Cross-Border Economic Relations Between Cooperation And Competition: The Aleas Of The Principle Of Reciprocity[Les Relations Economiques Transfrontalieres Entre Cooperation Et Competition: Les Aleas Du Principe De Reciprocite]

Cross-border territories constitute dualist organizations, in the sense given to this expression by Claude Lévy-Strauss in "The elementary structures of kinship". In the same anthropological perspective and correlatively, the principle of reciprocity occupies a central place in the organization of bilateral relations and in the normative devices which govern them. The individual or collective strategies of public or private actors in the cross-border "scene" fit, explicitly or implicitly, into this logic. In this context, this communication aims to highlight the inevitable contradictions between the multilateral logic specific to contemporary economic activity and the principle of reciprocity, which is at the heart of cross-border cooperation. This leads to proposing a specific framework for interpreting and modeling the cooperation versus competition tensions that characterize cross-border economic exchanges. Beyond these questions, there is also reason to wonder about the ways and means of building a dynamic of reciprocity which allows cross-border economic cooperation to overcome, over time, immediate situations of competition.