic, practical methods and/or approaches how to utilise and how to turn the disadvantaged and limited position of borderlands into the advantageous one, thus performing economic, cultural, social and/or other enrichment of territories which are situated at the borders of the state. However, it is important to underline that cross-border cooperation as such is not a new occurrence within contemporary development of political landscape and spatial geography of the European Union, but it is a phenomenon which is old as the phenomenon of borders themselves, because a borderline with its programmed disjunctive nature inevitable separates and differentiates between insiders/outsiders, and/or between Self/Other (see international relations theory in this domain, e.g. Elias, Scotson 1994; Fabian 2002; Inayatullah & Blaney 2003; Neumann 1996a; 1996b; 2013; Ringmar 2006; 2013; Sartre 1961; Walker 1993; Zarakol 2011); subsequently, the idea of traversing, crossing across disconnectedness and disjuncture is a natural reaction. Hence, examples of transboundariness can be easily found, for example if we look at the history of cross-border trade, like the Silk Road (Abu-Lughod 1991), crusade wars with the aim to open trade routes (Amin 2011), trans-Saharan caravan routes, Francisco de Vitoria”s explanation of the right to travel across the American continent (Anghie 2004; 2006; Todorov 1999), Hanseatic League or the slave trade across borders and continents (Blaut 1993) which extensively helped in the capital concentration of Europe (see e.g. Bairoch 1993; Frank 1998; Hobson 2004; Williams 1944). Furthermore, numerous contemporary features dominate that profoundly diminish the role of borders, state-control, thus borders become only a limited barrier, e.g. rise of globalisation, space of flows and/or fluidity (e.g. Bauman 2000; 2006; Beck 1992; 2007; Castells 1996; Rorty 2000), the expansion of free-trade agreements (Dunkley 2004; Chang 2008; Chossudovsky 2003; Gallagher & Robinson 1953; Patomäki 2002), rise of neo-liberalism (Abrahamsen 2000; Allmendinger, Haughton, Knieling, Othengrafen 2015; Brenner 2006; Cafruny & Ryner 2003; Harvey 2006; 2011; Žižek 2009a), and/or emergence of soft spaces as new, informal and non-statutory spaces which are active beyond the elected government bodies (Allmendinger et al. 2015; Othengrafen, Knieling, Haughton, Allmendinger 2015).

Institutionalised cross-border cooperation is a bit different from other forms of interaction, such as trade, as it involves a limited and demarcated geographical space which undertakes the interaction. Institutionalised cross-border cooperation has been profoundly triggered since the Second World War. The first established cross-border euroregion, Euregio, was created on the German and Dutch border (Scott 2000) with the aim to trigger economic, environmental, social, institutional solutions for the region and to support communication and cultural interaction. Later, the Øresund Committee was established in 1964 with the aim to coordinate cross-border cooperation between Denmark and Sweden. Subsequently, cross-border cooperation diffused in other parts of Europe, too.

The last decades have introduced substantial changes and alterations. Firstly, the collapse of the communist political system and its rigid political borders eliminated the “genial other” that has generated substantial changes in the world order (Gyelnik 2015 or Beck 1998), but at the same time it opened up the borders and possibilities for cross-border cooperation also in the Central and Eastern part of Europe. That means advent of globalization and spaces of flows have made borders permeable; consequently, several forms of cross-border interactions have been triggered, like twin-cities, euroregions and/or EU mechanism of European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation. Nevertheless, obstacles and limitations to cross-border cooperation still exist/remain and they are able to substantially reduce interactions across the borders and their effectiveness. In other words, border areas have to tackle with dual difficulty, namely, they have to overcome the limitation that is generated by border itself, like centralization versus peripherialisation; and they have to successfully manage administrative, legal, cultural, psychological and/or linguistic impenetrability across the borders. After giving an insight into the philosophical and economic/political differentiation and separation, the research starts to look at cross-border interactions and their general beginning in the domain of health care.

Cross-border health care cooperation: a general beginning

One of the principal area where cross-border cooperation could generate a highly added value, especially for the ordinary local people, is the domain of health care and its services; however, this cooperation is not automatic and it includes a progressive path. To be specific, the Amsterdam Treaty, which fully entered into force on 1st of May in 1999, underlined that health care frameworks and systems are fully integrated parts of national sovereignty, hence they are organized, controlled and managed by national governments. Nevertheless, the intense intra-continental movement of people, extension of mobility and the emergence of a new generation, to whom crossing and traversing of borders are natural phenomenon and habit, have profoundly touched this area of cooperation. In other words, an integrating Europe, which supports the free movement of people, goods, services and capital (the so called four freedoms of the Union) should support the policy changes from which health systems and patients can benefit (Rosenmöller, McKee, Baeten, Glinos 2006).

That means that the European Union supports this kind of cooperation and it is explicitly included within the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, thus the article 168.2 claims: “The Union shall encourage cooperation between the Member States in the areas referred to in this Article and, if necessary, lend support to their action. It shall in particular encourage cooperation between the Member States to improve the complementarity of their health services in cross-border areas”, thus EU member states and the European Commission may initiate any kind of cooperation which supports the domain of health service in cross-border areas.

Although, it should be underlined that cross-border health cooperation is not a fully new phenomenon that appeared from nothing and which was missing during the previous decades, as it was already noted in general connection to cross-border cooperation, but it is a form of interaction which enjoys significantly high attention at the beginning of the 21st century. Simply, there were two important moments that profoundly pushed forward this specific cross-border domain. First was “Europeanisation” and the elevation of hospital cooperation into the EU agenda after the ruling on patient mobility by the Court of Justice of the European Union (Baeten, Vanhercke, Coucheir 2010), while the second important moment was the meeting of health care ministers of the member states in Malaga in 2002, where they agreed on the fact that cross-border health care and access to health care services in the neighbouring regions/countries contain substantial added value for the residents of the border regions (Glinos & Wismar 2013). Subsequently, an active debate has taken place in the European Union that reached an important breakthrough moment, namely, the Directive 2011/24/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of March 2011 on the application of patients” rights in cross-border healthcare was undertaken that explicitly underlined the patients” right to cross the borders in order to perform cross-border health care. To be specific, the 10th article of the Directive says, “This Directive aims to establish rules for facilitating access to safe and high-quality cross-border healthcare in the Union and to ensure patient mobility in accordance with the principles established by the Court of Justice and to promote cooperation on healthcare between Member States, whilst fully respecting the responsibilities of the Member States for the definition of social security benefits relating to health and for the organisation and delivery of healthcare and medical care and social security benefits, in particular for sickness. (…) The Commission shall encourage Member States, particularly neighbouring countries, to conclude agreements among themselves. The Commission shall also encourage the Member States to cooperate in cross-border healthcare provision in border regions.”

In other words, it usually happens that there is a functional hospital next to the border, while on the another side of the border, the hospital is further (deeper) from the borders, e.g. hospital in Esztergom/Hungary; however, the closest hospital for the Slovakian (neighbouring) citizens of the border region is Nové Zámky, some 50 kilometers away from Štúrovo/Slovakia; there is a hospital in Valga/Estonia, while the closest hospital on the Latvian side is Vidzeme Hospital in Valmiera; subsequently, patients in case of emergency cannot be taken to the closest hospital, which would be the best, logical health care choice and decision, even if it is beyond the borders, but they are taken into hospitals which are further, thus their life expectancy to survive emergency situation is substantially hindered and they are in profound “competitive health disadvantage” in terms of survival and health prospects vis-à-vis other citizens. Consequently, it looks like that cross-border health care is not only an appropriate cooperation across the borders, but it is a highly logical step. Nevertheless, it appears that cross-border health care cooperation is overshadowed by significant obstacles which either slow down cooperation by bureaucratic requirements, or they cause that cross-border health care is non-existent.

That means the following obstacles can be identified in the cross-border health care area: different national legislations, regulations, system of administration and distribution of legislative powers; transport of medicine as problematic domain, since there is no license for cross-border transportation of medicine; morphine in the ambulance car and problems in case of border crossing; reimbursement and differentiation in health care tariffs; scarcity of doctors in the border areas; lack of information for the patients; differing ability and capability of health care service; language barriers; lack of cooperation, lack of bilateral and political agreements in cross-border health care cooperation; planning is missing; obstacles in mobility of patients; obstacle in emergency communication, namely, emergency systems are not inter-operable; legal uncertainty in terms of liability; differences in equipment and competences; cross-border cooperation is highly dependent on the involved persons and their willingness; cross-border health care cooperation is not a high political priority; different levels of responsible authorities; and/or lack of funding to solve obstacles. After describing the general beginning of cross-border health care, the study moves towards more specific and concrete cases of health care cooperation.

Cross-border health care: innovative and creative ideas

First substantial and historical health care and hospital cross-border cooperation was formulated between Austria and Germany, namely between the cities of Braunau and Simbach. These two cities are culturally close to each other and they are only separated by the river of Inn, hence these factors offered a suitable and appropriate environment for cooperation and interaction. The basic impetus of their cross-border cooperation was triggered by regional health care limitedness on the German side. To be specific, the reconstruction of the surgical ward in the Braunau hospital caused that the trauma care was substantially limited in the city; consequently, a health care cooperation agreement was negotiated between the hospitals. The result of the negotiation was that the German traumatic cases were accepted and cured in Austria, thus establishing cross-border cooperation already in 1994. In other words, the initial problem and challenge which triggered the cross-border cooperation was the limitedness in regional health care that could be effectively remedied by cross-border interaction. The effect of this cross-border cooperation was that thousands of patients received cross-border health care treatment. Unfortunately, cooperation terminated in 2011 because political priorities were modified in Germany and in Austria, too (Kostera & Burger 2013, 35-50). After introducing this first historical case of cooperation, the analysis will move toward functioning and viable cross-border health care interactions in the EU.

Several examples can be identified where cross-border health care shows a “progressed” stage in comparison with other parts of the European Union; nevertheless, one of the most important and innovative cross-border health care cooperation is performed by the ZOAST system, “Organized Zones of Access to Cross-Border Healthcare”, on the French-Belgian border areas. Simply, this form of interaction can be rightfully considered as a cross-border health care best practice and example in the domain of health care interactions.

The basic triggering moment of cooperation was the incapacity on regional level to perform medical and health care services to its residents. To be specific, the maternity care and maternity part of the hospital was closed in the French Revin, in 2002; consequently, the pregnant women had to travel into other French hospitals, like the Charleville-Mézières, in order to undertake health controls, health check-ups and child-birth. Although, the closest French hospital was situated in distance of 60 kilometres and this distance caused several problems and inconvenience for the pregnant women and their families. Subsequently, an alternative solution had to be figured out, namely the Belgian hospital in Dinant opened its medical care and medical services for the French pregnant women. In 2005, a cross-border cooperation agreement was signed between France and Belgium (Expert Panel on Effective Way of Investing in Health 2015, 30); subsequently, the agreement was fully adopted in 2011. It is an agreement which has substantially simplified the bureaucratic administrative procedures that hindered cooperation and it has established a legal framework which makes cross-border health care accessible and functional between France and Belgium. Hence, administrative and finance arrangements are eased for those patients who cross the border by allowing them to receive care by presenting their domestic health insurance card (Footman, Knai, Baeten, Glonti, McKee 2014). These organized zones mean that six border territories and their inhabitants can receive health care services, receive inpatient and outpatient treatment, either on the French or on the Belgian territory without prior medical authorization. The important and innovative element of this ZOAST mechanism is that cross-border health care is performed without any financial and/or any administrative barrier. Moreover, fundamental element of the ZOAST system is that it has established a permanent cooperation and communication link between various authorities, like national and regional, health insurance and other third parties who ceaselessly work on coordination. Furthermore, important role has been played by the French-Belgian Health Observatory which undertakes a position of a lead partner in healthcare projects and it attempts to coordinate cross-border health care cooperation.

This cross-border health care cooperation was such successful and effective that the cross-border maternity medical care was progressively extended and it started to cover the medical care associated before and after the child-birth, and later the cross-border medical care started to include other medical areas, like the outpatient and inpatient care. Thus the cooperation experienced a gradual extension, development and evolvement of medical care; although, one specific domain strictly remains outside of the ZOAST cross-border cooperation, namely medical domain of artificial insemination.

It is essential to highlight that the establishment of the ZOAST was not without it difficulties. Kiasuwa and Baeten (2013) explicitly note that the ZOAST system is effective and functional only because the involved parties eagerly support the cooperation and strive to accomplish medical cross-border cooperation between France and Belgium. However, some obstacles have remained and some additional obstacles paradoxically emerged as a result of the direct success of cooperation. To be specific, one of the most serious troubles in the cross-border cooperation is that the inflow of large number of French patients may cause some inconveniency for the domestic patients, like the emergence and/or prolongation of waiting lists and waiting periods for several medical services, like the gynaecology, hence the domestic Belgian citizens have to travel to the next hospital because of the inflow of foreign/French patients. Besides, problems were identified in communication between providers on either side of the border (Kiasuwa, Baeten, McKee, Knai 2014). What is more, certain French concerns are profoundly present, since the process of cross-border health care causes an outflow and loss of French patients, hence the French health care service experiences a demand shrinkage, while at the same time the Belgian hospitals significantly benefit from cooperation because their funding is determined by the occupation rates of the hospital capacity (Footman et al. 2014).

In other words, the effective cross-border cooperation, undertaken by the ZOAST frame, might be very useful, incentive and impulsive for the whole European Union in the process of distribution of cross-border interactions. That means a success may trigger widespread diffusion of cross-border legal-tool, as it is explicitly highlighted by the MOT (2015, 13), “it appears then interesting to think about a new European legal tool, similar to the Belgian-French “ZOAST”, which could be easily implemented within the EU, on a voluntary basis and within the framework of a European regulation.” Hence, effective existence and well-functioning system of the ZOAST cross-border health care frame may trigger an important, interesting debate and/or thinking about a new possible European legal frame(s) on cross-border health care services in the European continent.

Then there is the example of very innovative and creative cross-border health care cooperation example is the Hospital de Cerdanya on the borderland between Spain and France. This cross-border health care cooperation is labeled by Sanjuán and Gil (2013, 11) as cross-border cooperation of “embryonic” phase. The Hospital is in “embryonic phase” since it functions within the specific and unique institutional frame of European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation, thus performing a powerful attempt to situate the two region and two different health care frameworks within one functional and institutional system of EU cooperation.

It is important to underline that cooperation is profoundly influenced by geographical conditions like the mountain systems and the sinuous roads that are impassable during the winter; subsequently, the plateau is partly connected to the French city of Perpignan. What is more, cultural conditions are highly important since the two communities on the two sides of the border have been divided since the Pyrenees Treaty, which was signed between France and Spain in 1659, but the communities are very close culturally, socially, historically and they speak the same Catalan language (Harant 2006).

That means an important impulse for cooperation was the distance that needs to be taken on the French side. To be specific, there are two hospitals on the French side, in Perpignan and in Prades. Nevertheless, the accessibility of hospitals thorough the mountain plateau is slower, hence the acute needs of surgery and obstetric care is problematic since the travelling may take almost two hours and this time consuming distance is very exhaustive for the patients who are directly situated within health care disadvantage vis-à-vis others. Consequently, there was a need to search for alternatives and possibilities near to the borders and Puigcerdà. The basic idea behind the cooperation was that health care remoteness from large cities presents a problem for a relatively large local population and the inflow of huge tourist number that can reach 150 000 tourists per year also generates substantial health care needs and demands. Subsequently, an informal cooperation took place, thus the Spanish hospital in Puigcerdà started to take care of French emergency patients. This informal cooperation was running without any legal and institutional certainty that the health care expenses on foreign citizens will be reimbursed or not. Consequently, the functional informal health care cooperation started to take a more formalized path in 2003, when a cooperation agreement was signed by the Languedoc-Roussillon region and by the Catalonian Government. The cooperation agreement contained the idea to establish a common health care infrastructure for the borderland regions where the health care centum was planned and managed, hence opening profoundly new spaces of cross-border health care cooperation in Europe.

In order to have a functional and effective hospital in the long-term, there must be an appropriately large population health care demand which is able to assure the utilization of the health care services. That means independently and without cross-border cooperation, neither the Spanish nor the French side can gather proper population health care demand, thus the only possibility of the Hospital was to base itself on cross-border interaction and to link the Spanish and French border health care demand into one integrated cluster, hence joining the two Cerdanya regions into one health care frame. Subsequently, cooperation offers a unique solution for the residents of the border regions. However, it is important to underline that the establishment of cross-border health care cooperation was not without question marks and legal obstacles. One of the most important and fundamental question and legal issue was formulated around the births and death within the context of the new health care structures. In other words, the French law identifies those citizens who are born out of France as “born overseas”; subsequently, there was an agreement between the Catalan Government and the French Ministry that the new EGTC Hospital receives a status that is similar to embassy (Berzi 2013).

Put it in other way, cross-border hospital cooperation is intended to serve the inhabitants of Spanish and French Cerdanya Region and it is expected to serve health care needs of the entire Pyrenées-Mediteranée cross-border region (Glinos 2011). In 2007, the agreement was signed between the French and the Catalan governments and they also agreed on the fact that the new hospital will function under the legal frame of EGTC that will manage multi-level governance by bridging and linking the differences between Catalonia/Spain and France. Consequently, the hospital was opened in 2010 and it has been highly serving the local wellbeing and patients. The Hospital tries to be linguistically supportive towards different patients, hence the structure employs medical staff from both sides of the border, thus linguistic demands are fully fulfilled and the linguistic problems are successfully bridged and eliminated. That means there is a bi-national medical and also a bi-national administrative staff which allows the patients to use three languages at any time and at any place of the Hospital. These languages are the following ones: French, Spanish and Catalan language. Moreover, the patients can use their health cards, too.

An important factor for the development of cooperation is that the European Union and the European Regional Development Fund played a major role in the establishment of the Hospital; however, the European Union was not directly involved in the obstacle removing process and solving steps that was needed to be done on local and/or regional level. Subsequently, the Cerdanya hospital can be read and interpreted as a very innovative and creative way of cross-border health care cooperation and coordination in the European continent. Important message of this cross-border interaction is that effective and successful cooperation on local/regional level may trigger interactions into higher state level and dimension. Although, this creative form of cross-border health care cooperation has to solve several administrative barriers and problems in the future, like the question of medical malpractice, the question, who will cover the performed malpractice; what law will govern labour disputes and professional liability; how can national schemes be granted with equal respect to the French and Catalan side; how can be a strong leadership created in three languages; how to combine the whole time professional contracts in Spain with the part-time contracts of France; how to establish a culture of cooperation within two different networks; what will be the quality of care and rights of patients, planning and funding schemes and many other further questions (Harant 2006). Simply, if the Hospital with its cross-border cooperation achieves the identified and expected results, it will be a very important precedent in Europe and this innovative approach of cross-border interaction may diffuse itself into the European Union, it may open new doors for cooperation and it hypothetically may trigger a new round of health care cross-border cooperation in the next decade.

One of the most important and well-functioning cross-border cooperation in the domain of health care is performed within the CBC context of the Meuse-Rhine Euroregion. This Euroregion and its cooperation has achieved such a performance that it is rightly considered as a European Union within a little micro-cosmos that materialize real and people friendly integration between European states[1]. Fundamental aim of cooperation is to assure that the border regions have good health care interactions between each other. That means cooperation supports not only health care cooperation, but it tries to promote other elements of health care structure, like cooperation within innovative fields of health care technology and/or promotion of health care tourism. Moreover, Euroregion underlines that the region, but also the European continent, experience serious demographic changes and these demographic processes may cause that the older generations and that part of the society which is in high need of health care will exceed the younger generation and the healthy part of society, and these changes adumbrate significant changes, high need for cooperation and linking of capacities, especially within the border territories.

Two important moments and elements of cross-border health care cooperation can be identified within the context of Meuse-Rhine CBC. The first important element is the crossing of borders by ambulance care, while the second important feature is the crossing of borders by ambulance helicopter. The former includes the possibility that the ambulance car can freely cross the border with patient, without any restriction and limitation. Certain “de iure” limitations appear, especially on the Dutch side of the cooperation, because of the morphine on the ambulance board; nevertheless, this limitation is not translated into “de facto” limitation and obstructions, hence cooperation is performed in a pragmatic way. The latter form of cooperation also represents a very unique feature since it involves crossing of border territories by medical helicopter with label “Christoph Europa”. This cooperation was preceded by a Memorandum and it opened the possibility to utilize helicopters within the framework of cross-border cooperation. The Memorandum openly claims that the signatory parties aim to establish and perform health care cooperation that can be used as an example for the whole European continent. In other words, certain border areas of the Netherlands are covered by the German medical helicopter; consequently, if a serious accident happens, then the German medical helicopter takes the Dutch patient to the German hospital. In other words, the German medical helicopter functions as part of the Dutch health care. Moreover, efforts are present with the aim to establish a European educational centrum for the air ambulance workers. Simply, this successful health care cooperation represents a vital, well-functioning and promising interaction that may be rightfully considered as an inspiring best example.

Tourist areas are important spaces for cross-border health care cooperation, such as the cooperation between Germany and Majorca and/or the cooperation between Malta and the United Kingdom (Baeten, McKee, Rosenmöller 2006). Subsequently, another important example of cross-border health care cooperation can be found between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Malta. The Island of Malta was under British rule since the beginning of the 19th century. When it achieved its independence from the United Kingdom in 1964, the already existing close relations remained and continued to flourish, especially in the tourist sector, where the citizens of the United Kingdom were the major providers. The second half of the 20th century introduced important aspects and developments in the field of medicine and/or medical/health care. That means medical services became complicated and complex, the inter-continental travelling became accessible and easier; consequently, it was an automatic reaction, and an even inevitable decision for a small country like Malta with its 400 thousand citizens, to establish cross-border/cross-continental cooperation on healing of rare diseases (Muscat, Grech, Cachia, Xuereb 2006).

This health care cross-border cooperation was established in 1975 and was triggered by close historical ties, the British tourist presence in Malta and by the limited capacity of the Maltese health care structure to cope with rare diseases on its own territory. The cross-border cooperation offers mutual benefits and advantages for the United Kingdom and for Malta, too. To be specific, the United Kingdom offers a health care service for the Maltese citizens in curing rare diseases. This cooperation is profoundly supported by the limited capacity of the Maltese health care service to cope with and cure rare diseases. That means Malta is very small country, hence maintaining a health care structure with ability and capacity to cure rare diseases is non-efficient because there is a “lack of demand”. Nevertheless, the United Kingdom, a much bigger country, needs to maintain a health care structure which is prepared to cure and alleviate those rare diseases. Consequently, the United Kingdom offers health-care services for the Republic of Malta. On the other side, Malta also offers its health care services for the citizens of the United Kingdom who are temporarily resided on the Island of Malta. Thus it is an interaction, where these two states mutually support each other’s health care structure and citizens. To be specific, there are around 300 citizens who annually receive health care service on the territory of the United Kingdom (Footman et al. 2014). Health care treatment of patients is regulated by mutually agreed quota between Malta and the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the reality shows that the quotas are usually exceeded and more patients are treated than it is originally agreed (Muscat et al. 2006).

Generally, health care problems are treated within the frame of the agreement, like bone marrow transplants, liver transplants, special cases of endocrinology, gastroenterology and/or neurology. Furthermore, it involves surgery actions like complex major spinal surgery, cardiac surgery and maxillofacial surgery. All these health care treatments have one common point, namely, they are characterized by high health care costs and with low patient demand, thus neither economic nor clinical arguments support the development of health care specializations within the Maltese health care structure.

Moreover, this cross-border cooperation involves the mobility of patients, e.g. mobility of the Maltese citizens who are cured in the United Kingdom and mobility of the British professional staff. That means the medical staff of the United Kingdom regularly visits Malta either to identify those ill people who will receive health care treatment in the United Kingdom or to control the recovering of patients who received treatment, and to monitor post-treatment conditions of those patients. This cooperation is highly successful, a fact that is mirrored in long-duration and sustainability. Moreover, Maltese patients are very satisfied with the care and especially with the nurse services in the United Kingdom. However, numerous weak points and obstacles may be identified within the cross-border interaction. To be specific, there is a substantial logistical hindrance, namely the United Kingdom is far away from Malta and this distance may cause several obstacles. The period of health care treatment stay in the United Kingdom is murky and its precise definition is impossible, hence ahead planning (from perspective of time and finance) is substantially hardened. Furthermore, language obstacles and distances may be also identified, since the English language is a West Germanic language, while the Maltese language is part of Semitic languages, thus there is a need for translation in order to have a proper communication. Finally, the cross-border health care cooperation is also limited and hindered by financial burden. Although, when we put together all the obstacles, weaknesses on one side and all the positives of cooperation on another side, it is immediately and explicitly visible that cooperation is beneficial, effective and it offers a substantial help to citizens, thus achieving profound added value.

Interesting cross-border health care cooperation and interaction that appears in link with tourism/tourist industry can be found in Italy, especially in the Veneto Region. Veneto Region is situated in the Northeast of Italy and it is a popular tourist destination during the tourist seasons. In other words, it is a region that is at the center of tourist attraction and it attracts significant number of tourists every year. Consequently, this tourist inflow demands the significant preparation of health care system of the Region, too. That means the Region initiated a health care frame that supports the tourist economy and which takes a special focus on services for chronic diseases and conditions, like chronic kidney problems. Subsequently, the hospital in Jèsolo is prepared for tourist dialysis services and it is open throughout the whole year, while hospital in Bibione is prepared for outpatient care/service and its health care structure offers a six-bed centre for tourists during the tourist season (Footman et al. 2014; Scaramagli, Zanon, Ronfini, Bertinato 2006).

Cross-border health care cooperation is performed in a way that the home medical centres of the patients communicate with the Veneto region, they send care plan of the patients, hence Veneto can prepare its medical service and it can synchronize with the pre-existing medical care of the tourist. This cross-border communication is functional; although, there is a high need for further improvement of the communication between hospitals because discharge summaries are rarely sent home to the domestic health care institutions, hence there are substantial weak points in this part of inter-health care centres communication. Subsequently, cooperation underlines that a standardized European discharge would be very useful and it would be a very supportive towards health care cooperation across the borders. Besides the problems with the patient discharge, linguistic problems also appear; nevertheless, the Veneto region attempts to solve the linguistic barriers and obstacles through involvement of interpreters that function as a translating link between the doctors/medical staff and the patients (Baeten 2011; Footman et al. 2014; Legido-Quigley et al. 2011). In other words, it is a weaker and less effective health care cooperation, but it is an important example, since it shows that economy and tourism can put a “positive pressure” and it might trigger further cooperation in the area of health care.

The next “embryonic health care cooperation” can be identified between Romania and Bulgaria, namely between Călărași and Silistra. The basic triggering moment of their cooperation was a situation that the hospital in Călărași suffered in substantial lack of doctors, thus several medical fields were hit by the staff shortage that may have caused decrease in health care quality and efficiency. Nevertheless, an opposite situation could be found on the next side of the River, in Silistra in Bulgaria, specifically, there was an oversupply of medical staff, especially in the field of anesthesiology. Hence, the hospital, citizens and the region of Silistra were threatened that the Bulgarian medical staff will move either to foreign countries or to central areas of Bulgaria, thus relieving the oversupply, but that reallocation of professional staff could have affected the region negatively and seriously. Consequently, a cross-border health care negotiation was performed between the hospitals of Călărași and Silistra. Result of the negotiations was an attempt to equalize the shortage and oversupply on the two sides of the Danube River, thus offering a solution to both cities of Călărași and Silistra.

This health care cooperation has had to cope with numerous cross-border cooperation obstacles, a substantial one being the issue of qualification recognition and numerous legal and administrative issues related to it. In other words, the protracted process of recognition was a substantial obstacle which may have limited cooperation and which dampened the initial motivation of cross-border interaction. Nevertheless, the medical staff of Călărași and Silistra maintained very good personal relationships and these were utilized in order to accelerate the recognition process. Consequently, the recognition process was accomplished within few months instead of a year-long waiting period. The next important limiting factor of cross-border cooperation between Călărași and Silistra was everyday commuting across the River. This commuting was very protracted and time consuming, thus there was a need to identify possible alternatives. Hence, negotiation was needed between the Romanian public health directorate and the border police. The result of this cooperation was that the border police offered their boat, thus the doctors from Bulgaria speedily crossed the River, and from the Romanian side of the River, the doctors were transported to the Hospital by hospital car. The third fundamental obstacle of cooperation has been linguistic difference and little mutual understanding of the partner languages. The solution was that translators were also involved in the cross-border cooperation and they helped the Bulgarian doctors in their communication and professional work (Galan, Olsavszky, Vladescu 2013).

However, it is important to underline that the cross-border health care cooperation between Călărași and Silistra was intended to be only a short and/or a mid-term process, unless the Romanian side solves the problem of medical shortage, while the Bulgarian side reduces the internal pressure caused by the oversupply. To conclude, the health care cooperation between Călărași and Silistra is a very good case and example that cross-border cooperation may articulate a solution for problems of the border areas, either the problem of regional/local limitedness, or the problem of regional/local oversupply. What is more, cross-border health care cooperation needs new creative ideas and imaginations. Imaginations are critically important in our life and the “activity of imagination” was openly underlined by people like Pablo Picasso, who claimed that “Everything you can imagine is real”, or Albert Einstein who proclaimed that “Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life”s coming attractions”. Imagination was also central to George Orwell, for whom a world where imagination ceases to be present is a world not worthy of living in. Hence, imagination represents and plays a major part in our final example which is the Eurocity Chaves-Verín European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation that has directly touched this dimension.

To be specific, the Eurocity Chaves-Verín EGTC manages cross-border cooperation on the borders between Portugal and Spain, and they have come up with a hypothetical health care cooperation that is worth to be mentioned in our analysis. Their basic position was that interactions are limited by two important factors. First limiting factor is testified by the administrative requirements and legal procedures which are needed for cross-border health care. Second limiting factor is the lack of information, i.e. citizens and health care structures are in acute lack of information about each other, about each other’s capacities and possibilities. Consequently, solution for the obstacle would be an establishment of a common health care facility that would establish an effective flow of information, hence eliminating lack or inappropriate information. That means establishment of common facility could be an appropriate option to solve either the administrative, legal or information obstacle between the involved regions. Moreover, the common health care facility would provide important and life-saving cross-border health care services like the commonly organized blood bank and/or the cross-border treating of cancer patients[2]. Although, it is important to underline that these hypothetical ideas are only imaginations, but they are crucially important for further development and formulation of cross-border cooperation in the European Union.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper was to offer a useful study of cross-border health care cooperation in Europe. The real effect of cross-border health care cooperation is its ability to promote interactions and cooperation which directly touch people in their everyday life, and they promote cooperation that is directly visible, e.g. saved lives in case of emergency.

The basic hypothesis of the study is that limitations at the regional/local level may profoundly trigger cross-border interactions, hence cross-border cooperation may function as a way and method to eliminate regional/local limitedness. This hypothesis was explicitly demonstrated in five identified cases of the study. To be specific, in cooperation between Braunau and Simbach, where limitation on the German side triggered cooperation; in the ZOAST cooperation where French limitationa generated the initial impulses; in the frame of the Cerdanya Hospital, where the local/regional limits of capacity and the hindered accessibility caused by geographical conditions promoted the idea of cooperation; in cross-border/cross-continental cooperation between the United Kingdom and Malta, where the limitedness of the Maltese health care generated the appropriate environment for cooperation; and in cooperation between Călărași and Silistra as a way to stabilize the imbalanced professional medical labor power condition at the two sides of the border. Besides, three other cases appeared in the study which were included because their performed cross-border interactions generated a substantial added value in the realm of cross-border health care cooperation.

What is more, the European Union has been experiencing its legitimacy crisis since people massively lose their trust and belief in the European ideas, especially after coercive handling of the Greek crisis and the coercive management of migration crisis by the central institutional authorities and bodies of the European Union. That means the “people friendly” policy that is created by cross-border cooperation may have a serious impact in the contemporary European Union with the ability to emphasize and show the positive elements of the European Union.

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How border trade contributes to the development of Baneh and helps to fight the economic crisis of the peripheral region.

A case study from the Iranian-Iraqi border

REZA KHEYRODDIN, SEYED ABDOLHADI DANESHPOUR,

MEHDI RAZPOUR

Introduction

The informal economy and its spatial consequences is one of the most important issues in the border regions of Iran. The topic had been neglected in recent national and regional territorial plans. There are many factors that affect border provinces, such as discrimination and inequality in employment opportunities and income. The consequences of this inequality are poverty, lack of security, lack of minimal indicators of life quality, migration and smuggling. In addition, the marginalization of these regions from the central government intensify those problems. The border residents had been prompted to diversify their business exploiting the divide. They are forced to test new ways to secure their life quality – putting them in contrast with the formal rules from the capitol. The resulting activities have profound impacts on the economic, social, cultural, physical and spatial structure of border regions.

Despite of the difficulties of the informal economic activities, there are significant positive effects of the informal economy on the life quality of border residents such as:

- Establishment of commercial and financial centers such as malls and banks in Baneh city

- transforming the city from an administrative-political to a commercial role

- Flourishing economic activities in rural areas through the creation of informal depots of imported goods, which helps to keep and even increase the rural population

- Increasing employment in the service sector

- Increasing employment opportunities related to the informal trade

- Increasing commercial tourism

The economic growth and the urban development of Baneh are indicated by the rising per capita income of the border residents. They become less reliant on agriculture and industry. This results in the creation of appropriate security in the margins of the country, which is a positive result for the national government. This study attempts to analyze and assess the significant economic and spatial consequences of the informal economic activities and the trade tourism on Baneh. As a result, strategies will be extracted which might support a sustainable regional development.

The spatial effects of informal economic activities in Baneh

The regional development planning in Iran has rarely had a positive role for sustainable regional development. The role of cities in the peripheral border regions had been almost fully neglected. The national regional development plans contain a couple of obstructions for the border regions such as: top-bottom approach, non-reliance on the original context of development and a lack of participation on the one hand and using traditional methods of development researches, while ignoring newer and innovative theoretical approaches and methods of scientific knowledge on the other hand.

Informal settlements are: 1. areas where groups of housing units have been constructed on land that the occupants have no legal claim to, or occupy illegally; 2. unplanned settlements and areas where housing is not in compliance with current planning and building regulations (unauthorized housing). Besides the current informal settlements and slums in almost cities of Iran, new flow of informal settlements with different specifications have emerged in some of the Iranian cities, especially in the border cities. The origin of this new phenomenon began after 2006 that lead to the cities sprawl, population increase and the physical growth of rural settlements which are around the cities, and the growth of some corridors in regional-scale. The nature of the actors that lead to emerging this type of informal settlements are different from those actors whom lead to emerging informal settlements during the past four decades in Iran.

Baneh city in the Kurdistan province of Iran, is one of the border cities that have been exposed to a wide trade and goods exchange. The difference between national currency prices on both sides of the border has created a flow of informal activities like smuggling and non-registered trade. Most of the smuggled goods are consumed by commercial tourists from throughout the country. According to the head of the Cultural Heritage of Kurdistan province, 1.438.500 commercial tourists visited Baneh city in the first four months of 2009 (Felegari, 2009). The existence of this massive influx of tourists who are buying the smuggled goods have extensive spatial and physical consequences on the city and the region. The central part of Baneh city has had extensive changes over less than a decade due to the construction of commercial centers and malls. The population increased unexpectedly in the city, which has nowadays 104422 inhabitants and most of the border villages, leading to an unprecedented and unstable monetary circulation. But all of these changes are insecure, since the flow of capital is affected by government legislation. The decisions of the national government can change the situation in the border region easily by blocking the borders or increasing the currency price.

In order to develop Baneh sustainable, it is necessary to create plans for the future. The economic, social and cultural boom and sustainable development can be realized within the region by planning, managing and monitoring the recent changes correctly. But, insecurity, the occurrence of an unstable border economy, unemployment, depression and inactivity might be a result of the inadvertence of local and national institutions resulting in the disorganization and marginalization of the border region.

The conventional methods of planning are not responsible and efficient enough to analyze spatial and physical changes of the region and the city. Therefore, special methods for the process of surveying, recognizing and analyzing are required. They have to take into consideration the special situation in border regions.

This paper attempts to survey the imported smuggling goods and analyze the spatial and physical consequences of this flow on the urban space. Strategic planning approaches in urban development should be the base for analyzing and steering the recent unstable changes to a sustainable urban and regional development. A systematic approach is necessary to identify the factors of urban and regional changes. Thus, the external and internal factors influencing the development of Baneh are analyzed. Most sources and samples used in this paper were obtained through library and field studies. Descriptive and analytical methods had been used. The data and information had been collected through face to face interviews with local actors, photography, field surveys and visits to the border region. The extend of the informal economy and its spatial consequences had been analyzed and considered on macro and micro level (urban and regional level). Some development, such as the increase in commercial land use was analyzed in the city center on the micro level (urban level), while unprecedented demographic changes in the border villages had been considered on macro level. The classification of informal settlements in the county of Baneh were analyzed in both level, urban and regional.

In the scale of the region, the situation and number of luxury homes (second homes) were identified in three corridors as macro level of informal settlements in Baneh County. The second level of informal settlements were identified by questionnaire in the villages which have been deployed in a buffer with two kilometers distance from the city of Baneh. This mean that, all villages which are in the distance of 2 kilometers from Baneh city were selected as settlements with high population and physical growth in second layer of informal settlements in the County. Questionnaire were used as a supplementary tool beside field study for the informal settlements layers identification. The population Data of villages at a distance of two kilometers from the city of Baneh were collected through library studies and contact to the health center of Baneh County. The third layer of informal settlements in Baneh County were identified through field survey in Baneh city. The old and new slums in Baneh city identified with Delfi method. Some questioners designed for municipality’s members and also informal settlements inhabitants, in order to identifying the area of the old and new slums. So, at the end of this process, the areas of slums in the city of Baneh were identified.

A SWOT analysis was performed in order to analysis the opportunities and challenges of the economical and touristic development of the city. Table 1 illustrate the produced strategies and the relation of the factors to each other.

Table 1: S.W.O.T. Table Structure; The relation between Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and the output strategies

Source : Pires and Robinson, 2001 & Authors modification 2015

Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Planning

How do I use these strengths to take advantage of the opportunities?

Offensive Strategies

How do I overcome the weaknesses by using the opportunities?

Threats

Defensive Strategies

How do I use my Strengths to reduce the likelihood and impact of the threats?

Critical Issues

How do I address the weaknesses that will make the threats a reality?

Trade-based tourism industry

Commercial tourism which is defined by Davidson as travel for purposes related to work, it is considered one of the earliest forms of tourism (Davidson, 1994: 1). According to World Bank’s research, tourism is confirmed as a strong factor in regional development (Hawkins, 2007:350). According to Laurel et al., most governments realize the role and importance of tourism as a source to generate income and employment. Most governments developed strategies for developing the tourism industry (Laurel, 2007). On regional level tourism can help to increase income in the destinations through the expenditures of tourists or tour operators directly. (Gee & Chuck, 2003). Thus tourism is a widespread activity which accompanies important economic, social, cultural and environmental effects with itself playing an effective role in regional development (Alizadeh, 2003: 57). Used in a responsible way, tourism can highlight regional authenticities and helps to preserve and improve these authenticities resulting in the growth and development of national income (Mikaeili, 2000: 21-22). Along with the planning for touristic development, sustainability aspects should be noted. Griffin underlines that some countries have adopted the strategy of sustainable tourism development (Griffin, 1999:10). In 1999 at the UN conference on environment and development in Rio de Janeiro it was asserted that travel and tourism have prepared suitable and positive solutions to achieve sustainable development goals as one of the major sectors of economy (W.T.O, 1999: 1).

Nowadays, urban tourism is an important activity that has stimulated social actions and spatial changes (Cazes & Potier, 2003: 10). According to the theoretical frame of urban planning, tourism has an important role in urban development. The urban infrastructure has to be planned taking into consideration the needs of the tourism industry. This is specifically relevant for cities such as Baneh, which are located on the edge of the country. The border regions is benefiting from the flows of financial capital, goods and the commercial tourism, which are the key factors for the recent flourishing dynamics. They constituted the major factors for the local economic activities, capital accumulation and development of the border region.

The concept of informal economy and its consequences

The gross domestic product (GDP) is determined by all official registered and accounted economic activities of all economic actors. The aim of those national accounting system is regarding to Mardokhi (2012) to enter the production value of all actors and economic activities in the national accounting system. In developing countries the establishment of informal economy had been enabled since not all economic activities and actors are registered. They act individually and outside of the formal system. Mardokhi believes that ‘formal activities’ produce in developing countries serious obstacles, which let actors prefer to work out of the formal system. The state creates those obstacles through bureaucracy, which makes formal activities so complex, expensive and lasting that it prevents actors from even trying. It may be said that bureaucracy is the most important factor for creation and extension of informal economy in Iran, that it has obvious impact as well on Baneh city (Mardokhi, 2012). Increasing tax burden and social security payments combined with increasing restrictions on the formal labor market and the low wage level in the formal economy increase the tendency of establishing informal economy (Schnider & Enste, 2000).

Feige classified informal economy in to four groups:

1. Illegal economy

2. Not reported economy

3. Unregistered economy

4. Informal economy

In illegal economy, the rules which define legal forms of trade are violated. Actors are employed in the production and distribution of forbidden goods and services. The costs are ignored and inserted interests in the laws and administrative rules, property relationships, commercial licensing, labor contracts, damages, financial credit systems and social security are deprived (Feige, 1990: 991-2). In the broader sense, informal economy are all activities that are not entered in the national accounts due to any reasons (Thomas et all, 1997: 3).

Informal economy can have various consequences. Some of the positive and negative consequences of informal economy are:

- Deduction of production inputs especially work forces from the formal economy

- GDP decrease in case of informal economy growth (Frey, 1984)

- Significant increase in tax revenues

- Simulation of economic growth in the face of declining informal exchange

- Optimization of the underground economy to respond to the demands of the economic environment of urban services and small-scale industry

- Efficiency and positive relationship between the underground economy and economic growth (Schnider & Enste, 2000)

- Intensification of tax evasion (Bhattacharyya , 1999)

- Stimulating the demand for bank notes and coins

- Decrease of inflationary policy as a result of increasing uncontrolled money supply.

- Increasing financial activities outside the control of the central bank

- Raising potential for political corruption

- Increasing public pessimism about the role and power of government and the efficiency of the tax system

- Reduced public support for voluntary compliance with tax (Giles, 1999).

While focusing on Baneh, it seems that the relevance of informal economy is slightly different, providing a synthesis of mentioned consequences and adding further factors. The location in a border region, neighboring the troubled Iraq, the marginalization of the region, the weak local economy and currency issues of Iran increase the attractiveness of informal economic activities. The hidden economy of Baneh County is influenced by factors like tax evasion, failure of registering trade in national accounting system, ignoring legal forms of trade, ignoring institutional financial rules, failure to report to the governmental statistical center, evasion from the cost of transaction and lack of licensing of commerce.

Case Study: Baneh - a city with national and international interactions

Baneh is a city and capital of Baneh County, Kurdistan Province, in Iran ‘s western border. Baneh is neighbor with Saqqez , marivan , sardasht  and Iraqi Kurdistan . According to the 2011 census , the city has a population of 90, 304 after the cities of Sanandaj , Marivan, Saqqez is the fourth largest city in Kurdistan province and 109th in Iran[1]. Baneh is one of the sites that still have their unique forests. Baneh is one of the greatest trading hubs in Iran where there are many shopping center and trading complex. Many passengers annually travels to the city to purchase materials and to see its untouched nature. People of Baneh mainly speak Sorani dialect  of Kurdish Language. There is also a few citizens in government offices which speak Persian.

Figure 1: Geographical location of Baneh County

Source: http://www.weather-forecast.com/locations/Baneh

Baneh and the cross-border flows of informal economy

The informal economy connected to the border shapes the economic base of Baneh. A large number of residents work in border trade, using livestock and special cars ‘Figure 2’, which are made for crossing the border illegally in Baneh County. The economic flows in the region are divided into two sets of activities:

1. Activities performed in order to transfer goods formally or informally from the Iraqi cities Sulaymaniyah and Erbil to Baneh

2. Commercial activities related to the distribution of those smuggled goods within Baneh.

The goods are usually bought by ‘commercial tourists’ from the north, west and northwest of Iran. The buyers are attracted by the low price of the smuggled goods.

Figure 2: Baneh Border residents transferring smuggled goods

Source: The headquarters of the fight against smuggling, 2015.

Until summer 2012 the low rate of currency, determined by the government of Iran, lead to the formation of smuggling by crossing informally the border of the country. As a result, enormous profits are earned by those engaged in smuggling and an informal economical system was established, connecting the border residents of Baneh with smugglers in the neighboring countries. The dynamic development of Baneh County which is affected by the border is the most important consequence of the informal economy flows in this marginalized region. The border region creates to a certain extend their own development circuit, outweighing the disadvantages like the distance from the center, geographical isolation, ongoing displacement of population and cultural, ethnic, religious tensions with the central regions. Cross-border activities can be understood as a chance for economic stimulation for border regions. Unlike in previous periods, Baneh is nowadays faced with extensive spatial changes, caused by the proximity to the border. The town became the most important hub for selling and buying of informal imported goods in Iran, which creates a vast impact that can be observed in the cityscape.

Functional-spatial consequences of the informal economy and commercial tourism in Baneh; Rich and poor in the informal settlements of Baneh city

The population of Baneh has increased continually from 1966 up to now. The area of peripheral and informal settlements of Baneh was identified by field studies, related maps and documents and also completing questionnaires by Delphi method. In most cities of Iran, the area of informal settlement is allocated to those people whom have failed enter the formal productive economy of the city and inevitably have been pushed to the margins of the town. Intense accumulation of capital caused by the consequences of informal cross-border economy and the creation of high attraction of immigration in Baneh border city, in addition to the changing role of the center of town from residential to commercial lead to emerging a big demand for residential space in Baneh city over the past 10 years. In just four years, from 2011 to 2015, twenty thousand people added to the population of the small town of Baneh by the growth rate of 5.22 (Table 2).

Table 2: Population growth of Baneh city

Source: Statistical Center of Iran

Year

1966

1976

1986

1996

2006

2011

2016

Population

8 617

1 552

16 933

55 433

74 960

90 304

104 422

The immigrant population pressure, lack of flexible plan and high demand for housing in the city of Baneh caused rich and poor classes of people inevitably enter the informal residential construction at the edge of the town at a same time. In result new system of housing emerged in two parts at the edge of the city: informal settlements of high income classes and informal settlements of poor people.

Figure 3: Population growth of Baneh city

Source: Statistical Center of Iran

Figure 4: The situation of high income and poor people

Source: Authors, 2016

The location of these informal settlements shows that upper income people started to residential construction in a continuous space along the formal area and formal phisical part of the city. While, due to the lower value of land in peripheral and disconnected parts of the city, poor pepole attempted to residential informal construction in the most marginalized parts of the city.

According to the statistics, the villages at a distance of two kilometers from the city of Baneh have experienced significant population and physical growth in recent years. These changes caused informal production of physical space around the villages. The desire to settle in the villages surrounding the town was doubled by increasing the price of land in the city of Baneh.

Table 3: Population changes in the surrounding villages in the distance of 2 kilometers from Baneh city

Source: Encyclopedia of Counties in Kurdistan, 1966-2011, Statistics and Information Unit of Health Center of Baneh County, April 2016, Persian date Farvardin 1395.

Village Name

1966

1976

1986

1996

2003

2006

2011

2015

Ghaee Bard

155

117

265

140

158

203

371

467

Bane Razan

-

-

-

54

54

92

383

1080

Kopich

35

24

57

44

63

49

792

817

Torkhan Abad

64

71

44

129

93

153

469

780

Kokh Sheikh Al Eslam

-

106

216

127

151

167

226

254

Rashid Ghale

94

150

407

274

319

430

745

566

Khajeh Amir

87

75

273

282

301

341

966

1305

Figure 5: A radical transformation population of villages surrounding the city of Baneh

It seems that the desire to have second luxury home[2] in the heart of nature is very high wherever there is pristine nature and capital accumulation. The investment in luxury construction will increase in such regions. The same process have emerged in Kani Sour, Armardeh and Sourin regional axes in Baneh County. Commercial tourist and capital accumulation caused by border economy on the one hand, and mountainous pristine nature and the lack of legal overseeing on the construction outside urban areas on the other caused luxury informal space production. High-income people of Baneh have emerged some axes of luxury informal settlements around the city of Baneh by investment in second home construction informally that these axes are growing rapidly.

Figure 6: Sourin axis

Photographer: Author; September 2015 & Google Earth, Imagery date; 8/22/2011

Figure 7:Armardeh axis

Photographer: Author; April 2016.

Figure 8: Kani Sour axis

Photographer: Author; April 2016.

As a result, a classification of informal space production system can be resulted in three levels of space in the border region of Baneh:

1. High-income and poor residents whom are settled in informal settlements of Baneh city.

2. The growing villages around the city of Baneh with a distance of two kilometers affected by huge migration.

3. Informal production of luxury second home in some axes around the city of Baneh.

Figure 9: New typology of informal space production system in the spatial layers

Source: Authors, 2016.

Figure 10: A classification of informal space production system in the border region of Baneh in three levels of space

Source: Authors, 2016.

Shopping malls and commercial centers – the development of trade tourism in Baneh

The most important and obvious physical impact of the informal border economy on Baneh is the building of commercial centers and shopping malls. Until the 1990s, Baneh did not have any indoor shopping centers or malls. The main commercial district of the city was located at the main street in the downtown, forming a commercial axis which supplied the residents with products of daily and monthly needs. After the 1990s and especially from the 2000s, the commercial centers appeared. They contained at the beginning two- and three-story and recently several floors. According to Aminnejad’s research after 1996, ten large malls were constructed in seven years with 8950 sqm commercial area and 831 shops (Aminnejad, 2004: 63). Until 2013 54 malls had been constructed. These commercial centers are the places where the informal imported or smuggled goods are offered and sold. Those malls have a catchment area which is reaching far beyond the region.

Table 4: Number of shopping malls in Baneh

Source: Cultural, handicrafts and tourism Heritage of Baneh city, 2014.

Year

1996

2006

2007

2013

Number of malls

1

14

23

54

The vast construction of malls in a small city like Baneh is neither sponsored nor financially supported by the central or local government. More than 1.500.000 tourists visited Baneh city in the first four months of 2009 (Felegari, 2009). They had been mostly attracted by the offered illegal imported goods with low prices. According to the head of the Cultural, Handcrafts and Tourism Heritage authority of Baneh, in summer 2013 five thousands tourists visited Baneh daily, creating vast physical-spatial consequences.

Table 5: Tourists visiting Baneh city in the first 20 days/year

Source: Cultural, handicrafts and tourism Heritage of Baneh city, 2014.

Year

2005

2006

2007

2009

2011

2012

2014

Tourists

25 000

264 000

568 000

1 438 500

700 000

612 000

630 000

The tourist attentions are attracted by the number of services such as inns, hotels, restaurants, catering facilities and banks which form the physical texture of Baneh. Furthermore, due to the large number of tourists, hidden jobs in the tourism industry are created related to one and two-day rental dealer for inns, hotels or even residential homes licensed by the cultural Heritage of Baneh. The city is perceived, especially in holidays, as a space of tourists.

Figure 11: Tourists in the new commercial center of Baneh city

Source: Authors, 2016.

Shifting the commercial core of Baneh

The boom of trade as a consequence of the informal economy and commercial tourism has strengthened the economic heart of Baneh. The commercial centers expanded to the north and northwest of the city (Municipality Street, Shohada Street, and Jahad square). Multi-story buildings and shopping malls were constructed around the new commercial core of the city. The shifting commercial resulted in a concentration of administrative centers, banks, services and catering facilities around the new commercial core and increasing land and rental prices in this part of the city. Indirectly the concentration of commercial centers in the new core had stimulated further construction activities so that the phase one and two of Golshahr town and Azadegan town had been constructed in 1991 to 1996 and 1999 to 2003 (Aminejad, 2004: 63).

Figure 12: Shifting the commercial core of Baneh

Source: Authors, 2013.

The share of commercial, catering and roads land uses have increased in the time period 1996 to 2011. The commercial area of the city has increased from 29.000 sqm in 1996 to 245.000 sqm in 2011. It should be noted that this figure is only specified to the land use. New commercial centers are made in multi-story buildings. The commercial land use per capita can be calculated with approximately 8.16 sqm, by assuming three floors in the average building. This impressive allocation per head is noteworthy, since it is far above the normal allocation rates.

The analysis of land use changes underline the intensive increase of shopping malls during the new urban expansions of the city from 1996 to 2011. The share of new core land uses are shown in Figure 14. The comparison of the changes point out the reduction of residential land use and the growth of commercial land use in the new core. It seems that the constructions of shopping malls cased to the destruction of residential buildings in the new core of the city.

Figure 13: The land use growth rate in Baneh city (%) from 1996 to 2011.

Source: the statistics of Baneh city municipality, with author’s modifications, 2013.

Figure 14: The new core land use changes, 1996 - 2011

Source: the authors

The dynamic economic development of Baneh results beside the increase of commercial malls and urban sprawl in the growth of municipality revenue in toll and taxes. In 2003 the revenue just from the formal border bazaar in Siranband had been calculated with about 330.000 US Dollars. Additionally the municipality charged 2013 one dollar per car and entry for parking. If the revenues are used wisely, they can help to create needed infrastructure and enable an urban development which is not dependent on agriculture and industry.

Instability of economic development - the main challenge for the city growth

The lack of manufacturing and industrial factories and under developed agriculture due to the mountainous nature of the region, resulted in a high unemployment in Baneh. The lack of employment for young people have pushed most of them towards informal economic activities and smuggling, helping them to aggregate a good income. Still the income is unsecure and unstable, since the smuggling activities depend on the counter measures of the border police. If the policy of the border troops is oriented towards non-involvement income can be generated, if not the smuggled goods will be confiscated, erasing the income.

It can be summarized that the informal economic activities, which are the basis for the current economic growth and flourishing of the city and the region basically depend on the policies and decisions applied by the police commander and governmental managers. Furthermore, the ‘real’ exchange rate in Iran can have irreversible effects on informal activity of border residents. In fact, the current price of exchange, which is determined by the government, is lower than the real exchange price. The border residents buy the government cheap dollars and use them to buy goods across the border with the actual rate. If the government will decide to adapt the current exchange rate to the real exchange rate, smuggling and informal activities will generate no more profits for border residents. Due to the possibility of changing policies and decisions of government agents and local decision-making institutions, the current border economy is highly dependent on external factors and cannot be understood as sustainable. Therefore, strategic, long term planning has to be the basic requirements for the regional development of Baneh border County.

As before described a SWOT analysis on the region was performed. Table 6 summarize the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of Baneh. The table highlight the urban development based on commercial tourism and the consequences of the informal economy. Internal factors are those factors which can be influenced in Baneh, external factor are those challenges which are pressed upon the city.

In planning context, the analysis extract strategies that will exploit the strengths and opportunities such as formalizing informal trade by creating a free trade zone, a better management of infrastructure and the establishing of a sustainable local tax system. Strategies like supporting investment flows, developing the tourism and transport infrastructure help to overcome the weaknesses. Strategies which help to overcome threats are supporting the frontiersman in order to create unity and human dignity by the government and supporting the informal economy by a general review of regional development plans.

Table 6: SWOT Analysis

Source: the authors 2015

Conclusion

In this paper the impacts and consequences of informal economy and commercial tourism at the border are reviewed, analyzed and identified. As the result of the paper, informal settlements were classified in three layers and tow functional poles. Informal settlement spaces in the Baneh County are as follows: Luxury informal construction in regional axes as the first layer, rural sprawl and the growth of villages around Baneh city as the second layer and the growth of informal settlements areas in the city of Baneh as the third layer. These layers classified in to functional poles; the poor and the rich informal settlements.

Recent flourishing economic developments of Baneh city are considered as opportunity for a sustainable development but as well as threats which need more careful planning. The instability of this boom is the main challenge. The variable policies of national government and local decision making institutions concerning the border regions, fluctuations of exchange rate, loss of capital from the region, a lack of turnover management and more importantly a lack of defined processes on how to use this capital flow and spent it to create basic infrastructures of regional development will challenge the city of Baneh. In plans like the Regional Development Comprehensive Plan, Service description is set standard and pre-defined. This plan investigates different regions of the country with various characters by the same and inflexible approach. The basic economy of a region is always included into the Service description of the Regional Development Comprehensive Plan, but rarely pays attention to study and analyze the informal activities. The informal economy in the Baneh border region is the most important effective factor on regional economic activities. The Regional Development Comprehensive Plan and other similar plans do not have the capacity and appropriate approach to review and analyze such issues. The question remains, which approach should be followed by current and future regional planning systems? Thus, the modeling and analysis of specific areas with specific functions and challenges requires a deeper study and more realistic approaches. This process surely has specific problems and can be considered in studies of scientific community’s researchers. This article is an attempt and an example on how to investigate those issues and interactions in border regions. The approach can help us to modify or adjust new models and efficient development plans. At the end it should be asked which institutional agents and decision makers on local, regional and national level can propose appropriate solutions to achieve the objectives of regional development programs and deal with mentioned problems at the same time?

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1 "Census of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1385 (2006)"

2 Holiday Home

EUBORDERSCAPES - Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts

HENK VAN HOUTUM, JUSSI LAINE AND JAMES SCOTT

Bordering, Political Landscapes and Social Arenas: Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts in a post-Cold War World (EUBORDERSCAPES), financed though the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, was a four-year research project that tracked and interpreted conceptual change in the study of borders. As part of its basic methodology, the EUBORDERSCAPES studied the manner in which social, economic, cultural and geopolitical change, particularly since 1989, had influenced understandings of state borders. The objective included also an engagement with major paradigmatic shifts in scientific debate, and in particular in the social sciences. Building on the border studies state of debate, the project set out to capture the opened up possibilities for questioning the rationales behind everyday border-making by understanding borders as institutions, processes and symbols. From the outset, borders were taken not as givens, but understood to emerge through socio-political processes of border-making or bordering that take place within society.

The approach of the project emphasised the social significance and subjectivities of state borders while critically interrogating ‘objective’ categories of state territoriality and international relations. In progressing beyond the state of the art, EUBORDERSCAPES sought to demonstrate that important connections could be uncovered between borders as a ‘challenge’ to national as well as EU policies and borders as potential elements of political innovation through conceptual (re) framings of social, political, economic and cultural spaces. The project set out to provide a nuanced and critical re-reading and understanding of borders as resources in terms of the exercise of power, the management of conflict, cross-border co-operation, and the everyday negotiation of borders by ‘ordinary’ citizens and non-citizens. State borders were seen to reflect and thus help us interpret tensions as well as points of connection within intercultural and interstate relations. In a very direct manner, these tensions are reflected in the practical consequences of controlling borders through security policies, border and visa regimes and immigration policies at the same time that global interdependencies require more forceful international co-operation.

The EUBORDERSCAPES project studied evolving concepts of borders primarilily in three major ways: 1) as an important reflection of political, social and cultural change, 2) as an indicator of possible responses to this change and 3) in terms of the differences that state borders make in societal terms – to the opportunities, aspirations, dignity and recognition of groups and individuals. The project thus focused on the emerging epistemologies of how state borders are perceived, understood, experienced and exploited as political and social resources.

In performing empirical research EUBORDERSCAPES drew from various sources, such as key academic debates, political discourses, ethnographic research, media representations and shifting cultural understandings of the construction of national borders. The project aimed to shed light especially on tensions between national understandings in terms of demarcations based on ethnicity, citizenship, language and socio-cultural characteristics, etc., and broader supranational/transnational understandings which address borders as areas of contact between civilizations, religious and cultural spheres. In doing this, the project also attempted to illuminate the consequences of restrictive and securitized border regimes for interstate and intercultural dialogue.

Although formal state boundaries often serve as a reference point in discussions of territory, identity and Europe, the project did not focus only on the physical border itself but above all on its various representations. During the project, it became clear that the recent developments have deeply changed the power of borders by modifying the dialectical relation between the borders’ fixed nature and their constantly changing, fluid regime as well as by framing the impact of borders on human activities in a new way. Borders not only have a different meaning for different actors but are a manifestation of power relations in society at different scales. In particular, they reflect the normative power of international organizations, including the EU and the power asymmetry between states in different fields.

Shifting conceptions of borders

The project adopted a complex, multidimensional and dynamic concept of borders, encompassing not simply territorial delineation, but also political, social and cultural distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. We conceptualized borders as social and political constructs, open to change. The concept of ‘borderscapes’ plays and important role in our conceptualization of border for it expresses ‘the (geo)political and epistemic multidimensionality of the border, enabling a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuing regimes in the era of globalization and transnational flows’ (Brambilla 2015). Adopting the borderscapes viewpoint allowed us to view borders genealogically and to historicize border-making and particularly border-migration nexus. This led us to rethink Europe as an ‘ambiguous space’ reflecting its colonial and post-colonial experiences, but also to better understand the ambiguity that marks the EU’s engagement with its various neighbourhoods.

In our case studies, the understanding of borders as lines of division and barriers, both physical and mental, prevailed. However, borders’ dual nature, as both dividing lines and areas of contact, become also underlined. Understandably, the contact aspect of borders was more pronounced in more open and peaceful borders, where security concerns are not so strong. Beyond these general understanding, some regional differences could be noted across various case studies. The bordering processes over the Mediterranean was conceptualized as subject to dual spatial logic of cohesion and fracture with different approaches adopted towards ‘desired’ and ‘undesired’ migrants. It seems that the neighbourhood countries which agree to cooperate in policing and control of EU’s external borders and regulation of ‘undesired migrants’ are granted privileged access to the EU’s own debordered space. At the same time, undesired migrants, including economic migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the refugees from the Middle East face severe restrictions in their attempts to reach Europe. Morocco, which was granted ‘Advanced status’ in relations with EU in 2008, is a paradigmatic case in point, receiving funding and privileges in exchange for assistance in border control. A similar agreement is being negotiated with Turkey, in order to control forced migration from the Middle East.

In the post-Soviet cases, the divisive aspects of borders were emphasized and borders were perceived more as issue of state-building than of cultural divisions. In Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Ukraine the unjust and arbitrary nature of the current borders, dating back to early Soviet border-making, became emphasized. This further contributed to the perception of borders as fundamentally changeable. There is also differentiation among various borders: while some borders, such as border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, are completely sealed off, both politically and socially; other borders are seen as more friendly, open, and permeable. In the case of Russia, a differentiation between ‘good’ borders (those with ethnically and culturally close Slavic states) and ‘bad’ borders (with South Caucasus and Central Asian states, which are perceived as sources of violence, conflict, and migration) become evident.

Within the EU, the top-down cross-border cooperation projects have been effective to a greater or lesser extent in changing perceptions of borders from separation lines to areas of contact and exchange. This impact is especially visible between Central and Eastern European states such as Poland or Hungary on the one hand and ‘old’ EU members on the other. The sharp divisions of the Cold War have been replaced by more open, interactive views on borders. In all, borders can be conceptualized along two dimensions: dynamic (de-bordering and re-bordering) and structural, understood in the sense of Giddens’ structuration (enabling and constraining). These dimensions can be seen to produce four different modalities of bordering process: threat, obstacle, resource and protection.

Changes in the conceptions of borders

The changes in the conceptions of borders can be influenced by a wide variety of actors and various processes. Within the EU the most important changes were initiated by EU institutions and policies, namely, by the institutional debordering and programs aimed at promoting cross-border communication. But the external borders of the EU are more susceptible to geopolitical processes and changes. For example, the Eastern border of the EU between Poland and Ukraine/Russia has been affected by the geopolitical changes and the crisis in the Ukraine. Along the Southern borders, in the Mediterranean, our research teams noted struggles that consist of strategies of adaptation, contestation and resistance that challenge the externalization and the top-down geopolitical control of EU’s external borders, often perceived through the metaphor of ‘Fortress Europe’. Cultural production plays an important role in this process of contestation and challenge the top-down narratives and policies, such as for example the LampedusaFestival. The festival has become a counter-hegemonic borderscape in which migrants engage in performance and representation of their in-between identities which challenge notions of nation-state and citizenship.

In the post-Soviet states, the impact of the dissolution of Soviet Union still exerts influence on the understanding of borders. The conceptions of borders are undergoing continuing change in the region. In Ukraine, there is a shift from more state-centered (borders between states) to more nation-centred (borders between nations) perspectives. In the Caucasus, there is a process of re-orientation and differentiation among various borders; borders with neighbours who used to be part of the Soviet Union have become stronger and even closed (between Azerbaijan and Armenia); while former Soviet external borders have become more permeable (border with Iran for both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and border with Turkey for Azerbaijan).

The issue of sovereignty carries different weight in different regions. In Western Europe, for example, fears of loss of sovereignty to the EU do not play significant role in public discourses. However, in South-Eastern Europe, the problems of sovereignty are more acute, and the EU is blamed for failing to guarantee national sovereignty and territorial integrity. This is especially noticeable in the discourses emerging during the recent refugee and immigration crisis. The subsequent erection of fences against immigration from the (non-EU) Balkans and Middle East regions was commented in most national media as an act of re-establishing sovereignty and the national power to decide. In another Eastern European case, in Poland, the annexation of Crimea by Russia has raised concerns about security and national sovereignty. In the Southern neighbourhood, the issues of sovereignty are perceived in the context of de-colonization, and are strongly debated in the cases of Gibraltar and Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, who’s belonging to Spain is disputed by Morocco. Rather paradoxically, despite having territorial claims against Spain, Morocco nevertheless cooperates in controlling the EU’s border in these enclaves.

The issue of state sovereignty seems to be more acute in the former Soviet states. Russia, under the Presidency of Vladimir Putin, has begun to pursue a policy of multi-level and multi-speed reintegration of post-Soviet space, with most advanced form of such reintegration represented by the Eurasian Economic Union comprising Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Other initiatives include attempts to construct single energy space, including also Turkmenistan and Ukraine. However, what is seen in Russia as mutually beneficial forms of integration has often been perceived by the leaders of post-Soviet countries as constraints on their sovereignty, in both economic and political sense.

In the case of Israel and Palestine, political problems lie at the very heart of border conceptions. They affect notions of sovereignty because of conditions of occupation in which one side has both sovereignty and control, while the other lacks both. The construction of borders, both physical and perceptual based on fear of the other, strengthens notions of self-determination and political autonomy for both sides, leading to a desire for the construction of borders based on bilateral agreement rather than the current situation of imposed borders by the stronger side.

The issues of ethnic and national claims dominate border discourses as well as practices in the post-Soviet space. There is a number of ethno-political conflicts, dating to the late Soviet period, including conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, conflict over Transnistria in Moldova, conflicts over South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, and most recently the crisis over Crimea and Eastern parts of Ukraine. All of these conflicts have in common incongruity between formal borders and cultural and ethnic borders, which can be dated back to the Stalin’s administrative divisions as well as imperial history of Russian, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires.

Territorial claims can, however, be also found beyond post-Soviet space. Armenia has territorial claims towards Turkey; the disputes over Gibraltar and Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are other examples. Yet, within the EU, internal de-bordering has mostly had positive effect on such ethnic and national claims. In Gibraltar, the EU promoted cooperation and interaction with Spain. In Central and Eastern Europe, the debates about national minority rights have also become more moderate, for example, in the cases of Hungarian minority in Romania and Serbia. Overall, within the EU, geopolitical issues continue to play bigger role than ethnicity. In the Southern Mediterranean, the issue of ethnicity has less to do with national claims and more with cultural, and especially religious divides. The associations between European/Christian versus non-European (Middle Eastern or African/Muslim) are rather strong across the southern EU borders, from Morocco to Turkey. In Turkey, for example, it is widely believed that the EU is a ‘Christian club’ which would never accept Turkey as its part.

Ethnic and national claims are also closely connected to the issues of self-determination and political autonomy. For example, in all of the post-Soviet conflicts cited above the ethnic and national claims have self-determination, ultimately in the form of independent statehood, as their aim. However, there are also some issues pertaining to political autonomy that are not directly connected to ethnicity. The case in point is Russian exclave Kaliningrad region, which has no autonomy and thus is thoroughly dependent on the decision-making in the federal centre in Moscow. This is an important constraint on the region’s economic cooperation with the EU, and more specifically with Poland, with whom it shares a land border. The dependence on federal authorities often results in diversion of interests of local and federal authorities. In Eastern Europe, there are some concerns about loss of political autonomy to the EU. However, expectations of funding usually overrode these concerns.

Emerging problems affecting borders

Monitoring of media and observations in the case study countries suggest a general tendency towards fortification and securitization of the borders. There is a strong tendency in to medialize the refugee crisis, which spectacularizes and simplifies narratives of migration, and these narratives dominate the public sphere. Migration from Middle East is often perceived not as refugee crisis, but also as a potential source of criminality and especially terrorism for Europe. While these tendencies are strongest in the countries closest to the external borders of the EU, particularly Mediterranean and South-East Europe, there are also calls for fortification of internal EU borders, thus challenging the achievements of debordering process. This has to do less with the migration flows themselves, but more with the perceived unfairness of the proposed quota system, which is especially opposed in Central and Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria. In these countries the refugee crisis and the failure of the EU to deal with it have given rise to Euroscepticism and critique of liberalism and multi-culturalism.

In the Mediterranean, where the issues of refugees and more generally forced migration have been significant for a longer period of time, there is a more complex response. The inadequacy of EU’s response to migration from Mediterranean has long been observed in the region. The recent crisis on the one hand resulted in the tendency towards fortification and securitization of borders; however, because of the perils of the sea-crossing which results in many tragedies and loss of life, the humanitarian narrative is stronger here. The Mediterranean becomes the space where humanitarian and securitarian discourses collide, as migrant meets a smuggler. In this respect, the cooperation of the EU with its neighbours in controlling the borders is becoming even more important. The mechanism of joint control was previously already tested, with some success, in the case of Morocco, where Morocco has received privileged access to the EU and softening of the border regime, as well as financial assistance, in return for its cooperation in readmission of migrants. The current agreement on Middle Eastern migrants between the EU operates according to a similar logic. There is, however, strong opposition within EU towards the opening of borders with Turkey

The rise of radicalism and violence on the borders is also related to the refugee crisis, and more generally, to perceptions of migration. This is a widely used narrative, that can be found, for example, in the West bank, where Israel justifies building of a wall with the threat of terrorism and violence emanating from Palestine. Similar logic has been employed by Russia, which had closed its borders with Azerbaijan and Georgia due to fears of terrorist threat. However, radicalism and violence also rise on the other side of the borders. Currently in Europe in addition to fears of trafficking of goods and people, and of the terrorist threat spreading into Europe with the flow of refugees, there has also been radicalization of right-wing groups in Europe itself, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe.

Among the emerging geostrategic problems that affect borders the most important issue is the so-called Ukrainian crisis, following the annexation of Crimea and unfolding of violent conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The strongest impact has been on the Russian-Ukrainian border, outside of the areas of military conflict. There is considerable strengthening of border controls from the Ukrainian side, restrictions on crossing the border by Russian men, and these actions are in contrast with the previous practices of open border that used to be crossed on foot. The perceptions of this process of fortification in Ukraine depend on the geo-political orientations. The pro-Russian citizens do not perceive the border as a source of threat, while the pro-Ukrainian tend to support the fortification. The crisis has also affected border with Poland: there is decreased border traffic between Poland and Russia, while at the same time the traffic between Poland and Ukraine increased. Furthermore, the perception of threat emanating from Russia has given rise to calls to abolish the visa-free regime with Russia. Similar concerns with security were expressed in Finland, where the Ukrainian crisis was interpreted as a collapse of multi-polar world, and the Finnish-Russian border became seen not simply as EU’s external border, but as a civilizational boundary between the West and Russia.

Further away from Russia’s borders, in Bulgaria, the Ukrainian crisis led to a separation of discourses into pro-Russian and pro-EU strands, and a raising awareness of Bulgaria’s importance in the new geopolitical context. In Germany, the response was more mixed, and changed considerably over time. In the beginning, it was perceived as an outcome of intervention of multitude of players, including the US and the EU, and only after unfolding of conflict in Donetsk the discourses shifted towards the confrontation between ‘the West’ and Putin. These interpretations pointed to a new perception of Ukraine’s border as an external border of the EU, and can thus be taken as a case of rebordering from a distance. The crisis also had an indirect impact on borders in post-Soviet space. Following the Ukrainian crisis, Armenia and Georgia have found themselves separated by new division line, as Armenia joined Eurasian Economic Union, and Georgia reaffirmed its integration with the EU. This has potential of complicating relations between the two neighbouring countries

Borders as Constructions

Different patterns of daily practices of cross-border interaction could be observed in different regions. In Western Europe, which constitutes a debordered core area, open borders are routinized and seen as ‘business as usual’. However, considerable differences continue to exist between everyday practices and official discourses. For example, in Geneva and in Lille local authorities embraced EU debordering, while ignoring anti-EU sentiments on the ground. In the case of UK-Ireland border, an active reconceptualization of a national border as an EU border is evident. Both national and local media downplay the role of the EU and interpret the developments as part of the UK-Ireland peace process or unification of Ireland, thus re-nationalising the European impact on the border.

One common observation from a variety of case studies is that formal debordering, i.e. opening of borders, implementation of visa-free regimes, and promoting of cross-border cooperation, does not necessarily lead to removal of social borders or mental barriers. Language differences play important role in perpetuating these mental barriers. This has been observed in cases as different as German-Polish and Polish-Russian border and the metropolitan area of Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai. The mental barriers are deconstructed only in relatively small sectors of population, largely among bilingual young professionals. In the case of more conflictual and closed borders, one of the interesting findings has been the lack of understanding of similarity between border practices and border narratives on different sides of the border. The images of threat and fear exist on both sides of the border, and in fact mirror each other. This is also true for social borders in ethnic/migrant enclaves that exist in urban and metropolitan areas.

The cross-border interactions are often asymmetrical. While both Polish and Russian citizens frequently cross the border in Kaliningrad region, Russians do so much more frequently, and the main goal for them is shopping for all kinds of consumer goods, which are cheaper on the Polish side of the border. Polish citizens cross the border to buy gasoline, which is cheaper in Russia. The interaction across Polish-Ukrainian border is similarly asymmetrical, with Ukrainians crossing mostly for reasons of work and study, while Polish visit Ukraine for short ‘sentimental vacations’. Similar process is taking place in German-Polish border, which is crossed much more frequently by the Poles.

Everyday experiences of borders vary greatly according to various groups of population. Younger people in Central and Eastern Europe tend to be more active in cross-border cooperation and interaction, while mental barriers remain stronger amongst older people. Similar dynamic was observed in Italian-Tunisian border, where the second generation of Tunisian migrants have multiple and hybrid Arab/Italian identities. More business oriented persons in all our case studies had been active in exploiting the economic opportunities presented by the border. Civil society, then, was the most active in cases where it was supported by the EU or local authorities. In the absence of such support, cross-border activities were fading away, as was the case with Russian-Ukrainian border region Slobozhanschina.

In terms of narrative construction, the opening of the borders and increased interaction does lead to more multi-vocal perspective and can help to change perception of borders from division lines into areas of contact. However, care must be taken not to silence those voices that oppose debordering. This is especially relevant in the core debordered area of Western Europe, where debordering has become a dominant discourse. Yet, populations often resist that and emphasize the significance of national belonging, even as they engage in cross-border activities. An important aspect of cross-border interaction has been the communication via various technological means, without physically crossing of border. While this form of interaction is rarely considered in border studies, our research, especially in the Polish-Ukrainian case, demonstrated that technology can be a powerful tool in reducing the separating effects of borders. For Ukrainian students in Poland such communication, which can be very frequent and regular, has been crucial in retaining contacts with their families.

Daily experiences of border are also affected by the interpretation of crisis situations. The constraints imposed on interaction across Ukrainian-Russian border and the decrease in traffic across Russian-Polish border are some of the examples. In the Mediterranean, Ukrainian crisis had little impact; however, the events of the Arab spring affected border interaction considerably, as the capacity of Libya and Tunisia in controlling their borders was undermined. At the level of discourses and narratives, they play an important role in medializing crisis situation, i.e. refugee problems. Cultural production such as literary works, autobiographies, art, can both contribute to the simplified hegemonic media discourses or challenge it by creating alternative, counter-hegemonic narratives and imaginaries.

Linkages between Traditional and Post-Traditional Borders

While our original hypothesis suggested a binary opposition between traditional (geopolitical) and post-traditional (everyday practices) understandings of borders, our research suggested more of a mutual infiltration of everyday practices with geopolitical imaginaries and hierarchical practices of control. Consequently, it is more relevant to speak not of the continuum between the two poles, but rather of the plurivocality of experiences of the border. The concept of borderscapes that we employ is the main conceptual tool that links traditional and post-traditional notions of borders.

Gender can play an important role in structuring experiences of borders. This is especially the case regarding migration. At the Italian-Tunisian border, where temporary seasonal migration of fishing workers from Tunisia was replaced by more permanent immigration following the restrictions on migration introduced with Martelli law of 1990. While the seasonal migrants were generally male, more permanent migrants brought their families with them. In some cases, the constructed symbolic borders between femininities and masculinities intersected with cultural and geopolitical borders. This became especially visible in the narratives of immigrant LGBT resistance to established norms in host and diasporic communities as well as in the narratives of inter-generational conflict focusing on patriarchal honour cultures, arranged marriages, FGM or cross-cultural families. From the analysis of men’s and women’s narratives of migration we can conclude that masculinity and femininity generate different experiences of the border, and often the role of family and relationality may be more easily addressed in women-authored narratives of border and crossing. The trope of home, however, is central to migrant narratives more generally and has a particular role in the making of diasporic identity and migrant subjectivity – as our analysis of the role of food in autobiographical writing shows, it is a link with the past and serves as a means to reconstruct and maintain ethnic identity.

Another important dimension that emerged from our fieldwork was the role of age in the experience border. This is especially true in the Central and Eastern Europe and in former Soviet Union, where the legacies of Cold War borders are felt more strongly by the older generation. In the German-Polish border, young people were much more active in cross-border interaction, and they also felt themselves more ‘European’. Similar dynamic was observed along Poland’s border with Ukraine and Russia. At the same time, within the former Soviet Union, older generations had particularly difficult time with accepting the strengthening of what used to be fully open administrative borders between Soviet republics. Although the experiences of such closures were different, from practically open, until recently, border between Russia and Ukraine to closed border between Armenia and Azerbaijan, many older people remained nostalgic about the free travel within Soviet Union. In Mediterranean, intergenerational differences played an important role in the strategies of adaptation and identity construction. Unlike the generation of their parents, second generation Tunisian migrants in Sicily had developed multiple identities and belonging to both Italian and Tunisian cultures.

One area where the tension between traditional and post-traditional borders was the most obvious was migration. The experiences of migration were extremely varied in different cases. In Polish-German border, there has been a change from long-term emigration (from Poland to Germany) to a more temporary, short term travel for work, business and leisure. The trend was opposite at the Polish-Ukrainian border: from short term travel towards long-term migration for work or to study. Ukrainians were much more active in this migration flow than the Poles. Another aspect of the tension between geopolitics and everyday practices was the petty trade of military gear on the Polish-Ukrainian border – whereby a peaceful border gets temporarily transformed into an informal militarized zone. There has also been changes in migration between Russia and Poland. While the overall traffic has decreased following the geopolitical changes of the crisis in Ukraine, travel for shopping still continues and has even increased. At the same time, there has been a trend for students from Kaliningrad to study in Poland. Studying in Poland is often preferred to local university in Kaliningrad, while at the same time it is cheaper than studying in Moscow or St. Petersburg. In the Mediterranean, the practices of securitization and fortification reflect the continuing importance of traditional, geopolitical understanding of borders. The practices of control and surveillance from a distance and outsourcing of border control functions to North African states suggests shifts in traditional forms of border control.

In the CEE region, very little semblance of what might be called “cosmopolitan” cross border or regional identities have not materialized. Political attempts to implement ‘Europeanized’ identities were usually met with local resistance, and local identities became shaped by national sense of belonging. The only exception we observed was young cultural and functional elites, who underlined the significance of cross-border cooperation and bi-lingual education, creating thus small local enclaves of cosmopolitanism. However, the existence of ethnic kinship or cultural similarity in the border regions certainly helped to soften borders and make them more permeable. This, for example was the case in Polish-Ukrainian border. New immigrants living on the border stressed their in-betweenness in relation to the cultures in which they are immersed, which can be considered as a form of border identity.

In the post-Soviet space, Russia has stressed the importance of ‘compatriots’ and ‘Russian speaking’ people, who continue to live in the countries of former Soviet Union. This group plays important role in the construction of the concept of ‘Russian world’ (Russkii Mir), an association of all those who feel connected to Russian culture regardless of their citizenship. The repercussions of this identity are far-reaching, as the concept of Russkii Mir is also a cornerstone of Russian foreign policy. The importance of this identity can be further observed in the case of Eastern Ukraine, and Transnistria where pro-Russian orientations continue to shape perceptions of borders, even in the context of military conflict.

With regards to conflict amelioration, the EU’s role at the Ireland-UK border as well as in Gibraltar suggests a positive impact in increasing in daily interaction on the peace process. In Ireland, the opening of the EU border had been interpreted as a part of UK-Ireland peace process. Consequently, there are some expectations that cross-border interaction and the EU can have positive impact on conflicts in former Soviet Union, in particular, Transnistria and Karabakh. However, even in the case of the most open of the post-Soviet conflict borders, in Transnistria, the regular cross-border interaction has not led to any progress in the resolution of political conflict.

Top-down Europeanization and cross-border cooperation initiatives have had some impact, although long-term effect of such policies in the absence of EU funding remains questionable. In Central and Eastern Europe, these top-down policies were partially resisted by both elites, who sought to protect their privileges, and populations, who opposed the encroachment on their understanding of ethnicity and nationalism. In this region the top-down debordering quickly turned into Euroscepticism and short-term re-bordering with the onset of refugee and Ukrainian crises. In some cases, such as Russian-Ukrainian Slobozhanschina Euroregion as well as cross-border cooperation projects in the Russian-Finnish border, the withdrawal of funding at the end of the programmes have significantly undermined cooperation activities. However, in Kaliningrad region, the cooperation continues with the involvement of local authorities, business people and populations, without significant support from the EU. In the core debordered area in the Western Europe, despite well developed interaction, the attitudes towards open borders remain ambivalent. In metropolitan border areas, such as Greater Geneva and Lille-Kortjik-Tournai, despite high level of functional integration that is supported by political and business elites, populist movements call for rebordering.

Proximity to borders can also have an effect on cultural activities. Cross-border cooperation initiatives often involve various cultural events, festivals, fairs, etc. These activities usually take place at more peaceful borders, and can give rise to long-term partnership and collaboration. This, for example, has been the case in the contemporary art scene in north-west Russia. However, border art projects are also highly vulnerable to the geopolitical changes. Thus, in the Russian case, with the strengthening of state control, the funding from Scandinavian countries, which used to sustain this collaboration, has become unwelcome, and the artists who were engaged in this collaboration have been marginalized as ‘foreign agents’. A new border between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has been drawn.

Policy Options and Scenarios

In considering future developments and possible policy responses it is important to distinguish between various roles that the EU plays in different borderscapes, as well as different border context. The first line of distinction is between internal and external borders. Within the EU borders, the EU has played a role of mastermind of integration, and it has been relatively successful. However as reflected above, these successes have not been uniform and there are important differences between the core debordered area of Western Europe and the borders with/between newer EU members in Central and Eastern Europe. EU’s top-down policies and initiatives were able to engineer debordering and promote interaction across national borders, not least by mobilizing local civil society. In some cases, such as for example at the German-Polish border, the imaginaries of top-down EU domination of the border interaction have been replaced by imaginaries of autonomy and self-reliance.

At the same time, EU should take more seriously the feelings of those who resist debordering and emphasize their national, as opposed to European, belonging. Silencing of these alternative discourses and neglect of such feeling has potential of destabilizing the process of debordering and can lead to a rise of xenophobic discourses and movements, even in rather prosperous and well integrated areas such as Greater Geneva. Whatever the level of de-bordering and related functional integration, national borders remain strong markers of identity and difference, either in a virtual or actual sense. The instrumental approaches to cross-border cooperation (e.g., planning of transportation infrastructures, enhancing labour market integration, resolving negative externalities, etc.) that dominate current initiatives do not address the resurgence of national and protective re-bordering claims and are therefore not sufficient in order to promote a sustained cross-border integration. Confronted with a relative deterritorialization, there is a need to recode the state border as an object of recognition able to promote a shared sense of place and belonging

At the external borders, EU’s policies have been far less successful. In many cases, such as in the Mediterranean, EU’s response to migration across the sea has been regularly described as inadequate. The policy of control and surveillance from a distance and outsourcing of policing of EU’s borders to neighbouring countries such as Morocco and Turkey has failed to resolve the problems of migration. In the Mediterranean therefore there is a need, even an urgency, for a more committed EU, which would not only promote the Eurocentric vision but would become more attentive to the local contexts and local problems. Such a policy shift would also require broadening the spectrum of actors involved, grasping the dialogic nature of bordering processes and imaginaries, as well as the tension between institutional formal modes of political agency and social non-formal modes of agency. The currently proposed mechanism of immigration quotas is also inadequate for resolving the refugee crisis. The EU needs to acknowledge that the current arrangement is asymmetric and puts unjustly heavy burden on peripheral states. There is a need for a balanced concept that redistributes costs, and puts security and the humanitarian aspects of migration into a balanced perspective.

The EU’s geopolitical involvement in Eastern neighbourhood, particularly in Ukraine, has been also a controversial issue with greatly differentiated responses across the EU and in the post-Soviet space. The possible scenarios as well as policy recommendations that emerge from the differently positioned actors in this regard are inevitably complex and sometimes contradictory. In the South-East Europe this involvement has led to rising Euroscepticism, and thus threatens still fragile process of European integration. Along the Eastern borders of the EU fears of getting involved in an international conflict and concerns for the security of national borders has been growing, and in our fieldwork was felt particularly strongly in Poland. The considerations for the stability of the European integration project Eastern Europe in the context of an ongoing military conflict without a solution in a foreseeable future suggest the need to reduce geopolitical activities in the region as much as possible.

However, things look very different from the other side of the EU border. Particularly, in Ukraine, which has been the site of the military conflict as well as is at the core of EU/Russia’s tense relations, greater engagement of the EU is sought and recommended. The trajectory of Ukraine’s increasing integration with the EU, most recently through an Association Agreement, suggests a need for a more comprehensive EU policy towards this country. In particular, it is noted that EU’s relations with its Eastern Neighbourhood should be more differentiated and involve close interaction between those countries that have moved further in the process of association with the EU, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. However, in the current geopolitical context such integration trajectory leads to increasing tensions with Russia, which in turn lead to rising security concerns in the neighbourhood. Ukraine seeks EU’s greater commitment to its own security; with particular regards to the borders this commitment is envisioned as EU’s assistance, technical and financial, in strengthening Ukraine’s borders with its neighbours.

At the same time, EU has important, and yet not fully tapped potential in conflict resolution. The success of EU’s engagement in Northern Ireland and in Gibraltar, which helped to increase interaction and cooperation of conflicting sides serves as a good example for other conflicts in the region. From Palestine to Transnistria to Nagorno-Karabakh EU is perceived as an honest broker and its mediation in the conflicts there is perceived as having potentially positive impacts. However, at least in the post-Soviet space, such involvement would also require collaboration with Russia, which is difficult to achieve in the current context.

Finally, one area where EU’s involvement has been highly effective is support of civil society, both within the EU and in the neighbourhood. Although the impacts of this support may be less obvious and less immediate, they can have significant long-term effects in a variety of contexts, from conflict amelioration to cultural production. This policy recommendation is also related to the call for a more committed EU above and the engaging of wider range of actors.

In the sphere of cultural production, the EU can facilitate the role of cultural production in despectacularizing narratives of border crises presented in the media by journalists and politicians. ‘Slow media’, such as literature and film, can bring more wide-ranging narratives into public debate, reducing the impact of simplified media discourses. The EU can also facilitate creative and ethical ways of making individual experiences of border-crossing accessible in the public sphere. The range of such experiences should not be limited only to border-crossers, but should include wider range of actors, such as bureaucrats, police and local residents. Cultural production can suggest strategies for an ethics of representation (avoiding spectacle, victimization and surveillance) when dealing with border-crossings. Ethical considerations include facilitating sharing of the sensible without risk to actants. It is also important to Explore through further research the memory and utopia dimension of migrant border-crossing, including collective and individual memories of migration and of countries of origin.

Concluding Observations

Traditional border studies have been characterized by a fixation with states and territories and the notion that borders are physical outcomes of political, social and/or economic processes. The world seen in this way is compartmentalized into state shapes and territories which are fixed, lacking internal fluidity. Accordingly, international relations take place between sovereign governments as determined by Westphalian norms. Contemporary border research debate clearly reflects more general shifts away from spatial fixity. According to this way of thinking borders are connected and/or divided by transitional spaces where a perceived set of unifying attributes and features is gradually replaced by another one. Natural borders are a result of humans characterising spaces as natural areas. Furthermore, political boundaries rarely match ethnic, linguistic and cultural boundaries. In this way, the world political map showing lines separating container boxes is largely a representation of political elites, because many people do not recognize or associate themselves with such ossified and fixed divisions (van Houtum 2005).

There are various levels of actors involved in the border-making processes. These can be conceptualized as institutional vs interpersonal levels, or hierarchically, involving supranational, national, and local levels. The supranational level is represented most obviously by the EU, with its policies of de-bordering within the Union, cross-border cooperation initiatives both within the EU and with the neighbourhood, and cooperation with neighbourhood countries in securitizing EU’s external borders. Furthermore, several types of actors can be identified, including authorities, civil society organizations, entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens. These actors can also operate on different levels, including for example national and local authorities, and local vs national and international civil society organizations. The interests and practices of different actors of the border-making process can sometimes complement or be at odds with each other. Thus, the EU projects often support civil society organizations who are willing to engage in cross-border cooperation. In Swiss-French case, while both the political and business elites have very positive views about open border, some groups of population and some populist movements have been against this. In Russian exclave Kaliningrad region, local authorities, business people, and population alike support softening and opening of the border with Poland, while federal authorities in Moscow are more concerned with issues of state and border security.

The work of the EUBORDERSCAPES consortium suggests that more traditional concepts of border-making can be expanded to include more effectively the role social imaginaries; borderscapes are social/political panoramas that emerge around border contexts and that connect the realm of high politics with that of communities and individuals who are affected by and negotiate the EU’s Mediterranean borders. As an example of the scientific impact of EUBORDERSCAPES we suggest developing the borderscape concept as a way of thinking about the border and bordering processes not only on the border, but also beyond the line of the border, beyond the border as a place, beyond the landscape through which the border runs, and beyond borderlands with their territorial contiguities to the border.

The borderscape functions along the lines of Appadurai’s (1990) ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, etc. These terms help deal with the ‘global cultural flow[s]’ and the ‘imagined worlds’ in which people live. As such the borderscape is a flexible concept, following interweaving flows and connections, and an inclusive concept not necessarily limited by any clear spatial border. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (2007, x.) privilege the concept of the borderscape as indicating ‘the complexity and vitality of, and at, the border’, emphasising its status as a landscape of resistance to the simple exploitation of territory by the nation-state. The fact that the borderscape is partially deterritorialized, ‘not contained in a specific space’ (Ibid., xxviii.), and more wide-ranging in its material practices of demarcation than any specific borderline of territorial sovereignty, gives the borderscape an inherent resistance to state demarcation.

As borderscapes, borders in fact cannot be reduced to instruments of terms of inclusion/exclusion as conveyed by metaphors such as Fortress Europe but must be expanded to include what is happening every day at the EU’s external borders as reflected in the agency of migrants. What emerges are borders as fields in which processes of traversing and crossing meet those of reinforcement and blocking and in which borders are produced by social institutions and migration as a social force. The borderscapes perspective therefore transcends the panoptic gaze implicit in border spectacles as it follows the discursive and performative construction of migration, refugee crises and their consequences in a wider socio-spatial context. This perspective also goes beyond Eurocentrism because migrants and refugees become actors and protagonists of change as well as persons subject to multiple forms of victimization. Different artistic expressions of borders and border crossings can be regarded as expressions of resistance to official understandings of EU southern frontier and as local politics of a new in-between identity that dwells in a borderscape where the very concepts of citizenship and Nation-State are questioned. The bordering process involves various individuals, groups, and institutions on state and local levels. Indeed, in modern nationalism, the power of central state actors cannot function fully without the compliance of larger populations. The borderscape adds to bordering the spatial and sensible components of power. To investigate the borderscape is to return to the question of who decides where the border is going to be and what it will mean.

References

Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture & Society 7/2-3 (1990) pp. 296–297.

Brambilla, C. (2015) Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept. Geopolitics 20(1): 14-34.

Houtum, H. van (2005) ‘The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries’, Geopolitics, 10(4): 672–79.

Rajaram, P.K. and C. Grundy-Warr (2007) Introduction. In: PK Rajaram and C Grundy-Warr

(eds) Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp ix-xl.

Changing the racialized ‘common sense’ of everyday bordering

NIRA YUVAL-DAVIS, GEORGIE WEMYSS, AND KATHRYN CASSIDY[1]

The out-sourcing of border-guarding is not (just) going to paid expert agencies but is imposed as part of the unpaid daily citizenship duties of untrained people in Britain

Last year, a meeting took place in the British House of Commons which sought to highlight some of the less discussed aspects[2] of the UK’s 2014 Immigration Act and the 2015-16 Immigration Bill. One of the speakers on the panel[3], the long-serving Liberal Democrat peer, Baroness Sally Hamwee, described the latter as “the nastiest bill I’ve ever come across”.

Indeed, the Bill creates a new offence of illegal working and gives immigration officials wide-ranging powers to seize property and earnings, to close down businesses and to enter and search properties. Its impact will be felt widely on small businesses such as late-night takeaways and off licences, which may be less able than larger organisations to deal with the additional burden of carrying out and recording frequent and complex immigration checks.

The Bill makes it a criminal offence to be found working without the right papers, punishable by a prison sentence of up to 12 months and an unlimited fine. It also withdraws support[4] from failed asylum seekers with children who currently get £5 per day and accommodation.

Campaigners warn the Bill will lead to discrimination against minorities, encourage exploitation of migrant workers by removing safeguards and help create an underclass of people removed from the protection of the law.

One of the most controversial aspects of the legislation is the obligation placed on landlords to verify the immigration status of tenants. Landlords across the country will  be liable for a fine or imprisonment for up to five years if they let out a property to a migrant without the ‘right to rent’, instead of just a fine as set out in the 2014 Immigration Act. In some circumstances, landlords will be guilty of an offence even if that migrant is not the tenant named on the lease but someone staying in the property. There is already evidence that in order to avoid risk of prosecution, landlords are discriminating against tenants who appear ‘foreign’[5].

However, this is just one aspect of the social and political processes that these bills embody and which are threatening to transform British society. This will become a society in which virtually everyone is required to become (untrained and unpaid) border-guards while large sections of the population (especially BAME) are suspected of being illegal (or, at least, illegitimate) border-crossers.

This applies to virtually all spheres of social life, not just housing: employment, education, health, banking – even driving. And although the UK is at the forefront of these developments, this is a phenomenon which is spreading all over Europe and globally.

Out-sourcing the external border

In this article, we argue that rather than reinforcing citizens’ security, everyday bordering has become the major mechanism of controlling diversity and (‘common sense’ populist) discourses on diversity. We also link this directly to neo-liberal out-sourcing of external and internal borders.

Academics, including Ruben Andersson, activists such as Don Flynn and our own research in London, Dover and Calais all testify to how the multi-scalar out-sourcing of border-making and border control to private businesses and ordinary citizens is a practice that links both external and internal border regimes.  Andersson has referred to the boom this has created for private sector firms as an ‘illegality industry’, in which public funds are ploughed into developing further means by which to strengthen external borders.

The £830 million spent by the UK Home Office on the failing e-borders scheme[6] meant to collect and analyse data on everyone travelling to and from the UK is just one British example. Furthermore, out-sourcing often involves partnerships with regimes  whose treatment of their own citizens falls well below that which we might expect of partner states. Over the last two decades there have been clear shifts in policy, as European nations and the EU itself have attempted to foist the job of securing their borders onto neighbours. Out-sourcing territorial borders involves the transfer of funds and when faced with challenges from neighbouring states about the impact of maintaining such border regimes, those states respond by allocating more resources or funds to the existing arrangement.

The detail of each border differs but our research at the juxtaposed border controls in Calais, and the experience of humanitarian organizations such as Doctors of the World demonstrate the failure of the out-sourcing of the UK border to France. The placing and strengthening of the UK border in France, has resulted in thousands of increasingly desperate people existing in a ‘camp’ that had it been anywhere else in the world, as Leigh Dayton said, would have led to televised fundraising appeals.

Out-sourcing the internal border

At the same time as we have seen the burgeoning of ‘out-sourced’ border-making on external borders, we have seen the emergence of ‘everyday border-guards’ as the administration of the internal borders is made the responsibility of ordinary citizens.

These processes of internalization reflect an acceptance that territorial border securitization is an impossibility for any modern state. As Don Flynn from Migrant Right’s Network argues[7], this approach began in the 1990s in the UK, but has undergone a process of intensification since the 2014 Immigration Act. Under this legislation and the 2015-16 Immigration Bill, the UK government has sought to extend the ‘hostile environment’ which will make life in the UK for undocumented migrants and those without the right to work untenable.

It criminalizes the everyday life of unauthorized workers by creating offences for ‘illegal working’, ‘driving when unlawfully present in the UK’ and depriving them of the ‘right to rent’.

Its impacts are wide-ranging and stretch far beyond the lives of undocumented migrants, as in spite of new resources given to Home Office Immigration Enforcement teams, the main burden for administering the new legislation falls on people across the UK. Landlords, employers, bank employees, education and health care professionals have become responsible for checking the immigration status of their tenants, employees, students and patients. The 2015-16 Immigration Bill proposes larger fines and up to 5-year prison terms for employers and landlords who do not comply with their border-guard roles. Activists from housing, health and migrant support organisations have demonstrated how these internal bordering regimes that encourage suspicion within communities and are supported by fears of prosecution are already leading to increasing  everyday racism through landlords and health workers refusing to rent to, employ or treat people with complex immigration status or who they perceive as ‘foreign’.

Unless we return the border to the margins of our society and lives rather than allowing it to become a more and more dominant feature of our everyday, our lives will become more precarious, more conflictual and more vulnerable to extremist ideologies of all sides.

Neo-liberal ideologies demand the minimization of the state and the privatisation of more and more agencies of what used to be the welfare state. However, in the case of the 2014 Immigration Act and 2015-2016 Bill, the out-sourcing of border-guarding is not (just) going to paid expert agencies but are imposed as part of the unpaid daily citizenship duties of people in Britain.

When (usually male) citizens of a state are required to serve in their country’s militaries as part of their citizenship duties they are given professional training and are not criminalised for failing to hit the enemy unless proven to be doing so willfully. The new immigration legislation imposes border-guard duties with no such training and with no regard to ability or motivation of those who fail in their duties.

Concluding remarks

As was pointed out to us in the parliamentary meeting, it’s most probably too late now to mobilize opposition to the current Immigration Bill, although hopefully some campaigning organizations will mount some legal challenges to the more draconian aspects of the Act as it is rolled out. However, our task is much more pervasive and long term. It is to deconstruct the ‘naturalized’ common sense that legitimizes such legislation and practices and which are threatening to undermine not just the civil liberties of all the people living in Britain but also the convivial multi-ethnic multi-cultural society which has been one of the best aspects of life in the UK, especially in its metropolitan centres.

1 This contribution is based on a short essay published in Open Democracy, 17 February 2016. URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/wfd/francesco-ragazzi-rosemary-bechler/policed-multiculturalism-and-predicting-disaster (Last download: 15-12-2016)

2 Everyday Borders (VIMEO video). URL: https://vimeo.com/126315982 (Last download: 15-12-2016)

3 Changing the racialized ‘common sense’ of everyday bordering (Open Democracy). URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/nira-yuval-davis-georgie-wemyss-kathryn-cassidy/changing-racialized-common-sense-of-everyday-bord#_ftn1 (Last download: 15-12-2016)

4 Immigration Bill (Public Bill Committee) URL: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmpublic/immigration/memo/ib27.htm (Last download: 15-12-2016)

5 Right to Rent Checks Result In Discrimination Against Those Who Appear ‘Foreign’ (JCWI Blog). URL: https://www.jcwi.org.uk/blog/2015/09/03/right-rent-checks-result-discrimination-against-those-who-appear-’foreign’ (Last download: 15-12-2016)

6 Home Office criticised over £830m ’failed’ borders scheme (BBC News). URL: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34988913 (Last download: 15-12-2016)

7 Frontier anxiety: Living with the stress of the everyday border (MRN Blog). URL: http://www.migrantsrights.org.uk/blog/2015/11/frontier-anxiety-living-stress-everyday-border (Last download: 15-12-2016)

How ‘Brexit’ Could Destabilise the Irish Peace Process

CATHAL MCCALL[1]

The campaign for the UK to leave the EU is is partly invigorated by concerns – and perhaps insecurities – relating to EU workers’ freedom of movement.  A central element of the “Brexit” campaign seeks to prevent the movement of unwanted “outsiders” to the UK, and as such, it focuses our attention on clear, hard borders, replete with all the attendant physical manifestations: customs posts, watchtowers, patrols, and, if needs be, razor wire fences and walls.

The problem is that Britain only shares one land border with with another state: that with the Republic of Ireland. For some British politicians there are no obvious objections to hardening the Irish border. For example, Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall has remarked, “if there’s a hard [Irish] border, there’s a hard border. I wouldn’t have a problem if there was one”. Finding someone who shares that view in Ireland is a hard task, however.

Three decades ago, as the Troubles trudged remorselessly on, a leading unionist politician called for the Irish border to be electric fenced. Nowadays, the politician in question, Peter Robinson, is leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, First Minister of Northern Ireland and unequivocally committed to sharing power with Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, and to cross-border cooperation on the island of Ireland. Such cooperation was an integral element of the 1998 Agreement that transformed Northern Ireland from a conflict society to a peacebuilding one. Vitally, it requires a soft, open Irish border.

The launch of the Single Market in 1992 and the onset of the Irish Peace Process in 1994 meant that Irish border customs posts and military checkpoints were surplus to requirements. Subsequently, secondary cross-border roads were re-opened and militarised sections of the border region were gradually scaled back through the dismantling of mountain top watchtowers and the closure of heavily fortified security bases. The result is that the physical manifestation of the Irish border itself is difficult to discern: you have to be looking for it to see it.

This softening of the Irish border has involved de-emphasising state sovereignty and overcoming borders as barriers to communication, mobility, and trade – as embodied in the process of Europeanisation and the 1998 Agreement. That agreement created a cross-border institutional infrastructure comprising the North South Ministerial Council, which brings together ministers from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (including unionist ministers), and a number of North South Implementation Bodies. It was bolstered by the eventual removal of the British border security regime located primarily in South Armagh, known to some as “bandit country”.

After two decades of an open border and cross-border peacebuilding – much of it funded by the EU through its Peace programmes – one might reasonably anticipate that, in the event of “Brexit”, the UK government would be alive to the dangers for the Irish peace process of reintroducing a border security regime. Indeed, any such hardening of the border would be interpreted by Irish nationalists and republicans as an abrogation of terms established in the 1998 Agreement, endorsed through simultaneous referenda in the North and South, and made law in the British-Irish Agreement Act (1999). That position would likely be supported by all of the main non-unionist political parties on the island of Ireland.

Few British Eurosceptics seem to be aware of how fulfilling their aim in relations with the EU could reignite a conflict much closer to home. They do not take the Irish peace process into account, either because they can’t see it or don’t want to see it. In the absence of de facto control over the borders of the Republic of Ireland through a “British Isles” border security regime, it does not seem plausible that a post-Brexit Conservative government could entertain the continuation of an open Irish border.

Just as worryingly, should the UK Government secure satisfactory opt-outs on freedom of movement in its negotiations with the EU, a hard border is still required to keep out those unwanted “outsiders”. If this scenario comes to pass, Prime Minister David Cameron may well find that his “best of both worlds” for Britain actually hands the island of Ireland the worst of all possible worlds.

To Remain or Leave? Northern Ireland and the EU Referendum

The UK government is committed to holding a referendum before the end of 2017 on whether the United Kingdom should remain in or leave the European Union (EU). Voters will be motivated by a range of issues, many of which are being openly debated, particularly in the media, among politicians and by the various campaigning groups that now exist.

Regionally, in Northern Ireland, the debate on whether to vote to remain in or leave the EU has barely begun. Yet debate is needed, not least because the arguments presented at a UK level tend to overlook the regional dimension. Regionally-focused debate is needed, and particularly so in Northern Ireland, given its unique geographical location in the UK of bordering another EU member state. The implications of remaining in and of leaving the EU have regional dimensions that need to be identified and debated.

This purpose of this briefing paper is to contribute to that process of identifying and debating the implications for Northern Ireland of remaining in or leaving the EU. It does not present arguments for either side. Instead it raises questions around a range of topics that it is believed need to be considered in advance of the referendum. The paper does not claim to be comprehensive in terms of the topics covered or the questions raised. It is designed instead as an initial foray into identifying the issues and questions that should inform debate. Its purpose is to stimulate discussion and to provoke others into identifying the issues they want considered and the questions they want asked and answered in advance of the referendum.

1 The contribution to the Yearbook has been compiled by a team of academics from the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) and from the Department of Government at University College Cork (UCC). The team includes Prof. David Phinnemore (QUB) (editor), Prof. Yvonne Galligan (QUB), Dr. Cathal McCall (QUB), Dr. Lee McGowan (QUB), and Dr. Mary Murphy (UCC).

Ieda Osamu, Susumu Nagayo eds. (2014, 2015):

Transboundary Symbiosis over the Danube.

Slavic-Eurasian research center, Hokkaido University, 133 + 195 pp.

The subject of this book review is the two-volume book edited by Ieda Osamu and Susumu Nagayo and which was published in 2014 and 2015. The title of the first volume is ‘Transboundary Symbiosis over the Danube: EU integration between Slovakia and Hungary from a local border perspective’; while the second volume was published with title, ‘Transboundary Symbiosis over the Danube: Road to a Multidimensional Ethnic Symbiosis in the Mid-Danube Region’.

The first volume of the Transboundary symbiosis over the Danube presents results of international cooperation with trilateral approaches towards the Danube region and borderland. The second volume was a result of the Second International Conference that was organized at the University of Selye János in Komárno (Slovakia), in 2014.

In total, the books contain 17 chapters, focusing on Slovak, Slovakian history and Slovak-Hungarian relations. Important element of the reviewed books is that they contain various chapters from Slovak (e.g. Dušan Kováč, Štefan Šutaj), Slovakian Hungarian (e.g. Barnabás Vajda), Hungarian and foreign, non-European writers and historians, thus they reflect the Slovak, Hungarian, Slovakian Hungarian understanding and a foreign unbiased approach and ‘voice’, thus these different historical considerations generate a complex reading for those who want to know more about Slovakia, about its history and its interaction with the Hungarian minority and Hungary. In other words, the volumes attempted to investigate the ethnic symbiosis in the ethnically mixed space that is located along the boundary of Hungary and the Slovak Republic with the aim to comprehend ethnic symbiosis and ethnic problems in the identified area.

Chapters of the books can be separated into theoretical essays that try to use historical approaches in order to understand the relationship between minority and majority in the Slovak Republic, while other chapters use case-study approaches to investigate specific issues, such as the language situation, the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros dam issue and/or the question of national identity of students at the Department at Komarno’s Selye János University, the only Hungarian-language university in Slovakia. Subsequently, I have selected some of the most interesting chapters of the tw research volumes, and the review offers a brief characterization and description of those chapters and their ideas.

Several chapters deal with the issue of controversial Slovak - Hungarian narratives and discourses. Dušan Kováč, as one of the most prominent, well-known and respected Slovak historian, tries to grasp this topic. Kováč appropriately and aptly notes in his chapter that the ‘European historiography has developed in an atmosphere that is characterized by conflict between national narratives’. This conflict of national narratives and discourses is explicitly visible between the Slovak and Hungarian approaches. Subsequently, Kováč offers an interesting historical reading and he describes the narrative conflict between Mihály Bencsik and Ján Baltazár Magin that happened in the beginning of the 18th century. The former was a Hungarian lawyer and university professor in Trnava/Nagyszombat (now located in the Slovak Republic), and he published a document in which he explained his opinion about withholding the right of representatives of the city of Trenčín/Trencsén (now located in the Slovak Republic) to participate in the diet that was called by King Charles III. Bencsík claimed that the representatives of the city of Trenčín/Trencsén were the descendants of the Bohemian King, Svätopluk’s people; consequently, they are not rightful citizens of the Hungarian Kingdom and they could not participate at the diet. Nevertheless, Bencsik’s opinion was clashed with the opinion of Ján Baltazár Magin, who was a priest of Dubnica, and he published a response under title ‘Tŕne, čiže obrana…’ (‘Thorns or Defence…’ in English). He claimed that the original inhabitants of the land are not the Hungarians, but the people of Svätopluk and they are equal inhabitants of the Hungarian multi-ethnic state from its beginning. In other words, the debate between Bencsik and Baltazár Magin represented the beginning of a historical clash, still existing, over nationalistic polemic about the earlier arrivals and inhabitants of the Carpathian Basin. Nevertheless, Kováč makes a principal mistake, namely he appropriately identifies that Hungary suffers from the Trianon trauma; nevertheless, this trauma is not caused only by the fact that the concept of the nation was linked with the state, but he totally ignores the fact that more than 3 million ethnic Hungarians found themselves under political structures of new states that were driven by hostile political elites towards the new minorities.

Another interesting chapter was written by the Slovak historian, Štefan Šutaj. He analysed Slovakian and Hungarian history, common views and confrontations. The main objective of his research were the differences in characterizing the Hungarian Kingdom within Hungarian and the Slovakian historiography and public consciousness. To be specific, Hungarian historiography and historians do not make terminological differentiation between the pre-Trianon Kingdom and the post-Trianon Hungary, and both political structures are labelled as ‘Hungary’. Simply, the term ‘Hungary’ is used for all historical forms of Hungary, what represents a unique and important sign of continuity and permanency. Nevertheless, the Slovakian historiography and historians make an explicit linguistic difference between the two state formations. That means pre-Trianon Kingdom is labelled as ‘Uhorsko’, while the post-Trianon state is labelled as ‘Hungary’, i.e. the Slovakian approach makes a profound difference and the continuity between these two state formations are shattered. Subsequently, Šutaj asks the following question in his chapter: “how does one explain from the Slovak perspective to the “others” that Hungary achieved a new sovereignty, like Czechoslovakia, if in other languages the same term is used for the pre-Trianon and post-Trianon state formation?”

Šutaj highlights an interesting approach, namely the Slovakian perception of Trianon. The Slovak side has never made Trianon a symbol, national-populist groups are exceptions in this case having commemorated and celebrated its anniversary in 2010. Neverttheless, Trianon is rather understood within a negative context, it is seen as connected to irredentism, revisionism and feeling of threat. Subsequently, both nations understand Trianon in negative terms. What is more, Šutaj notes that Slovakian society is very sensitive either to any Hungarian attempt to intervene into Slovakian affairs, or to any attempt of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia to change the existing status and competencies. To be exact, change in the status quo “mobilizes even moderate patriots and lukewarm nationalists to be distrustful toward Hungarians.” Subsequently, Hungary has introduced a new approach towards the post-Trianon framework and care about the Hungarians. Namely, cross-border vision of the unity of the Hungarian nation and establishment of institutional linkages that is able to connect the motherland with its minorities beyond its borders. Hence, it allows a gradual penetration of national policy across the existing border structures. Hence, integrity of the Kingdom of Hungary has been replaced by the idea of integrity of Hungarians.

Gabriela Dudeková gives a historical insight into post-Trianon history, claiming that the same events and happenings are usually evaluated oppositely on the Hungarian and Slovak side, and this different interpretation generates space for profound disagreement and conflict. Moreover, the author notes that creation of the Slovak Republic in 1993 was built on the idea of a nation state of the Slovaks and not on the basis of multinational state structure, where minorities would have had respected position within the political vision of the new state. This post-independence approach and orientation led to strong and heavy nationalization of amateurs, but also Slovak historical departments. Dudeková brilliantly claims that “a part of the history writings in Slovakia and Hungary still see their common past as a list of wrongdoings and identify themselves in the victim’s position. Certain examples of these wrongdoings are not only used by national extremists but by professional politicians”.

Susumu Nagayo’s dual chapter offers a deep and interesting toponymical research of an unclear domain of the Slovakian history, namely the name of the capital city of Bratislava and its orthographic changes during historical periods. His basic point of departure was that the name of the City was reconstructed in the beginning of the 19th century on the basis of mentioned and referred city names in medieval chronicles, and whose renaming of Bratislava happened after the First World War, when the Czechoslovak legions occupied the City in 1919. In his first chapter, Nagayo presents several names and appellations to Bratislava, like Braslavespurch, Wratislawa, Bracislaw, Brecislaw, Břetislaw, Brecisburg, Vratislava, Prešpurk and/or Pozsony. That means he briefly introduces the works of Slovak writers, like Ján Kollár, Jozef Šafárik and/or Ľudovít Štúr and their use of various names for the city of Bratislava. He concludes that the name ‘Bratislava’ was not straightforward and clear even in the 19th century, and even numerous Slovak writes, like Kollár himself, used different names for it in their writings. Object of the second chapter of the author moves away from the discourse of the writers, and it is relocated into the realm of newspapers.

Yuko Kambara looks at the issue of ethnic symbiosis and conflict. According to him, an antagonistic duality has been present in the Slovak Republic and Slovakian society, i.e. politicians create and generate an image of ethnic conflict in the southern parts of Slovakia where a profound conflict squeezes the ethic relations, while local population and the Slovakian Hungarian elite proves the direct opposite, namely the existence of peaceful bilingual conditions, ethnic symbiosis and inter-ethnic cooperation in rural and smaller communities. Kambara’s research is based on data that were gathered through interviews with Hungarian minority elites. This study is important because it directly challenges the inappropriate and distorted picture, often generated by the Slovak political elite, about ethnic conflict between the majority and the minority.

Interesting study is given by Eva Győriová Banková, who analysed the language and political situation in Komárno. Komárno is a Slovakian city that was divided by the new border structures after the First World War, and it is a city that is predominantly Hungarian in language and culture. Her research has concentrated on identifying the use of mother tongues by different generations, and the use of language at home and in public. Her research provides interesting findings, the first of which is that the Slovak language, as mother tongue, is mainly used by the younger generation, while the Hungarian mother tongue is mainly used by the older and middle-aged persons. This difference of preferred mother tongue usage between the generations shows the changes and variations within the city and its linguistic structure. Subsequently, the preference tendency of the Slovak language is visible among the younger generations. Third interesting finding of the research was that the preferred language in the public life is the Slovak language.

The message of the two-volume book is the following one: policies that support and promote ethnic separation and exclusionism will not be able to improve sensitive interethnic relations in Central Europe. Nevertheless, they are able to further deepen historical disputes and quarrels. Subsequently, a multidimensional symbiosis may be an additional approach in this area and geographic space. Moreover, it is important to underline that the volume does not contain any special new knowledge to the readers that could not be received from other history books that deal with the same topic; although, they offer a uniquely collected information and ideas, thus enriching understanding of the readers. What is more, the books offer unbiased/foreign research of a very sensitive and often biased topic, thus assuring objective approach and reading of relations.

Teodor Gyelnik

Phil Allmendinger, Graham Haughton, Jorg Knieling, Frank Othengrafen, eds. (2015):

Soft Spaces in Europe:

Re-negotiating governance, boundaries and borders.

Routledge, 248 p.

The need to cross borders has perhaps never been as pressing as in the contemporary context. Ever since the time of the Treaty of Westphalia, the struggle for ideal, that is, precise, boundary lines between the territories of different administrative regimes has been seen as an essential prerequisite for peace and prosperity, not only for states but also for sub-state entities with self-governing bodies. By the middle of the 20th century this process lead to the ultimate hardening of national borders as well as domestic administrative structures. It came only in the recent decades that the gaps between the single entities of territorial governance produced by these hard boundaries have proved to be unsustainable and highly disruptive from a social and economic point of view. As a consequence, integration processes at different (global, continental, regional) scales emerged to tackle them and unlock the potential of a more integrative territorial design.

In line with the above, there has been an emergence of non-state level actors in the field of territorial governance which ran parallel with the weakening significance of state administration. This phenomenon has been observed and studied for long years and thus went on to become a prosperous field for new notions on actual governance models taking over the Westphalian model of territorial state administration. A newcomer to this conceptual diversity is the notion of soft spaces which is extensively scrutinised in Routledge’s recent edition Soft Spaces in Europe: Re-negotiating governance, boundaries and borders released in May 2015.

The editors of this volume are recognised experts in urban regional studies and governance issues: Phil Allmendinger (University of Cambridge) and Graham Haughton (University of Manchester) from the UK together with Jörg Knieling (HafenCity University Hamburg) and Frank Othengrafen (Leibniz Universität Hannover) from Germany. Accordingly, the book reflects a strong applied approach which makes it straightforward and highly readable not only for academics but also for a wider range of readers, namely professionals and political specialists being active in urban and regional planning.

A key concept employed within the volume is, as already highlighted above, what the editors call soft spaces. These peculiar spatial forms have been defined by the four editors in the introductory chapter as ‘governance experiments that involve the creation of new geographies […] with new and sometimes fuzzy boundaries that eschew the existing political-territorial boundaries of elected tiers of government ‘(p. 4.). With other words, soft spaces are labelled as non-statutory spaces which have emerged at multiple levels across Europe in the past three decades and, thought aiming at a wide range of different objectives, have in common the intention to fill in the gaps between and inside the statutory planning systems of nation-states.

As indicated in the editors’ introduction, the limits of statutory planning as a scientific problem already appeared in German discourse during the 1990s (e.g. Benz, 1994; Knieling et al., 2003). However, the term ‘soft spaces’ itself grew out of a UK context related to spatial planning issues between the UK and Ireland (Haughton and Allmendinger, 2007, 2008; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009; Haughton et al., 2010). Since its appareance, the notion have been adopted and adapted by other authors and resulted in a widening range of relevant scholarly output (e.g. Faludi, 2010; Heley, 2013; Metzger and Schmitt, 2012; etc.).

Even though the editors wish to provide ‘the first major international comparative study of soft spaces in planning’ (p. 4.) the scope of authors and study areas is somewhat narrow. The ten chapters, consisting of an introductory text, eight case studies and a concluding chapter are written by a total number of eleven authors, including the editors. What is more is that the case studies cover areas from no more than seven countries (Denmark, France, Germany, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK); as a result, some of the countries appear in multiple texts, such as Germany (Chapters 3,7 & 8), the UK (Chapters 2,6 & 9), and France (Chapters 4 & 8). It is also worth to mention that beyond the multiple interventions of the editors, four of the seven contributors authored at least two chapters. On the positive side, this relatively close circle of authors and territories results in a thoroughly compact structure and content of the book which fundamentally contributes to its excellent readability, On the negative side however, it may suggest that soft spaces are inherently northwest European phenomena which would contradict to the introductory thoughts of the book asserting that ‘the emergence of new, non-statutory or informal spaces can be found across Europe’ (p. 3.).

Nevertheless, the book mobilises a wide range of scientific output on questions and challenges that are highly relevant in other parts of Europe as well. Let us mention here first and foremost the competition vs. cooperation dualism which appears in more of the texts. The encouraging of nearby cities to cooperate rather than compete has for long been an important goal in territorial cooperation. Here, this is reflected by the case of the Manchester-Liverpool area (Chapter 2.) as their long-time rivalry ultimately ended up in the Atlantic Gateway cooperation. A similar challenge to be tackled is that of the Sillon Lorraine (Chapter 4) in eastern France where competing urban centres, first and foremost the cities of Metz and Nancy, were hard to be involved in joint operations because of their fundamentally different political aims in regional development and networking. In this vein, individual actors often build their partnerships selectively, involving the ones they prefer to work with, while excluding other possible partners for political, economic or strategic reasons. Such selectivity often leads to competitive projects within the same area as one can notice it in the case of the Randstad vs. the Metropolitan region Rotterdam The Hague (Chapter 5) in the Netherlands, or along the border of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (Chapter 9) where the rivalry is largely based on the competition for available funding.

Another issue at stake is the difference in approaches towards desired governance forms and the extent as well as the inclusivity of the new spaces of cooperation. Remarkable imbalances have already been found concerning the effectiveness of supra-municipal cooperation initiatives already within the same country, presented here through the comparison of the Ashford and Cambridge areas (Chapter 6). Here, the contrast between the two soft spaces is attributed to the different public attitudes towards development in the two urban centres.

Significant differences are also manifest when taking into consideration whether the given cooperation initiative is organised in a bottom-up or a top-down manner. This is modelled by the Upper Rhine region and the Eurodistrict Strasbourg-Ortenau, respectively (Chapter 8) which are the outcomes of the cooperation of different levels (local and regional level in the first case, state level in the second one) and show various degrees of cooperation intensity and inclusiveness.

Otherwise, the question of inclusiveness has been a key feature throughout the whole book. A great emphasis was put on the importance of a possibly variable geometry of soft spaces which is then supposed to have a higher flexibility and may react on the changing needs of the cooperation easily and rapidly. The appraisal of such organising logic is mostly reflected by the texts concerning the Metropolregion Hamburg (Chapter 3) and the Fehmarn Belt region (Chapter 7.), but is also apparent in the other texts. Flexibility and adaptivity is widely considered as being among the most valuable features of soft spaces that make the difference between soft and hard spaces, non-statutory and statutory systems. Accordingly, an important challenge for soft spaces is to avoid the trap of ‘hardening’, giving fix boundaries for the cooperation area. As suggested by the example of the Green Heart in the Netherlands (Chapter 5) ‘this kind of rigidness could make the concept inflexible and less susceptible to changes in society’ (p. 96). An important conclusion is therefore that soft spaces are needed to maintain their softness.

All in all, the book provides an excellent insights into the highly compelling notion of soft spaces and its application in northwestern Europe. Initiatives listed here are characterised by a relatively long thought far not linear history and are also needed to face new challenges nowadays. From this point of view the book is noteworthy for not aiming to present these governance initiatives as pure success stories and mark them as a high point in the evolutionary process of territorial governance but to reveal their potentials together with their weak points and difficulties as well. For this reason, as already mentioned above, this book can be recommended for professionals active in the field of regional planning and governance. It reminds us that crossing traditional borders of statutory planning is a complex work, even in the areas often referred to as the birthplace of European integration.

Márton Pete

References

Benz, A. (1994): Kooperative Verwaltung: Funktionen, Voraussetzungen und Folgen. Baden-Baden, Nomos, 418 p.

Allmendinger, P., Haughton, G. (2009): Soft Spaces, Fuzzy Boundaries, and Metagovernance: The New Spatial Planning in the Thames Gateway. Environment and Planning A March 2009 No. 41., 617-633.

Faludi, A. (2010): Beyond Lisbon: Soft European Spatial Planning. DisP - The Planning Review Vol. 46 , Iss. 182. pp. 14-24.

Haughton, G., Allmendinger, P. (2007): Soft spaces in planning. Town and Country Planning, 76, 306–308.

Haughton, G., Allmendinger, P. (2008): The Soft Spaces of Local Economic Development. Local Economy May 2008 No. 23., 138-148.

Haughton, G., Allmendinger, P., Counsell, D., Vigar, G. (2010): The New Spatial Planning: Territorial Management with Soft Spaces and Fuzzy Boundaries. Routledge, London, 276 p.

Heley, J. (2013): Soft Spaces, Fuzzy Boundaries and Spatial Governance in Post-devolution Wales. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, No. 37., 1325–1348.

Knieling, J., Fürst, D., Danielzyk, R. (2003): Kooperative Handlungsformen in der Regionalplanung: zur Praxis der Regionalplanung in Deutschland. Regio spezial Bd. 1, Dortmund, Dortmunder Vertrieb für Bau- und Planungsliteratur, 221 p.

Metzger, J., Schmitt, P. (2012): When Soft Spaces Harden: The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region. Environment and Planning A, February 2012 No. 44., 263-280.

Martin BARTHEL – geographer,

project researcher/PhD student – Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland

mabarthel@googlemail.com

Kathryn CASSIDY – Ph.D. (Geography),

Lecturer in Human Geography - Northumbria University Newcastle

kathryn.cassidy@northumbria.ac.uk

Seyed Abdolhadi DANESHPOUR – Ph.D. (Urban Planning & Design),

Associate professor - Iran University of Science and Technology

daneshpour@iust.ac.ir

Teodor GYELNIK – PhD (European studies),

junior research fellow – Central European Service for Cross-Border Initiatives

teodor.gyelnik@cesci-net.eu

Henk van HOUTUM – Ph.D. (Economics),

Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research; associate professor of political geography and geopolitics at Radboud University Nijmegen

h.vanhoutum@fm.ru.nl

Virpi KAISTO – M.A. (Arts),

junior researcher - Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland

virpi.kaisto@uef.fi

Reza KHEYRODDIN – Ph.D. (Urban planning),

Assistant professor - Iran University of Science and Technology

reza_kheyroddin@iust.ac.ir

Jussi LAINE – Ph.D. (Geography),

Assistant professor – Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland

jussi.laine@uef.fi

Cathal MCCALL – – Ph.D. (Political Science),

Senior Lecturer in European Studies - Queen’s University Belfast

c.mccall@qub.ac.uk

Márton PETE – M.A. (Geography),

Ph.D. student – Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, asisstant research fellow – Central European Service for Cross-Border Initiatives

petemarton@caesar.elte.hu, marton.pete@cesci-net.eu

Mehdi RAZPOUR – M.A. (Regional planning),

Ph.D. student in urban and regional planning, Iran University of Science and Technology

m.razpour@gmail.com

James SCOTT – Dr. habil. (Geography),

Professor of Regional and Border Studies – Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland

james.scott@uef.fi

Georgie WEMYSS – Ph.D. (Social Anthropology),

Senior research fellow at the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging - University of East London

g.wemyss@uel.ac.uk

Nira YUVAL-DAVIS – Ph.D. (Sociology),

Director of the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging - University of East London,

n.yuval-davis@uel.ac.uk

Crossing the borders.

Studies on cross-border cooperation within the Danube Region (2016)

The editor was Péter Balogh. The volume is the result of a cooperation between 25 researchers and support from the Hungarian Ministry of Public Administration and Justice. This volume is targeted at policy experts and the scientific community alike. A comparison of fourteen vast case studies of border regions is a relatively rare opportunity for scholarly experts, and as such forms an added value in itself. The volume is structured in two parts.

Available on the following link:

http://institute.cesci-net.eu/en/crossing-borders-studies

Overview of the EGTCs around Hungary (2016)

CESCI has published the most comprehensive analysis so far on the functioning of the EGTCs involving Hungarian members. The volume edited by Sara Svensson (CEU) and Gyula Ocskay (CESCI) treats the legal, economic and social conditions of the functioning of the EGTCs, gives an overview on the history of the governmental policies supporting the groupings and within an evaluating chapter it summarizes the results the groupings have achived so far.

Available on the following link:

http://cesci-net.ecu/EGTC-Overview

Joint Spatial Planning in Komárno and Komárom (2016)

CESCI scholar Lilla Krisztina Szilágyi’s study presents a remarkable initiative from the Slovak-Hungarian border region. A joint spatial planning document was set up by the Slovak Komárno and Hungarian Komárom. Introduction of the situation in the relevant urban area is followed by a presentation of the exemplary cooperation and an overview of the joint development document. In the study, the main challenges of the joint development plan’s realisation are reviewed, and resolution proposals are put forward by the author, using examples of existing best practices.

Available on the following link:

http://cesci-net.eu/case-study-komarom-en

Table of Contents

Editorial Board

Contents

Intorduction

Feature Articles / James SCOTT: Rebordering Central Europe: Observations on Cohesion and Cross-border Cooperation

Feature Articles / Jussi LAINE: An Alternative Politics of Borders: the EU-Russia Interphase as a Space of Encounter

Feature Articles / Martin BARTHEL: Milking the Border: Cohesive Strategies in Response to Crises of Peripherality in Border Regions

Feature Articles / Virpi KAISTO: Cross-Border Areas Facing Europe’s Crises: Problems in Measuring Territorial Development with Statistical Data and Analyses

Feature Articles / Teodor GYELNIK: Cross-border Health Care Cooperation in the European Union: an Effective Strategy of Mitigating Regional/Local Limitations through Cooperation

Feature Articles / Mehdi RAZPOUR, Reza KHEYRODDIN: Informal economy and urban spatial changes in the border town Baneh. A case study from the Iranian - Iraqi border.

Research Report / Henk van Houtum, Jussi Laine and James Scott: EUBORDERSCAPES - Potentials and Challenges of Evolving Border Concepts

Commentaries / Nira YUVAL-DAVIS: Everyday Bordering

Commentaries / Cathal MCCALL: How 'Brexit' Could Destabilise the Irish Peace Process

Book Reviews / Transboundary Symbiosis over the Danube. Ieda Osamu, Susumu Nagayo (eds.) (2014, 2015) (Teodor GYELNIK)

Book Reviews / Soft Spaces in Europe: Re-negotiating governance, boundaries and borders. Phil Allmendinger, Graham Haughton, Jorg Knieling, Frank Othengrafen, eds. (2015) (Márton PETE))

Authors

CESCI Publications