| Summary: | Up to now border regions of national states have been and still are characterized by “ends”: the end of traffic and communication infrastructures, the end of national laws and mentalities. They have been part of the peripheral space surrounding the centre or the centres of national states. Borders have been and partly still are lines of more or less strict separation between one state and another, between one people and another. Encouraged by the increasing cooperation between the “centres” after World War II, border regions seek to change their bad situation caused, on both sides, by their separating border line, through cooperation across these lines. Initially represented by personal contacts, soon cooperation came to take institutional forms that would stimulate it. The most accepted of cross border cooperation becomes the “Euroregion.” Usually Euroregions are associations of neighbouring local or regional administrative units on the borderlines of two or three, rarely more than three states.Since 1957 when the so-called “Euregio” was founded on the German-Dutch border, these Euroregions have aimed at improving the welfare of the people on both sides of the border. One of the most effective ways to reach this aim is the holistic method of regional development. This means making use of the whole regional potential in a sustainable way for the people living in the region. Therefore, all Euroregions – beside their differences in size or organization – have common projects for cross border regional development. Slowly, Euroregions have been acknowledged as suitable instruments for cross border regional development.Soon after 1989 Euroregions appeared, by transfer and attraction, in the former widely isolated countries in Eastern Europe. One of the dozens of Euroregions now existing in this area is the DKMT-Euroregion, the “Danube-Körös-Maros-Tisza-Euroregion” between Serbia, Hungary, and Romania.
|
|---|