BUILDING CROSS-BORDER COMMUNITIES THROUGH COOPERATION: EU REGIONAL POLICY AND CROSS-BORDER REGIONS AS SPACES OF GOVERNMENT

The European Union’s cross-border cooperation initiatives are perceived as an important tool for harnessing the process of European integration, which includes the ideas of fostering economic competitiveness and reducing regional discrepancies. The paper aims to analyse the role and function of notions of cooperation and cross-border communities used and advanced within the EU regional policy and, more specifically, within the European Territorial Cooperation objective. We argue that cooperation is a specific governmental technology which works through the promises of incorporation and inclusion of different stakeholders, binding them into more or less durable and institutionalised cross-border communities. Through cooperation, members of the community can be mobilised in novel programmes which encourage and harness political practices of self-responsibility and self-management. As such, cooperation is promoted as a necessary feature for building, cultivating and fostering cross-border communities in which self-disciplined citizens and other stakeholders are governed such that they are deemed responsible agents in their own development.