The SaarLorLux Greater Region. Moving towards cross-border super-regionalisation?
Abstract
Cross-border areas are often presented as "laboratories of European integration". Beyond the speeches and the symbols, what actual meaning lies beneath the notion of the "cross-border region"? Based on work done for a PhD, this monograph sets out the challenges in the construction of cross-border governance. The analysis largely focuses on the Greater Region.
Questions and subjects
Issues like regionalisation and territoriality are crystallised in cross-border areas whose own contours are constantly being called into question. They are the theatre where the integration of the European single market plays out and they are all the more marked by functional interdependencies for being situated along the seams between states with different economic, tax and social systems. At the same time, European regional policy has made border areas actors participating directly in the system of multi-level governance. Horizontal and vertical issues are therefore imbricated.
The plan to build a Cross-Border Polycentric Metropolitan Region within the Greater Region is considered as symptomatic of the reterritorialisation of regional matters at the cross-border level.
By defining the region as a territorial and institutional construction with its own identity with a long-term existence, this work identifies and questions the specific features of this process in the cross-border context. To do this, it makes a distinction between inter- and supra-regional cooperation, thereby questioning the ability of a border area to construct an ad hoc form of cross-border cooperation that amounts to more than the sum of the members that make it up. This study is underpinned by discourse analysis, an operationalisation of the concepts of cross-border territoriality and supra-regional institutions. In particular, the significance of the EGTC (European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation), the European instrument that provides a legal framework to the cooperation, is analysed.
Key steps
- Review: nonfiction.fr; Revue Géographique de l’Est
- Presentation to the public: Maison de la Grande Région, Esch sur Alzette
- Press coverage: Tageblatt; L’Essentiel
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