Covidfencing effects on cross-border deterritorialism: the case of Europe

The article opens with a run-through of the global effects of the health crisis and more specifically the closure of the borders in Europe, closure which have severely tested the coherence of the Schengen Area. It also mentions and commends the resilience of the cross-border organisations that reacted to these closures by collecting data or producing forward-looking reflections.

The first part contains a set of definitions. First of all, the process of "deterritorialisation" is what allows things to operate independently of belonging to national territories. It is made possible by the sharing or elimination of different economic, social, legal, cultural, physical, environmental or institutional parameters. This first process is the opposite of the process of "territorialisation".

The objective of the article is to understand how the closure of the borders in the context of the public health crisis impacted the process of deterritorialisation in different fields. In the social field, it is possible to identify problems that arose providing healthcare services in certain cross-border regions, the restricted mobility of healthcare staff and patients, the mistrust that arose as regards the risks of contamination due to the mobility of people. Among the positive effects, there were also, momentarily, examples of cooperation and synergies to overcome these obstacles. In the economic field and the area of physical exchanges, blockages obviously arose on certain transport routes, at the English Channel, for example. Cooperation measures that had been planned in the medium term were speeded up, where opportune, to minimise these blockages. Exchanges of good practices also became possible. In areas like the environment, few impacts were identified, due in particular to the relatively short duration of the closures.

The last part of the article analyses and maps the territorial impacts of the crisis on cross-border cooperation processes, in five dimensions: accessibility and institutional, economic, social and cultural cooperation. The cross-border regions most dependent on cross-border economic dynamics were naturally more impacted by the border closures. These maps show that there is an imbalance between economic dependency on borders and dependency in the social, cultural and institutional fields.