People-to-people projects help healing the scars of history

(Foreword for Elbe-Labe Euroregion publication on people-to-people projects)

After many centuries of conflicts across most European borders, the last half a century has experienced an enormous growth of cross-border initiatives in Europe and a variety of instruments to get citizens closer where there traditionally was a huge divide. A very special type are these people-to-people projects and the small projects’ funds managing them. Their importance in deepening the relationship between citizens across national boundaries in many Central European border areas is yet hardly understood in other parts of Europe, which are more central, populated and developed, or in the desks where many of the regulations, programmes and guidelines are drafted, places where the border effect is not notorious.

It has been a very unequal and strong struggle for European border and cross-border regions to explain this type of projects to EU authorities, programme managers, etc. However, thanks to an open dialogue with the Commission, the support of the Committee of the Regions and also the European Parliament (REGI Committee), some strong steps have already been done in order to protect this particular, sometimes peculiar, way of connecting people across the border.

Very recently, in July 2017, the European Committee of the Regions has adopted an Own Opinion on people-to-people and small-scale projects in cross-border cooperation programmes, on the initiative of local politicians from cross-border regions. It is very relevant to highlight that the rapporteur has been the vice-mayor of a small border town in the Czech Republic, very active in a Euroregion at the triple Czech-German-Polish border, in the CoR and in the AEBR.

These are hard times for European integration and it is also the time to raise awareness about some good news of Europe: integration happens and build European citizenship in a daily basis at border and cross-border areas through the implementation of people-to-people projects. On the other hand, the management of small-project-funds make possible the operation of various cross-border structures in plenty of border areas. It is important to take into account that these structures (Euroregions) are main drivers of integration in their border zones.

And border regions are becoming more clearly in most political agendas. On 20 September the European Commission has adopted a Communication to the Council and the European Parliament on Boosting growth and cohesion in EU border regions, which launches a very interesting set of proposals of concrete action, and acknowledges in its first page the contribution of people-to-people projects to the transformation of border regions, particularly through Interreg.

When European Cohesion and its funding is under a big question mark, and the debate is open, all territorial stakeholders have the duty towards border citizens to defend and make more visible the importance of cross-border interventions at all levels in order to keep on healing the scars of history which still spot our continent.