Those who like us live "on the margins" of the French space are naturally confronted with the border issue. With European integration, yesterday’s "dead ends" have one by one opened up to the neighbouring territories and little by little the margins are becoming "centres".
Daily life in northern Lorraine has been cross-border for a long time. Our parents already crossed the border to fill the tanks of their cars or to win the iron ore on the other side. Since then things have sped up. The area of influence of Luxemburg has extended further into Belgium and France, and within a few years we have become cross-border metropolitan citizens, or "transpolitans", living in emerging metropolitan areas astride the old national borders. Here, in a cross-border urban area, Europe is not a meaningless word.
After years marked by deliberate policies on the part of the states and Europe, cross-border cooperation must now move up to a new dimension, one of practices, customs and citizens. This is a change from cooperation as exemplary to cooperation as the ordinary, from the laboratory of Europe to the day-to-day life of Europeans.
As a member of the MOT network, we advocate a new impetus for cross-border cooperation, requiring a change of view and the introduction of suitable instruments, for it is undoubtedly on the margins that systems are reinvented.
Within the framework of the "operation of national interest" launched last October, we anticipate increased resources, the kick-off of negotiations on the issues of scope and governance, and the establishment of an Etablissement public d’aménagement (public development agency) in which the local elected representatives would play a full part. With regard to development and daily life, border areas today are excellent platforms of territorial innovation from which the French state should benefit in the context of the "big-bang of the territories" we are promised. The margins are an opportunity for France. Let us grasp it!
Source: Cross-border news, No. 54, November 2009
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