Belonging and Identity in the European Border Towns: Self-Centered Borders, Hetero-Centered Borders

Abstract

This paper investigates the complexity specific to the concept of belonging and identity at the European border area level. These issues are explored by a research on European border cities, within which factorial meanings are identified. There are five of such meanings: feelings of security and community, contents of the originality, negative soul of ethnic cosmopolitanism, aesthetics of time, and border town evoking marginalization. These meanings are used to identify clusters of borders, which are: central European borders, central-northern European borders, borders where negative meanings are prevalent, the Polish-Belarus-Lithuanian borders, border towns where being a town is worth more than being on a border. These perspectives allow for verification of how borders are either hetero-centered or self-centered. Hetero-centered borders project their own belongings and identities to the cities which are located beyond the border. Self-centered borders project belongings and identities to their own national city, region, nation. The paper ends by identifying self-centered and hetero-centered borders individually in their capacity to express cooperation among cities located on both sides of the border.

Notes

1 Relations between home towns and cross-border towns A, B and C are set out in the section “Towns on this side and the other side of the border and relations between them” in the article “Situations, conditions, styles of the life and government in border towns” (Gasparini 1999–2000). These relations concern:

(1) A, B, C towns in terms of distance from base order towns and number of inhabitants, and of languages spoken;

(2) average percentages of people going from their town to cross-border towns A, B, C and vice-versa, divided according to reasons;

(3) percentages of towns with agreements with cross-border towns and types of agreements;

(4) percentages of border towns whose inhabitants take part in the life, or use the services, of organisations in A, B, C cross-border towns (see Gasparini 2008b).

2 The research was directed by the author of this paper.

3 Further information on the principal component analysis (PCA).

The correlation matrix of the 13 variables, set out according to the variables included in each factor is reported in Table 3 of the article.

The eigenvalues, communalities and other information are included in the following Table:

Table

The component matrix and the extraction sums of squared loadings are set out in the following Table:

Table

Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy = 0.54258.

Bartlett test of sphericity = 199.95463, significance = 0.00000.

4 Considering the nature of the variables, the matrix of correlations, the fact that the enquiry regards attitudes and that an eigenvalue of more than 1 is taken as a criterion to fix the number of principal components, we deem that variance percentage explained by the five factors stands as a fairly good explanation, and that the relinquishment of less than 30% of the total information is also acceptable (see: Nunnally 1967; Borgatta 1968, 1971; Harman 1970; Alvin 2000; Di Franco and Marradi 2003).

5 The coefficient of self-centered belonging (Σ1, 2, 3 of Table 5) is balanced by the distance from self-centered (Σ1, 2,3) and hetero-centered (Σ4, 5, 6 of Table 5) belonging. An example is the Poland(PL)-Ukraine (UA) border: self-centered belonging = 4.7 × (self-centered belonging 4.7 – hetero-centered belonging 1.7 =) 3.0 = 14.10.We consider the PL-UA border with a very high self-centered belonging, because the coefficient 14.10 is superior to 11.32.