New instruments for border regions in a Commission’s Communication

In 2017 State of the Union Speech there was no reference to Cohesion, which is a keyword for all of us who are connected to regional and territorial policy and cooperation. But cohesion runs its own race in current European debate. The 7^th Cohesion Forum took place last June, and the 7^th Cohesion Report has been announced for October 2017. In the meantime, the Commission’s Communication to the Council and the European Parliament Boosting growth and cohesion in EU border regions has settle the focus in CBC, in particular highlighting “ways in which Europe can reduce the complexity, length and costs of cross-border interaction and promote the pooling of services along internal borders”. A Border Focal Point (BFP) at the Directorate General of Regional and Urban Policy is going to be a major advance to address doubts, questions, etc., on the implementation of legislation and the coordination of administrative procedures, including the use of e-tools. An online professional network will discuss about legal and administrative issues and solutions through the online platform Futurium moderated by the BFP. Special attention is paid to Interreg as an instrument to solve cross-border obstacles, people-to-people projects, and smart specialisation. 

20 pilot projects are going to be selected in order to test possible solutions to legal and administrative obstacles, legislative measures are recommended, e-government will be promoted as a tool to facilitate cross-border administrative procedures under the once-only principle, information services for citizens such as SOLVIT are to be reinforced and new ones should be in place, full support to cross-border employment, border multi-lingualism, CB accessibility, pooling of health care facilities and mapping of CB health cooperation. Besides, a new instrument is under consideration to apply the rules of a Member State in the neighbouring one for a specific project or action limited in time, located within a border region and initiated by local and/or regional public authorities. Furthermore, building evidence of CB interaction to inform decision-makers will be promoted by collecting data and evidence on border obstacles. The coordination of national institutes of statistics is on-going in order to produce cross-border data. ESPON promotes territorial research linked to border regions.

All this promising scenario has to be taken into account within the discussions on the possible reduction of the budget due to the Brexit and other circumstances. We consider that Territorial Cooperation should not suffer from the cuts, and get even more relevance by earmarking resources in other programmes that only Interreg. And the same should happen with the programmes at the external borders of the EU. A healthy internal EU CBC should provoke stronger external EU CBC. In these times, what is really good news for all regions at the internal borders of the EU/EFTA, should be extended soon to the external borders, to those between the countries of the Neighbourhood Policy, the IPA ones and with the Russian Federation.

After two years of a strong commitment within the Cross-Border Review, the AEBR has deeply welcomed this Communication as a very good opportunity for EU border regions to make a qualitative jump into a further phase of cross-border development and integration, adding an enormous value to the European project. However, we deeply regret that only EU internal land borders are the main object of this set of actions. We have already discussed this with the Commission and different stakeholders, having recommended to promote a specific study for CBC in maritime borders, and a specific initiative addressed to CBC programmes co-financed by the European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI CBC) and CBC programmes within the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA-CBC). We are convinced that further actions proposed in the Communication for internal EU land borders will produce an invaluable benefit for the development of these territories, and this will be the main argument to initiate a similar exercise in EU maritime and external border regions.