Focussing European borders: The book provides insight into a variety of changes in the nature of borders in Europe and its neighborhood from various disciplinary perspectives. Special attention is paid to the history and contemporary dynamics at Polish and German borders. Of particular interest are the creation of Euroregions, mutual perceptions of Poles and Germans at the border, EU Regional Policy, media debates on the extension of the Schengen area. Analysis of cross-border mobility between Abkhazia and Georgia or the impact of Israel's »Security Fence« to Palestine on society complement the focus on Europe with a wider view.

Borders and border regions are shaped by many phenomena connected with both co-operation and conflict. The neighbourhood, cross-border contacts, illegal migration, border crossings, prejudices and stereotypes, border guards, and perceptions of borders are some of the key words that characterize the articles in this volume. The book deals with European border regions that have experienced numerous changes over the 20th century. Because of this changeable, frequently painful past, different human stories – mostly tragic or romanticized – individual and collective memories, mythologies with heroes, and divergent perceptions of history developed. Most authors in this volume deal with conflicts and co-operation that can either be remembered or forgotten.

Focussing European borders: The book provides insight into a variety of changes in the nature of borders in Europe and its neighborhood from various disciplinary perspectives. Special attention is paid to the history and contemporary dynamics at Polish and German borders. Of particular interest are the creation of Euroregions, mutual perceptions of Poles and Germans at the border, EU Regional Policy, media debates on the extension of the Schengen area. Analysis of cross-border mobility between Abkhazia and Georgia or the impact of Israel's "Security Fence" to Palestine on society complement the focus on Europe with a wider view.

The "deepening and widening" of the EU has thrown its changing internal and external borders into sharp relief. This work demonstrates that borders are key spaces within which issues such as identity, memory and trust, and communication between states continue to be played out and transformed.

Addressing and conceptualizing the changing character of borders in contemporary Europe, this book examines developments occurring in the light of European integration processes and an on-going tightening of Europe's external borders. Moreover, the book suggests new ways of investigating the nature of European borders by looking at border practices in the light of the mobility turn, and thus as dynamic, multiple, diverse and best expressed in everyday experiences of people living at and with borders, rather than focusing on static territorial divisions between states and regions at geopolitical level. It provides border scholars and researchers as well as policymakers with new empirical and theoretical evidence on the de- and re-bordering processes going on in diverse border regions in Europe, both within and outside of the EU.

Borders exist in almost every sphere of life. Initially, borders were established in connection with kingdoms, regions, towns, villages and cities. With nation-building, they became important as a line separating two national states with different “national characteristics,” narratives and myths. The term “border” has a negative connotation for being a separating line, a warning signal not to cross a line between the allowed and the forbidden. The awareness of both mental and factual borders in manifold spheres of our life has made them a topic of consideration in almost all scholarly disciplines – history, geography, political science and many others. This book primarily incorporates an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political science scholars from a diverse range of European universities analyze historical as well as contemporary perceptions and perspectives concerning border regions – inside the EU, between EU and non-EU European countries, and between European and non-European countries.

During the last two centuries, the political map of Europe has changed considerably. More recently, there are remarkably contrasting tendencies concerning the functions and densities of borders. The borders inside the European Union lost their importance, whereas Central and Eastern Europe saw the birth of a multitude of new state borders. The long-term study of border regions, therefore, is a fascinating subject for geographers, historians, social scientists, and political scientists. The main thesis of this book is that the rise of the modern nation-state reinforced the separating function of state borders by nationalising the people on both sides of it. This process gained strength in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was challenged in the second half of this century by processes of supra-national integration, globalisation and the revolution in communication and transport, as the case studies from different parts of Europe of this book will show. Audience: This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and practitioners in geography, history, political sciences, European studies and East-European studies.

State borders are somewhere the state is keen to stress its presence and yet are simultaneously places where that presence is challenged. They are sites of resistance to the state, and at the same time places where the national interest is vigorously maintained. This constant ambiguity generates questions about the dynamics of borderland-state relations, and about how what happens along the border can undermine state policies. Using case studies of nation and state relations in borderlands in Europe this book seeks to understand how structures of power are created, experienced, changed and reproduced.

'Borders' have attracted considerable attention in public and academic debates in light of the impact of globalisation and, in Europe, the end of the divisions of the Cold War era. Instead, being inside or outside of the EU has become a major paradigmatic divide between claimed 'spheres of influence' by 'Brussels' and 'Moscow' respectively. In the aftermath of the end of communism, established certainties no longer seemed to apply. And this included many of the borders within the former eastern Bloc, with some losing their relevance, while others re-assert themselves. As its particular contribution, this book adopts a symbiotic approach to the analysis of borders, drawing on a political-economy perspective, while also recognising the importance of the socio-cultural dimension as found in 'border studies'. This seeks to do greater justice to the complex, composite nature of borders as geo-political, state-legal and cultural-historic constructs in both theory and practice. In addition, the book's approach stretches across spatial scales to capture the multi-level nature of borders. The first part of the book presents the conceptual framework as it sets out to embrace this multi-faceted, multi-layered nature of borders. In the second part, case studies from north-central Europe, including the Baltic Sea Region, exemplify the complexity of borders in the context of post-socialist transformation and continuing EU-isation.