Everything All Right at the Internal EU Borders? The Ambivalent Effects of Cross-Border Integration and the Rise of Euroscepticism

ABSTRACT

The policy of the European Union, which promotes a vision of Europe without borders and has fostered the development of cooperation across borders over 25 years, has led, in some parts of Europe, to the emergence of so-called integrated cross-border regions. Thus far, the increase of cross-border flows and interactions has always been a normative and almost unquestioned policy paradigm. However, tendencies of re-bordering and signs of growing Euroscepticism can also be observed nowadays in these border regions, which show the importance of investigating the negative externalities that can be generated by cross-border integration. This article attempts to do this by focusing on three case studies usually considered as among the most integrated ones in Europe because of cross-border flows related to work: the cross-border metropolitan regions of Basel, Geneva and Luxembourg. Our findings show that if several decades of cross-border integration have led to the reinforcement of the functional linkages between the border regions, some effects of the cross-border integration process have also created a functional specialisation of space that relies on social and economic inequalities. Such a situation contradicts the ideal of cross-border territorial cohesion and helps to better understand the rise of Euroscepticism in some of the border areas.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Hans-Joachim Bürkner for his helpful comments on the previous draft of this article. The authors are grateful to the referees and editor, whose suggestions helped to improve the article.

Notes

1. In this article, two types of areas will be addressed which are not adequately differentiated in the literature:•Cross-border area: A portion of space which covers several territories from both sides of a border. Different words will be used to name it (every time with the adjective ‘cross-border’): cross-border region, cross-border area.

•Border area: A portion of space which is located on one side of the border. Different words exist to name it: Borderland, border region, border area, border space, border territory.

2. Since the data related to jobs at the work place is not strictly comparable (due to the different methods used by national statistical offices), the focus should be put on the evolution of the job per capita ratio.

3. For the case of Luxembourg: (Diop 2011) for the cases of Basel and Geneva: (MOT (Mission Opérationnelle Transfrontalière) 2006).

4. See http://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/dataset/S1565_422_ENG.

5. Sources: INSEE and Amstat. Data available online.