Bridging the Gap: Cross-border Integration in the Slovak–Hungarian Borderland around Štúrovo–Esztergom

ABSTRACT

One of the main narratives of border studies in recent years has been that cross-border interactions rarely result in a thorough integration, with the border remaining a strong dividing line. While not questioning that grand narrative as a whole, this article contributes to nuancing the picture. Through the four analytical lenses proposed by Brunet-Jailly (2005. Theorizing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Geopolitics 10, no. 4: 633–649) we investigated the Slovak-Hungarian borderland around Štúrovo and Esztergom, where substantial developments towards a thorough integration of the two sides have actually taken place. The empirical material is based on personal interviews with 26 local elites, statistical data, field observations, etc. Two dimensions emerge as particularly important behind this integration. One is related to market forces: a long-lasting severe economic situation including high unemployment on the rather agriculture-dominated Slovakian side has pushed thousands to daily commute to work on the industrially oriented Hungarian side, where demand for labor has been high. The other key dimension is related to the local cross-border culture, where shared identities and common languages on both sides have led to intensive cultural and educational exchange. These developments were also facilitated by the policy activities of multiple levels of government and the local political clout. Our case contradicts the now common idea that increasing cross-border integration coincides with decreasing cross-border mobility.

Acknowledgements

We thank Sara Svensson and Gyula Ocskay for their valuable comments to an earlier version of this paper. We are very grateful to Teodor Gyelník, György Farkas, and Zsolt Bottlik for providing us especially with quantitative data. We also thank Éva Gangl for producing the map.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Péter Balogh http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8220-3220

Notes

1 The EGTC is a legal and governance tool established in 2006, conceived as a substantial upgrade for multi-level governance and “beyond-the-border” cooperation. According to Spinaci and Vara-Arribas (2009, 5), these Groupings are truly new governance “contracts” of multilevel cross-border cooperation, which can become creative engines for local development and deeper European integration.

2 Such plants were during late socialism in Czechoslovakia “integrated into the economic space of core enterprises in core regions, and many developed the characteristics common to branch plant firms – limited managerial autonomy, non-existent research and development activity, subcomponent production for core plants, and limited technological development” (Smith 2000, 170–172).

3 The agreement was signed in the late 1980s, but Hungary withdrew in the early 1990s due to heavy country-wide environmental protests, with Slovakia nonetheless unilaterally completing the plant at Gabčikovo.

4 The whole of Ister-Granum EGTC has altogether approx. 170,000 inhabitants (Törzsök and Majoros 2015, 17). 78% of those Farkas (2016, 41) surveyed in 2014 had their residence on the territory of the cross-border region.

5 Interestingly enough, according to an interviewee such an arrangement already existed in the interwar years, otherwise a period widely associated with national protectionism.

6 Euroregions can be defined as “small-scale groupings of contiguous public authorities across one or more nation-state borders and can be referred to as ‘micro-CBRs” [i.e. micro-cross border regions] (Perkmann 2007, 861).

7 Only Arrabona EGTC was ranked higher but this entity hosts a significantly larger population, over half of which living in the city of Győr alone (Törzsök and Majoros 2015, 41). Nevertheless, most cross-border movements do not take place around Győr but form the already mentioned cross-border residential mobility between Bratislava and a small number of villages in Hungary (cf. Hardi 2012; KSH 2015a, 19).

8 In Central and Eastern Europe, national identity largely follows the principle of ius sanguinis more than that of ius soli, thus it is based more on ethnicity than on citizenship (cf. Lundén 2014, 65).

9 Bordering implies “the continuous (search for the) legitimization and justification of the location and demarcation of a border, which is seen as a manifestation of one’s own claimed, distinct, and exclusive territory/identity/sovereignty” (van Houtum 2010, 959). Othering then implies the making of others, and “the production of categorical difference between ours and theirs, here and there, and natives versus non-natives” (van Houtum 2010, 960).

10 This approach can be seen as a strategy observed in other multi-ethnic areas, where members of different ethnic communities cope with each other in everyday life by avoiding controversial issues (cf. Brubaker et al. 2006).