cross-border cooperation
The need for cooperation between regions next to state borders can be traced back to two reasons. Border regions are often peripheral areas with cumulative disadvantages, while in Europe, where borders are dense, national borders often cut across geographically, culturally and economically cohesive regions. Cooperation between them was difficult because of belonging to two or even more states, the closed nature of peripheries or due to conflicts that had evolved historically, but after all it was essential for the regions themselves, the states, and an increasingly unified Europe. cross-border cooperation is cooperation between local (regional) authorities, municipalities and social and economic partners in a “grassroots” organisational form in border regions of two or more European countries. The aim is to ensure financial resources to help them overcome the constraints imposed by national borders and to solve their economic, social, environmental, cultural and other tasks of common interest within the limits of their competences as recognised by the states concerned. cross-border cooperation dates back to the 1960s. First Regio Basiliensis was created in 1963 on the French–German–Swiss border. In the first phase of their development, cross-border contacts were mostly limited to cultural events, study trips and student exchanges, but many initiatives remained at the level of declarations and protocol meetings. The Enschede–Gronau Euroregion, established in 1965, developed an organisational system that is still a model today (members’ assembly, council, presidency, secretariat and working groups). The development of the Enschede-Gronau Euroregion was also supported by international treaties between the interested states (the Netherlands and Germany), which in the 1970s set an example for other member states to support similar relationship. This also required that the supportive policies of governments coincide with the decentralisation of their internal administrative systems. The assertion of interests of the cross-border cooperations was also strengthened by creating international alliances / associations. The Association of European Border Regions was founded in 1971 on the initiative of ten border regions. Today it has more than 100 members. The issue of cross-border relations has been taken up by the Council of Europe (see the European Outline Convention on Transfrontier Co-operation between Territorial Communities or Authorities signed in Madrid on 21 May 1980). This framework was the basis for the initiative of the organs of the European Union in the 1980s, and the Maastricht Treaty gave impetus to the development of cross-border processes. The EU financial resources supporting these cross-border cooperations contributed to a great extent to become institutionalised to deepening the links and expand them into new areas (joint development, planning, external funding, Phare CBC and Interreg programmes). In Hungary since 1990 local governments have been actively engaged in “diplomatic” activities, exercising their greater powers, which include the shaping their international relations on their own, and their relations are limited only by their own financial situation and the policies of the neighbouring countries. For Hungary the first cross-border cooperation was the Alpine-Adriatic Working Community (1978). Their numbers started to increase in the 1990s and now all border areas are covered by cross-border cooperations (e.g. the Danube Triangle, the Váh-Danube-Ipoly, the Ipoly, the Neogradiensis, the Sajó-Rima, the Košice (Kassa)-Miskolc Euroregions, the Carpathian Euroregion, the Danube-Körös-Maros-Tisza Euroregion, the cooperation between Hajdú-Bihar County and Bihor County, as well as the Bihar-Bihor Euroregion, the Danube-Drava-Sava Euroregion, the Drava-Mura Euroregion and the Western Pannonian Euroregion). The operation of cross-border cooperations was complicated by the fact that the administrative systems (levels) of the participating states were different. The roles and responsibilities of the participating public authorities differed considerably and most of the partnerships did not have legal personality which made it difficult to obtain the funding required for implementing the projects. The exceptions to this were those Western European cross-border cooperations where either the internal law of the participating states or the international treaties concluded by the states granted legal personality status to cross-border cooperation. The general solution to this problem was finally the creation of the so-called European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTCs) in the European Union.