Belonging and Identity in the European Border Towns: Self-Centered Borders, Hetero-Centered Borders

This paper investigates the complexity specific to the concept of belonging and identity at the European border area level. These issues are explored by a research on European border cities, within which factorial meanings are identified. There are five of such meanings: feelings of security and community, contents of the originality, negative soul of ethnic cosmopolitanism, aesthetics of time, and border town evoking marginalization. These meanings are used to identify clusters of borders, which are: central European borders, central-northern European borders, borders where negative meanings are prevalent, the Polish-Belarus-Lithuanian borders, border towns where being a town is worth more than being on a border. These perspectives allow for verification of how borders are either hetero-centered or self-centered. Hetero-centered borders project their own belongings and identities to the cities which are located beyond the border. Self-centered borders project belongings and identities to their own national city, region, nation. The paper ends by identifying self-centered and hetero-centered borders individually in their capacity to express cooperation among cities located on both sides of the border.