New borders for a changing Europe. Cross-border cooperation and governance

Abstract:

The European Union has just seen its largest single enlargement and now has twenty five Member States. So why at this time, when we might expect to experience an enlarged border-free Europe, is there such an increased interest in borders and border communities, and border-crossing processes? This work explores the reasons for this increased interest.

The work is comprised of nine papers, most of which were submitted to an international conference held in Belfast in the autumn of 2000, 'European Cross-border Co-operation: Lessons for and from Ireland'. The opening contribution from the editors gives the background to the study, while the second explores the changing significance of EU state borders and the historical perspective of border change in Europe. The third paper looks at the economic bordering in the European Union and explores the social production of economic borders and the reasons for them. This is followed by a paper on the nature and scope of cross-border participatory rights under European Community environmental law with particular focus on Ireland. Communications across frontiers and specifically those between Emergency Services are discussed in the next paper. Not surprisingly the discussion then moves on to the issue of cross-border police co-operation, featuring the trans-frontier collaboration between Kent, the Nord/Pas de Calais, the southern Netherlands and Flanders. The seventh paper examines the new forms of transnational governance in the Baltic Sea region. The concept of social capital is at the centre of the discussion in the next paper, focussing as it does on the German-Polish border region. The Upper Adriatic region is an unusual multicultural region on the EU's present periphery combining as it does three cultural areas - the Romance, the Germanic, and the Slavic - and is the feature of the final paper in this volume.

The work will interest academics, policy practitioners and politicians with involvement in cross-border co-operation and governance.

James Anderson is Co-Director of the Centre for International Borders Research (CIBR) at Queen's University, Belfast.