Cross-border region
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A cross-border region is a territorial entity that is made of several local or regional authorities that are co-located yet belong to different nation states.
[edit] Cross-border regions in Europe
In Europe, there are a large number of cross-border regions. Some of them are often referred to as 'Euroregion' although this is an imprecise concept that is used for a number of different arrangements. European cross-border regions are most commonly constituted through co-operation among border municipalities, districts or regions. These units typically comprise between one and two million inhabitants and cover areas located within a distance of 50km from both sides of the borders.
Most of these cross-border regions receive financial support from the European Commission via its Interreg programme.
European cross-border regions vary in their legal and administrative set-up. They have in common that they are not 'regions' in an administrative-constitutional sense. Many cross-border regions are based on some sort of civil-law agreements among the participating authorities. For instance, the classical form of a Euroregion is the ‘twin association’: On each side of the border, municipalities and districts form an association according to a legal form suitable within their own national legal systems. In a second step, the associations then join each other on the basis of a civil-law cross-border agreement to establish the cross-border entity. Many Euroregions along the Germany-Benelux border are established according to this model, following the pioneering initiatives by the EUREGIO [1] which is the oldest among European cross-border regions.
[edit] External links
M Perkmann (2003): Cross-Border Regions in Europe: Significance and Drivers of Regional Cross-Border Co-operation. European Urban and Regional Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, 153-171. [[2]]
J W Scott (1999) European and North American Contexts for Cross-border Regionalism. Regional Studies, Vol. 33, No. 7, 605 - 617. [3]
