More and more people in Europe commute daily to their workplace in a neighboring country, especially Switzerland and Luxembourg. Cross-border mobility results from socioeconomic imbalances in border regions, provides growth and purchasing power, and requires close coordination of European social systems.
The three-year project focuses on the Greater Region SaarLorLux+ and the Brandenburg/Lebus region as zones of contact and transition at national borders. The border closures and increased controls in the course of the pandemic have made clear, especially in border regions, how closely the European Union is already interconnected at its territorial interfaces.
How are borders experienced? In the Greater Region Saar-Lor-Lux, at the crossroads of four countries and three languages, strong relationships bring people together.
Switzerland and Luxembourg are the biggest hotspots for cross-border workers in Europe, which is why in both countries academics take a greater interest in issues concerned with the cross-border labour market and workers' mobility.
The UniGR-Center for Border Studies was the partner of the second Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) World Conference. The 5-day event on the theme "Border-Making and its Consequences" was held from 10-14 July 2018 at the University of Vienna (AT) and the Central European University in Budapest (H) and was attended by 450 border researchers from over 50 countries.
Cross-border workers account for six per cent of the workforce in Switzerland. This is plainly a far lower proportion than in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, nevertheless in the Confederation cross-border workers are an undeniable resource on the employment market and a subject of societal discourse.
The members of the Association of Teachers of History and Geography (Association des Professeurs d’Histoire et de Géographie) regularly holds plenary sessions as part of a thematic conference. In 2019 the association held its conference from 23 to 25 October in Metz and Nancy and worked on the theme "Lorraine, land of fronts and borders" (La Lorraine, un territoire de fronts et de frontières). The UniGR-Center for Border Studies (UniGR-CBS) was involved in the planning of the programme in several ways.
Cross-border vocational education and training (VET) becomes more and more important in the Saarland(DE)-Lorraine(F) border region – even if so far there is only a small number of cases. It may be a solution for high youth unemployment rates in Lorraine and difficulties to find appropriated apprentices in Saarland.
How do cross-border regions come about and what characterises them? The 19 contributors to this collection examine the social experience of the EU's internal borders through the example of the SaarLorLux Greater Region. They discuss the practices of institutional actors and inhabitants of border regions in a number of areas: the economy, the job market, political cooperation as well as everyday life, the media and culture. The collection contains 16 contributions in French and German by 19 authors from Germany, France and Luxembourg.
The Greater Region has 225,000 cross-border workers. A phenomenon that is strongly on the rise, although cross-border working has been a firm fixture in the local economies for a long time. The scale of it impacts both the regions of residence and of employment in many areas (economic development, mobility, employment and training) and the challenges are many.
Luxembourg and Switzerland employ over half a million people from regions in the neighbouring countries and have relied on cross-border workers for decades. In the second UniGR-Center for Border Studies themed journal authors examine the key developments in cross-border hotspots, in particular the job market, the experience of crossing the border on a daily basis and society's perceptions of cross-border workers.
GR-Atlas is an interactive, interdisciplinary, thematic atlas of the “Greater Region SaarLorLux,” which comprises the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Belgian region Wallonia, the former French region Lorraine as well as the German federal states Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate.
