Cross-Border Regions: The Gap Between the Elite's Projects and People's Awareness. Reflections from the Galicia-North Portugal Euroregion

In the last 20 years, numerous cross-border regions have been launched across Europe. Many studies have been carried out dealing with the analysis of regional building processes. Most of them focus on the work developed by local elites profiting from economic, political and institutional factors to build up cross-border regions. Studies focusing on people's knowledge of these cross-border projects and regions have also been developed. The gap that might open up between the elite's projects and people's knowledge of them can raise several questions: is cross-border cooperation better understood as a functional or as a democratic and participatory opportunity? Are cross-border regions the desired laboratories for European integration? Are border people engaged in this institutionalized cooperation? First of all, this contribution will discuss these general questions in light of recent theoretical and practical studies on European cross-border cooperation. Secondly, it will exemplify the theory with a case study on the Galicia-North Portugal Euroregion. After briefly presenting the main actors and processes involved in the cross-border region building, this paper shows the results of fieldwork based on a survey conducted by the author in Galicia and North Portugal. The investigation had three objectives: (a) to assess general knowledge of the term Euroregion, the cross-border bodies and the cross-border projects; (b) to assess the degree of relevance of cross-border cooperation to euroregional integration; and (c) to assess the degree of similarities and differences between Galicians and Northern Portuguese. The results of the survey show that the inhabitants of Galicia and North Portugal are mostly unaware of the existence and working methods of the different bodies that sustain the Euroregion, although they express a high level of interest in fostering cross-border cooperation initiatives and a high degree of empathy towards neighbors. This paper concludes by discussing the results of the case study in relation to the theoretical aspects presented in the first part.