Cross-Border Cooperation in the Euro-Mediterranean and Beyond: Between Policy Transfers and Regional Adaptations
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Cross-Border Cooperation in the Euro-Mediterranean and Beyond: Between Policy Transfers and Regional Adaptations Filippo Celata • Raffaella Coletti
Published online: 27 February 2013 Ó EMUNI 2013
Abstract Since 2007, the Euro-Mediterranean area has been included among the mesoregions covered by the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). Such a choice has not been exempted from criticisms, insofar as the geographical coverage of the ‘‘European Neighbourhood’’ has been judged too wide and too diverse to be the object of a single policy. The aims and scope of the European Union’s strategies towards Mediterranean countries, moreover, are different from those towards the Eastern European Countries, while policy instruments, implementation procedures and political narratives are more or the less the same. The paper addresses the case of one of those policy instruments: Cross-Border Cooperation, an important component of the ENP; it presents a comparative analysis of Cross-Border Cooperation initiatives in the Euro-Mediterranean area vis-a`-vis similar initiatives launched in other ENP’s mesoregions. The implementation of the policy, it is argued, is based indeed upon a mixture of policy transfers and local adaptations, and produces both homogenizations and differentiations. The aim of the paper is to see how a single policy instrument (Cross-Border Cooperation within the ENP) is adapted to the specificities of each mesoregion, what kind of regionalization and bordering/crossbordering processes it produces, and what role the Euro-Mediterranean area is supposed to play in this frame. Keywords European Neighbourhood Policy Cross-Border Cooperation Euro-Mediterranean area European Union
F. Celata (&) R. Coletti Memotef Department, University of Rome La Sapienza, Via del Castro Laurenziano 9, 00161 Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected] R. Coletti e-mail: [email protected]
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F. Celata, R. Coletti
The Euro-Mediterranean area, the European Neighbourhood Policy and Cross-Border Cooperation After the 2004 enlargement, the relations of the EU with its neighbouring countries have been managed in the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), definitively launched in 2007 and including all countries surrounding the EU which are not candidates for accession. The aim of the ENP is to increase cooperation and cross-border relations along the EU external frontier, following the idea that the EU countries and their non-EU neighbours should ‘‘share everything but institutions’’, as famously declared by the president of the EU Commission in 2003, Romano Prodi. The idea is that of creating a ‘‘wider Europe’’, based upon a multi-scalar and post-national geography with blurred borders. One of the main criticisms towards the ENP is indeed the policy’s geographical delimitation (Aliboni 2005; Dimitrovova 2010a). Even the European Parliament expressed doubts about ‘‘the meaningfulness of the ENP’s geographical scope, as it involves countries which are, geographically and culturally, European toget
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