The 2020 public health crisis aroused very diverse reactions within the European Union in terms of migration policy. Initially these measures impacted migrant works in essential sectors of the Union's internal economy (including healthcare and agriculture). Then when it came to getting the economy restarted, these workers had to return to work, very often without sufficient account being taken of their precarious situation and safety. In this context, the existing migration systems played a dual role: channels used by States in the earliest days of the crisis, but then remobilised by the workers who wanted their rights and their safety to be respected.
This article details the process of the formation of the Greater Region as a specific space for cross-border cooperation in Western Europe. The author recounts the history and background to this cooperation and presents the different regions making up the cross-border territory. He then explains its specific socio-economic features through the themes of cross-border working and labour immigration. Finally, he details several cooperation projects initiated, including the cross-border polycentric metropolitan region (RMPT) project. This last example is emblematic of the difficulties involved in future cooperation in this territory.
Since 2007, the Trinational Agglomeration of Basel has allowed the coordination and implementation of concrete measures across the entire territory of the agglomeration. These measures meet the objective of articulating the preservation of landscapes,, the management of urban development and the implementation of public transport services within the territory of the agglomeration. The project is led by a trinational association Agglo Basel of which all the local authorities making up the agglomeration are members. The overall project is designed to ensure that investments in infrastructure are coordinated and balanced between the three national components of the agglomeration.
In France, cooperation projects initiated by local authorities are managed at a decentralised level and, more often than not, result from free initiatives. These cooperation projections grouped together under the general term of "external actions of local authorities" are supported by a ministerial delegation. This support is implemented by different bodies (the National Commission on Decentralised Cooperation (CNCD), the Directorate General for Local Authorities (DGCL), enabled by different funding sources accessible via calls for projects and encouraged by different networking mechanisms.
This collective publication offers an insight into some of the many and varied social and political practices emerging in the border regions of the Western world as a reaction to the phenomenon of globalisation. It proposes to qualify these practices with the notion of "B/ordering space". One thing they all have in common is that they are processes linked to the existence of borders which manifest on a spatial and territorial level.
The Center for Inter American and Border Studies (CIBS) has established itself as a benchmark in the field of border studies by capitalising on the expertise on its own border territory. As well as often being high-profile, this territory presents some important challenges in terms of governance, demography and migration, as well as access to education and healthcare, employment and economic development. To meet these challenges the centre has developed an interdisciplinary approach specific to the territory studied, and a high level of expertise.
The twinning mechanism, which has become very widespread since in Europe since the end of the Second World War, is analysed in this study through its concrete effects on populations and its impact on the sense of belonging to the community of Europeans. The study is based on a questionnaire that was circulated very widely to the local authorities concerned. It provides insights into the spillover effects of the many exchanges that take place as part of twinning schemes and offers some recommendations to reinforce and renew these dynamics.
The LEADER subsidy measure is characterised by a "bottom-up approach", i.e. the people on site decide about the local integrated rural development strategy (LILE) for their region within the LEADER action group (LAG). They choose the projects to be subsidised based on transparent and objective selection criteria. To make rural spaces in Rhineland-Palatinate future-capable, the funding period of 2014 to 2020 has sustainable projects and processes at the focus of promotion in twenty selected LEADER regions. Beyond this, the innovation and economic power in the regions, intermunicipal cooperation, tourism and nature protection are to be strengthened. The goal is achieving a sustainable structural further development of the LEADER regions by developing and trying out answers to urgent challenges of our time. This includes, in particular, demographic change, countering climate change, preservation and creation of jobs, environmental and resource protection.
LEADER permits participation of rural spaces and their populations in the subsidy backdrop of the EU, thereby also contributing to letting the EU goals reach rural spaces and enabling them to contribute to the Europe 2020 strategy, while also increasing acceptance and citizen proximity of the EU.
The term "border" is characterised by its complexity in connection with its linguistically ambiguous character. The work analyses the concept of the border under a multidisciplinary approach. All eight contributions are based on two approaches: internationalist political science theory on the one hand and social sciences on the other hand. This work has an entirely new, diversified methodical approach. It offers added value for the traditional approaches of political sciences and international relationships regarding the term of "border", in which the multidisciplinary perspective is supported. This approach permits integration of development of this concept and shows that several shared properties exist in spite of the different areas.
In spite of their small sizes, Luxembourg and Switzerland have a high demand for workers. In particular, they offer employment opportunities to people crossing the border to work. The situation in the main employment sites (Luxembourg, Basel, Geneva) – but also Ticino – is the object of the subject leaflet that 19 authors submit contributions with comparing perspectives. Under consideration of central context features and methodological considerations, the geographers, economists, sociologists and politologists considered in particular the labour market, cross-border everyday life and social perception of cross-border commuters. The multidisciplinary approach was eventually condensed by the editors into shared challenges between Luxembourg and Switzerland.
