Project description
A European Integration History of Cross-Border Cooperation in the Greater Region and the Euregio Meuse-Rhine
The Euregio Meuse-Rhine and the Greater Region are two established institutional forms of Cross-Border Cooperation, both of which possess the EU status of European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation. They operate in regions with a high degree of interconnectedness, which can be seen above all in the commuter flows between the different sub-regions. Both have their origins in the early 1970s, are multilingual and are composed of institutional actors whose profiles differ considerably in terms of administrative and legal powers.
There has been no significant historical research on either of these associations to date. The aim of the project is to reflect on the role of the discipline of history in the interdisciplinary analysis of cross-border cooperation. This endeavour starts by examining the source material and its accessibility. On the methodological level, the existing social science data sets represent both an opportunity and a challenge, since dealing with them has become the subject of conceptual considerations in historical scholarship since the 2010s.
The increased integration of cross-border cooperation into a European legal framework has made structural security and financial incentives possible. However, the development of the legal framework is mostly lagging, if one looks, for example, at the recently intensified discussions on tax and social security law in border regions - whereby the historical perspective here leads back to the 1920s. According to one research hypothesis, the European legal framework increasingly harbours the danger that cross-border cooperation becomes an expert matter that never or no longer reaches many citizens. In a perspective of long duration, according to another hypothesis, successful formats of cooperation increasingly fall out of support, whereas the establishment of newer formats can be less and less creative and close to citizens due to administrative requirements. If one looks at the developments from a bottom-up perspective, one must ask to what extent the transformation of the founding spirit into more routine forms of cooperation does not also play a major role.
Personal Bio
Christoph Brüll is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (University of Luxembourg). He studied History and International Relations at the University of Liège and holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (2008). His research interests lay in the Transnational Political and Social History of Western Europe with a focus on the legacies of World War II and on Belgian-German relations. He is a co-founder of the Working Group ‘Border temporalities’ within the Center for Border Studies of the University of the Greater region. Since 2019, he serves as the Director of LOGOS, the doctoral network in the Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of the Greater Region.