NEW REGIONALISM AND EU BORDER REGIONS: REMOVING LEGAL AND ADMINSITRATIVE OBSTACLES
NEW REGIONALISM AND EU BORDER REGIONS: REMOVING LEGAL AND ADMINSITRATIVE OBSTACLES

Summary/Abstract: The EU regional policy pays particular attention to border regions, however, the past decades, underlined also the paradoxical situation surrounding these parts of the EU. Despite the fact that border regions connect Member States’ markets into an internal market, and that they mark the natural geographical channels for the free circulation of economic factors, the economic performance of the border regions is generally more modest in comparison with inner territories of the Member States. Recent researches have shown that this contradiction is rooted in specific barriers, which go much beyond the obstacles that are covered by the EU funding treaties in the context of the internal market freedoms. Even though these barriers are also of legal, regulatory and administrative nature and are able to restrict drastically the cross-border interactions, are not explicitly prohibited by the treaties. Therefore, the main question of the paper is how to identify and how to dismantle these legal and administrative obstacles. In line with this objective, the paper conducts a case-to-case analysis to identify the possible forms of obstacles and also scrutinizes the currently deadlocked legislative procedure for establishing a mechanism to eliminate barriers in the border regions (draft ECBM Regulation).

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