Governance – Power – Cooperation

Depending on location, European border regions can look back on several decades of development in their histories of cooperation. For the Franco-German region this stretches back to the post-World War 2 reconciliation between the two countries, for the German-Polish borderlands to the raising of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of Germany in 1990. It is, however, easy to forget how fragile cross-border relations can still be: something the Covid pandemic, with its limping crisis management, brought powerfully home in the months of and after spring 2020. Poor cross-border communications and inadequate foresight as to their effects exacerbated the problems – old as well as new – caused by re-erecting long disused checkpoints and closing borders. In the present time of polycrisis it is more than ever important to review the Covid era and to analyze the nature and timescale of resilience in cross-border cooperation.

In a project based on empirical surveys and funded by the German-Polish Science Foundation, the four authors of the present policy paper outline a number of development perspectives for the Franco-German and German-Polish borderlands. Differentiating among resilience factors according to their capacity for resistance, adaptation, and transformation, practical recommendations are given for the enhancement of crisis management in both regions. The recommendations cover four areas:

• Communication between decision-makers must be improved and widened at all levels – vertical, horizontal, and diagonal – taking account of varying structures and responsibilities in the face of specific borderland challenges. Informal as well as formal communications are of central importance, not only in times of crisis but permanently. Suitable provision should also be made for cross-border residents.
• Of central importance is the growth of responsible cooperation on the basis of familiarity and trust, political will and mutual transparency. Borderland-specific measures can play a major role here, as does the reinforcement of intercultural competence.
• Key players and structures should be familiar to people across all levels of action: this can provide a basis for common cross-border growth. Suitable measures for improving knowledge transfer, disseminating good practice, and developing scenarios for response to future crises include the exchange of personnel and regular practice sessions. Apart from crises, such measures foster relations on an everyday level. All of this presumes the existence of adequate funding for border regions.
• The EU perspective on borderlands as ‘living laboratories of European integration’ requires that their potential for the development of the EU be taken seriously and vitally enacted. The opportunities offered by a Europe of open frontiers should be actively publicized – also as a means to anticipate and counter any feelings of cultural or national resentment. 

This collection of essays pays attention to the biopolitical intricacies surrounding borders, with a particular focus on the Global North, encompassing North America and Europe. It dwells on the growing importance of biopolitical perspectives in Cultural Border Studies and aims at re-thinking Europe and the Americas through the crises and challenges they pose. By scrutinizing biopolitics, the negotiation of crises, and the state of exception in literature, the arts, and political discourse, this thematic issue probes the multifaceted dimensions of biopolitical control, highlighting the interplay between state authority and the lives of those impacted by these regulations. Border biopolitics then emerges as a complex nexus of authority, surveillance, control, and management of human lives on, at, and across borders.

In the 21st century, cooperative cross-border projects in many peripheral areas of EU member states have steadily gained in importance; but, as the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated, they can by no means be taken for granted. Borderland cooperation involves many actors, and complex as well as varied background conditions. Funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (project key 01UC2104), the network project ‘Linking Borderlands: Dynamics of Cross-Border Peripheries’ undertakes a comparative analysis of two borderland regions, one in south-western, one in eastern Germany: the so-called Greater Region on the borders of Belgium, France, Germany, and Luxembourg, and the Brandenburg-Lubuskie Region straddling the German-Polish border. The Working Paper outlines the background to EU borderland cooperation and sketches some central lines of development taken by border studies, before presenting its five constituent perspectives.

Up until May 2021, the post-election insecurity in Belarus had mostly been a national affair, but with Lukashenka’s regime starting to retaliate against foreign actors, the crisis internationalised. This article follows the development of Belarus-Lithuania border dynamics between the 2020 Belarusian presidential election and the start of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A qualitative content analysis of English-language articles published by Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT shows that shows that there were relatively few changes to the border dynamics in the period between 9 August 2020 and 26 May 2021. After 26 May 2021, the border dynamics changed significantly: The Belarusian regime started facilitating migration, and more than 4,200 irregular migrants crossed into Lithuania from Belarus in 2021. In response, Lithuania reinforced its border protection and tried to deal with the irregular migration flows. Calls for action were made, protests were held, and the country received international support.

The paper aims to recognize the changes in the barriers to cross-border educational projects, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research focused on the European borderlands, where the level of maturity of cross-border cooperation is diverse (the Franco-German and Polish-Czech borderlands). The author utilised qualitative research methods (desk research, in-depth interview, case study). An exploratory study covered the barriers existing before the pandemic that stayed stable or have changed during the pandemic, and the new types of barriers that have appeared then. Within both borderlands, the identified barriers were similar in general; however, their intensity was varied. The key difference was the approach to these barriers within each borderland. On the Franco-German border, cross-border cooperation is more complex and deeper, and on the Polish-Czech border, it is more superficial and focused on specific issues only. These differences reveal the solutions that should be implemented to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on those projects within each borderland.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the related border restrictions have had numerous social, economic and political consequences for border regions. The temporary border closures impacted not only the lives of borderlanders whose everyday practices are embedded in cross-border spaces, but also the functioning of institutional actors involved in cross-border activities. The aim here is to investigate the communication surrounding the pandemic and the reactions and (new) strategies of cross-border institutional actors in the context of (re)bordering. Applying the concept of resilience, this paper explores coping mechanisms and modes of adaptation as well as strategies developed to adjust to new circumstances. Against this backdrop, factors that enhanced or hindered the adaptation process were identified. The German-Polish borderland serves here as a case study, although it will be situated within a wider European context.