Paper short abstract:

New institutions on the new eastern border of the EU can help to re-establish cultural links, renew material culture around borders, and remove old tensions. The paper will investigate the extent to which these new institutions can encourage the re-emergence of old transboundary cultural phenomena.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout the period of the Cold War, the republics of the Soviet Union bordering on what is now the eastern border of the EU, were generally considered in the West not to belong to Europe and to be something of a culturally amorphous mass and largely without any independent identity. Attitudes towards the former Yugoslavia were more attenuated, but even here, little distinction was made between its constituent states. Today it is clear that not only are the states which have emerged, so painfully in former Yugoslavia, culturally very different, but each of them is also culturally and ethnically mixed. Nowhere is this latter phenomenon so evident as in the border regions, most especially those which are now adjacent to the EU's new member states.

This complicated neighbourhood situation, the result of many historical events and compromises, has served gradually to bring societies which were ignored by the self-appointed dominant west European states, back onto the European stage. The EU's new neighbourhood strategy is an attempt at an inclusive policy, which seeks to 'prevent the emergence of new dividing lines between the enlarged EU and its neighbours'. Specifically the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), with its proposed movement 'from cooperation to a significant degree of integration' together with new funding regimes to aid this process, aims to be a catalyst in the blurring of dividing lines. New institutions can help to re-establish old cultural links, to renew the material culture on both sides of respective borders, as well as to enable the removal of old tensions which may exist between the two sides. The paper will use interviews with cross-border actors to determine the extent to which these new institutions can encourage the re-emergence of old transboundary cultural phenomena.