Cooperation of regional and local public entities – such as political actors and public administrations – across national borders has evolved dynamically in Europe in the last decades especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Border regions accommodate a significant share of population and territory in Europe which makes it a “Europe of cross-border regions”. Several Euroregions and so-called European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTCs) have been created in national peripheries to facilitate euroregional political and administrative cooperation in cross-border regions for example in managing cross-border public services or EU projects and funds.
Yet, deeper political and administrative integration and cooperation partially experiences boundaries. Besides general re-bordering processes through re-nationalization, the discursive and political dismantling of values, ideas and political processes of Europeanization and Transnationalism and the re-enforced border controls in the EU Schengen Area also practical barriers in the daily cross-border collaboration practice of public entities reveal that cross-border integration reaches its limits.
The newly established Ad Hoc Group (AHGs) aims at discussing this ambivalence under the notion of “Horizontal Integration” in the European Administrative System (EAS) and also asks the question how could cross-border governance structures be more inclusive and participatory by including distinct actors across civil society, academia or private actors beside public administration and political actors in these governance arrangements.
The Ad Hoc Group is a novel experimental forum that brings together outstanding European expert researchers from political and administrative sciences that work on cross-border cooperation in Europe. Jointly, the group will discuss theoretical approaches of “horizontal integration”, cross-border “participatory governance” and “multilevel governance” in the debate revolving around the EAS, current developments and will compare the administrative horizontal integration in different border regions in Europe. The Ad Hoc Group aims at bringing different European cross-border administrative experiences under a holistic analytical lens to test new ideas and approaches.
Lukáš Novotný
Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem (Czech Republic) & University of Chemistry and Technology Prague (Czech Republic)