Cross-border cooperation: a global overview

Abstract

This article is a review of regional cross-border coordination and cooperation around the world. Two questions are raised: when trade dominates, does economic or functional interdependency result in cross-border linkages? Second, when politics and institutions mediate cross-border relations, do economic relations intensify? Specifically, do local–central networks of government actors and institutions mediate such processes when they emerge? To investigate those two questions, this work focuses on cross-border relations in various parts of the world primarily focusing of the role trading relations or local–central relations would play in developing cross-border networks spanning an international boundary. In an era of globalisation, increased trade across regions of the world seem to have led to a specific increased cross-border cooperation, however, taking different forms from intense trading relations to resulting cross-border institutionalisation. Those forms of cross-border cooperation in the various regions of the world, however, do not result from the same drivers: For the purpose of a comparative analysis of cross-border relations, the argument developed here is that regional drivers determine types of relations from no relations to intense trading and government-like forms of cooperation. However, in most cases as suggested below, the prime drivers of cross-border relations, trade, do not necessarily translate into increased border spanning governmental activism, and government cross-border institutionalisation does not necessarily transmute into increased economic integration.

Introduction

Regional cross-border coordination and cooperation may emerge from trade and/or good neighbourly relationship between states. In this chapter, two questions are raised: (1) when trade dominates, does economic or functional interdependency results in cross-border linkages? (2) When politics and institutions mediate cross-border relations, do economic relations intensify? Specifically, do local–central networks of government actors and/or other organisations mediate such processes when they emerge?

To investigate those two questions, this work focuses on cross-border relations in various parts of the world: Africa, Asia and South Asia, Europe, Latin American and North America, each time primarily focusing on the role trading relations or local–central relations would play in developing cross-border networks spanning an international boundary.

This paper is divided in five main section reviewing the situation in Africa, Asia and South Asia, Europe, Latin America, and last in, North America. Despite the surviving legacies of the colonial period and subsequent border disputes, the chapter asks whether in our era of globalisation, increased trade across regions is leading to more cross-border coordination and cooperation, however, taking different forms from intense trading relations to resulting cross-border institutionalisation. Those forms of cross-border coordination and cooperation in various regions of the world, however, may not result from the same driver. For the purpose of a comparative analysis of cross-border relations, the argument developed here is that regional drivers determine various types of relationships, from no relations to intense trading and government-like forms of coordination and cooperation. However, in most cases as suggested below, the prime driver of regional cross-border relation, trade, does not necessarily translate into increased border spanning governmental activism, and government cross-border institutionalisation does not necessarily transmute into increased economic integration.

Africa

Today, African countries share about 100 open-border disputes over about 170,000 km of boundary lines. All in all, this is a lot of dispute over 182 dyads in total, 109 terrestrial/land and 73 maritime divide 55 countries including 16 that are landlocked. The resolution of the first ordinary session of the assembly of heads of state and government held in Cairo, Union of Arab Republic, of 1964 (OAU, 1964; OAS, 2021) had suggested to the nascent decolonised African continent that decolonised countries had to agree to the limits set by their colonisers. Despite the ambitious program of the African Union (AU) of 2007 (AUBP, 2020); today, most African countries have not been able to resolve those poorly delineated borders and concurrent disputes because of varied territorial, positional and functional dispute reasons. Indeed, in 2020, only about 35% of all boundary lines had been demarcated; that is, nearly 110,000 km of boundary is not properly marked on the ground. In Gbenga Oduntan’s brilliantly documented Law and Boundary Disputes in Africa (2015), it is clear that prior to colonisation, the continent local and regional-imperial authorities had boundaries, walls and delineation makers. Unfortunately, those were unknown or ignored by colons, and since then, too many states showed limited interest in the AU initiative to delineate their boundary lines; a challenging task for a continent 6.1 million square kilometres large. Indeed, despite the 2014 African Union’s convention on Cross-Border Cooperation, which set the Agenda 2063 for an ‘integrated continent, politically united and includes a world class integrative infrastructure that criss-crosses the continent’, the current political climate of rising nationalism, population expansion and environmental tensions, all contribute to making those tensions worse (Agenda 2063). Obviously, the goal is to seek greater political and economic integration, in particular, to increase intra-African trade beyond current 15.5% (UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), 2017). Indeed, that is goal #8 of Agenda 2063 (Agenda 2063). Recent figures are very far from this goal: total intra-African trade, defined as the average of intra-African exports and Imports, was about 2% for 2015–2017; Comparative figures for America, Asia and Europe are, respectively, 30%, 59% and 68% (UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), 2017).

Obviously, such a background sets an unfortunate stage for the development of cross-border regions across the continent, yet local and regional trading relationship does exist across borders, and minorities straddle those many borderlands as well – thus a rather complex and tense continental situation. A sweeping overview would suggest that there are very few well established cross-border regions on the continent. Yet, a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2017) assumes that studying policy networks may provide some information on, or at the least on the existing potential there may be for, cross-border cooperation in West Africa (OECD, 2017). Focusing of economic, social and political disparities, the report points to situations whereby they are either ‘obstacle’ to, or ‘source of synergies’ for, cross-border cooperation (2017, p. 22). The OECD suggests that (1) there is potential for cooperation, particularly in the Sahel region; (2) that local specificities are fundamental for those potential realisations; (3) in some regions, the core regional cross-border actors are well-connected government bodies and local organisations: Senegal River valley and Lake Chad basin. Yet counter intuitively, cooperative networks of non-governmental actors organise the Liptako-Gourma cooperation. All in all, for local and regional actors, (4) the Lagos-Cotonou conurbation, the Dendi, the Hausa country, the border between Togo and Burkina Faso, and the Sikasso-Korhogo-Bobo Dioulasso triangle have the greatest potential. All in all, the OECD report suggests that African states should integrate cross-border policies alongside their other sectoral policies (2017, p. 24).

In sum, international efforts such as the African Union Border Program have attempted to alleviate border disputes across the African continent with little success. However, across West Africa, cross-border potentials exist and are conceivably important and real in some regions. Trade and local-regional minority networks enhance those potentials but struggle because of current post-colonial nationalist policies.

Asia and East Asia: Contrasting Functional Economic Regions

In Asia and South East Asia, border disputes remain a major challenge to peace and economic prosperity in this vast region of the world; too many disputes involve armed conflicts. Unfortunately, territorial, positional and functional disputes, including over natural resources, continue to fuel violence in borderlands. Minority displacements, as well, are a major impediment to enhanced economic development and trade. Interestingly, exceptions to these observations also exist and are well-known global cross-border economic regions: Hong Kong or Singapore is a good example. Regrettably, the situation in East Asia is particularly tense, with disputes on nearly all of India’s dyads with one of its five territorial neighbours (Pakistan, China, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh) (Avis, 2020; Brunet-Jailly, 2015). Possibly best known worldwide is the ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir; it has not been resolved since 1947 at the time of partition. Control and access to resources have made this specific situation dearer: the Baglihar Dam construction on the Chenab River in Kashmir by India is a good example. Pakistan argued that the project violated the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. The issue was resolved in 2010 after a 2005–07 arbitration. Furthermore, the border between Pakistan and India is now famous for its ditch and fences, and shoot to kill policy on the southern section. From May 2019 to May 2020, the Indo-Pak Conflict Monitor, a consulting firm, registered 143 cases of violation of cease fire of the border by either side (Indo-Pak Conflict Monitor, 2019). For the World Bank, such relations mean for Pakistan and India a 35 billion gap between real trade and potential trade, and for the whole of south Asia (the old world of the Greater India region), the World Bank estimates the economic loss for India at 44 billion in annual trade with its contiguous neighbours (Kathuria, 2018, p. 1). India and Nepal also had to deal with the Madheshi dispute when a cross-border community decided to block the border in 2015. Bangladesh and India also have had disputes along their 4096.7 km boundary line. Indeed, the porous nature of the border has become a political issue in New Delhi, which makes the life of borderland minorities particularly difficult, where it seems borderlands are military buffer zones and civilian are not welcome (Tripathi, 2020). The boundary line is known for its number of deaths and fenced areas.

Also well-known is the South China Sea Maritime disputes, which is possibly one of the most complex disputes in the region (Buhk, 2020) in particular because it overlaps with many natural resource’s areas, oil and gas, and has strategical importance for China because a major part of its maritime trade routes transit through the area. It involves China, Taiwan, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia. Interestingly, however, pan-Asian intra-trade stands at 59% and thus compares well with North America (30%) and Europe (68%).

Despite this unfortunate context and in parts because of outstanding intra-trade relations, a number of cross-border coordination and cooperation areas have emerged as powerful economic regions. Chung-Tung (1998) underscores a number of Asian and South Asian interesting cross-border developments: In North East China was the (1) Tumen River Development Zone; in Central Asia was (2) the Hong Kong–Shenzhen region and in the south was (3) the China–Vietnam (Guangxi Province of China with Quang Ninh Province of Vietnam) which overlaps with the Greater Mekong Sub-region, and also with the (4) Singapore Johor-Riau cross-border region that links Southern Johor in Malaysia, with the islands of Batam, in the Riau Province of Indonesia.

The Tumen River development program, originally, a United Nation Development Program initiative (UNDP, 1993; Tsuji, 2004) links China, North Korea and Russia, with South Korea and Japan thanks to major infrastructures in trade routes connecting rich extractive resources with international markets. Since inception, over the last 25 years, it sponsored 30 billion dollars infrastructure investments. The cross-border region is about 10,000 km square and directly connects the city of Yanji in China, with North Korea Chongjin and Vladivostok by sea across Tumen’s estuary. In Chen’s Borders Bend (2005), however, the assessment is final: The Tumen River trans-border region has huge unrealised potential. In parts it is because neither the North Korean nor the Russian decentralised sufficient autonomy to local and regional authorities. Despite improved connectivity and natural resource trade increases, the region has been unable to foster enough synergies.

Another such great cross-border region, which fully developed it potential however, is the Greater South China Sub-region (GSC) which includes China’s Guangdong and Fujian provinces and Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. At the core of this relationship is trade between China and Hong Kong with merchandise trade reaching 544 billion in 2019 or 50% of all Hong Kong’s trade with the rest of the world (Hong Kong, 2021), and, with Taiwan with 103 billion in merchandise going to China accounting for nearly 30% of all of Taiwanese export and 20% of all Taiwanese imports (Statista, 2021). According to Chen (2005), the GSC region is a proto-typical trans-border sub-region because it is mature and successful in integrating chains of production across the industries of all five core partners: Guangdong, Fujian, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. Hong Kong is the regional service centre. It is also the financial centre and the site of core investments in the region along with Taiwan. Manufacturing is done in Guangdong and Fujian. Macau and Shenzhen are where the regional elites spend their money.

The Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) may be a hybrid case because of its size and complexity. It brings together Cambodia, China’s Yunnan province, Myanmar, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Thailand and Vietnam. According to Chen (2005) trade, both international and cross-border within the region, is the prime cross-border regional factor. Today, cross-border trade flows with the Yunnan province of China are particularly important. Historically, trade across the region has existed since the ‘southern silk road’ when Burmese and Indian merchants traded ‘diamonds, jade, spice, cotton, and ivory for silk from China’s Sichuan province and copper, salt, herb from central China’ (Chen, 2005, p. 188). In 2014, the region’s 2.6 million square kilometres had a population of 329 million people and intra-trade growth from five billion in 1992 to 444 billion in 2015. Its total merchandise exports had reached 406 billion in 2014 and GDP totalled 3.1 trillion. In the meantime, it had benefited from 6.5 billion investments from the Asian Development Bank (GMS, 2016). GMS established a secretariat in 1992 and with the assistance of the Asian Development Bank, its six member-countries initiated a regional program of economic coordination with cooperation projects in agriculture, energy, environment, health and human development, technology, tourism, transportation and urban development (Phnom Penh, 2021). The secretariat, made up of representatives from each country, provides continuous coordination and launches programs of cooperation thanks to ongoing Asian Development Bank investments. Also, each year a ministerial conference is held. A distinct leaders’ summit (presidential summit) is held generally every 3 years. Such central governments’ coordination, however, also benefits from local and regional cross-border initiatives and of border-straddling ethnic ties. Indeed, for Chen, ‘ethnic ties constitute a bottom up force in economic cooperation irrespective of the top-down or horizontal institutional influence’ (2005, p. 201).

It is in this context that since 1991 Vietnam and China expanded their cross-border trade, agreeing in 1992 on 21 mutually corresponding trading points. They followed up with ‘border crossing economic zones’ in 1998. And, since 2002, 100% of all public revenues stay local or regional for infrastructure developments. These agreements fuelled rapid trade expansion from 41 million in 1996 to 230 million in 2002. In 2020, the newspaper The Voice of Vietnam suggested that trade between Vietnam and China had reached 192.2 billion dollars (Sung-soo, 2020). South of this region in Malaysia, Singapore’s early strategy was both to invest in information communication technologies for its own place-based industries, while also expanding massively in the Southern Johor and Islands of Batam. This was a strategy to maximise resources spatially: externalising labour-intensive industries to low cost labour areas in the region, while upgrading its industrial centre (Grundy-Warr, Peachey and Perry, 1999; Revilla, Breul, & Moneke, 2019). Today, the Singapore region, also called SIJORI, is known world-wide for its leading market position in oil and gas industries. It is also a leading city state for high value-added activities such as research and development and marketing.

Cross-border regions in Asia and South Asia have flourished despite very serious and ongoing cases of border disputes. Functional relations have arisen to enhance production chains in Singapore, Hong Kong–Shenzhen and the Great Mekong sub-regions. Interestingly, Vietnam and China had settled their territorial boundary line dispute first. In 1992, they agreed to the 1887 and 1895 lines while at the same time working on improving their trading relationships. Their boundary line was agreed upon fully in 1999 and demarcation completely in 2008 – in the meantime, they also split a disputed area of 227-km square in half with China receiving 114 km square and Vietnam 113. It is significant that in a majority of those regions there are very loose coordinating authorities that allow for some high-level discussion. But, just as important, local and regional cross-border authorities play an important developing role. The Tumen estuary region is a clear counter example of such successes.

Europe: Border Region Models and/or Exceptions?

In Europe, border disputes have often been reasons for war. Known examples include the Schleswig-Holstein war of 1864 between Denmark and Germany; that dispute that was pacified thanks to the referendum of March 14, 1920. The Alsace dispute is another example. It started during the war of 1870, and was settled in 1919, and then again in 1940, but returned to France in 1945. The Correlate of Wars Directed Dyadic Interstate War data set recorded 609 dyadic wars in Continental Europe during the 20th century, and although there have been wars in Europe during the 21^st century, thanks to the European Union it is a much-pacified area of the world today. Originally conceived as a peace building process, the European Communities, now the European Union (EU), has had the ambition to curtail territorial, positional and functional border disputes since inception. However, Communities policies never resolved border disputes directly and are known for having had diverse impacts on borderlands; in The European Union and Border Conflicts, Thomas Diez, Albert and Stetter (2008) argue that the overall results of those EU initiatives are mixed because integration policies do not always translate into greater security for disputed borderlands. Those important observations are consistent with recent Brexit tensions across the Islands of Ireland, and the Aegean seas between Greece and Turkey; what is clear is that the institutionalisation of those specific cross-border relations is not a guarantee for security. However, Diez and coauthors also point towards the powerful positive and mediating power of the EU institutions and policies on border issues, which, clearly set a different context encouraging much cross-border coordination, cooperation and collaboration, spanning both internal and external boundaries of the member states. An integrating pan-European economy is also assumed to be contributing: for instance, between 2002 and 2020, the share intra-EU trade for all member states was between 50 and 75% with few exceptions, Cyprus, Malta and Ireland with 34%, 41% and 49%, respectively (Eurostat, 2020). Indeed, Eurostats tweeted: Trade among EU countries as a share of total trade in goods ranged from just over 34% for Cyprus to 80% for Czechia and Luxembourg in 2020. The European Union average stands at 68% (UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), 2017). In sum, in the European Union, integration policies have somewhat contributed to peaceful borderlands, and led to much greater economic integration across EU member states; but this does not entirely explain why cross-border cooperation in the EU is currently a world-wide example.

During the foundational years, the Communities project continually sought to develop a common market and protect and modernise agriculture across the Community. However, from the late 1970s, a bifurcation in the competition policy branched-out towards new policies addressing concerns in territorial, and specifically, regional development policy, that is, to regulate regional competition inside the Community.

Indeed, the Treaty of Rome of 1957, article 2, states that the Common Market should lead to the ‘harmonious development of economic activities across the community’; Article 3, describes a number of important tools of public policy: the elimination of custom duties, Common Agriculture policy, Competition policy, the European Social fund and the European Investment Bank (EU, 1957).

Thus, the European Community found its way into regional economic development because of those specific articles of the treaty of Rome and, notably, because the treaty itself is attempting to limit competition between the various regions of, at the time, the Community (Vives, 2009). Such policy takes the form of limiting when-and-how member states’ aids are permitted, and underscores the need to implement economic and social cohesion across the Community: Indeed, article 92 and 93 of the Treaty of Rome are particularly concerned with limiting states financial aids, that is, ‘mobile private sector investment to a particular location through the use of public subsidies’ (EP, 1991). The rationale is that regional or state aids that take the form of financial incentives targeting private sector investors could distort competition across European regions. The ultimate goal then was to cap subsidies to prevent richer regions from attracting investors in proportion to their wealth; it is to avoid competition distortions in the single market. Although the Commission quickly realised that it would be impossible to level-the-playing field, it surveyed all member states’ aids and drafted competition rules and started implementing those in the 1980s. Originally, the policy classified regions and successive reforms focused on specific areas of investments such as the quality of public administration, infrastructures, communication and energy. Then in 1988, the European Commission proposed to reform the Structural Funds to further dissociated EU funding schemes from the annual contributions of each EU member states, and to focus on new general and geographic priorities. The Commission suggested the creation of Community Policy Initiatives (CPI) that would exclusively fund measures of particular interests to the Community overall and no specific member states. The largest CPI are the inter-regional, or INTERREG, programs, which from August 1990 targeted the internal borderlands of the Community. Their original goal was to target regions that had lived back-to-back, and were isolated because peripheral to their national economies. These regions had, in some instances, also suffered from low level investments in infrastructures because they were considered military regions and buffer zones between states. The 1990s saw the expansion of those initiatives with nearly 70 cross-border regions, Euroregions, Euregios emerging. Some pre-existed the European initiatives: for instance, the Euroregion Trans-Manche had been initiated by Nord Pas de Calais and Kent in the mid-1980s, and earlier cross-border projects had emerged in the late 1950s across the borders of the Netherlands and Germany in Enschede and Gronau (EUREGIO), and in 1964, in across the Oresund linking the greater Copenhagen region with Malmo in Sweden. As noted by Perkmann in 2003, cross-border cooperation can be defined as ‘a more or less institutionalized collaboration between contiguous subnational authorities across national borders’ (Perkmann, 2003, p. 156). Indeed, these are not resulting from intense trading relations but from relations of low-level politics bringing together subnational authorities, non-profit organisations and the private sector in ‘quasi-judicial’ ‘coordinating arrangements’ focused on ‘problem solving’ (Perkmann, 2003, p. 157). The success of those cross-border initiatives also benefits greatly from the European programs which according to Perkmann sustains the smallest communities and helps institutionalise the most ambitious ones (2001). Today, the Association of European Cross-Border Regions (AEBR, 2020) established in 1970 continues to play an important role as an institutional voice for borders regions vis-à-vis EU institutions. In 2021, the European Committee of the Regions (ECR, 2021) produced a Report on a Public Consultations on the Future of Cross-Border Cooperation, which surveyed 165 entities. The report results underscore the ongoing desires for improved tax sharing across borders, as well as connectivity and infrastructures, spatial planning authority and economic development strategy in particular for tourism. The recommendations also note the need to teach all borderland languages, and protecting access to cross-border health care.

In sum, over the last 50 years cross-border regions have flourished across Europe, and in particular across the European Communities and more recent European Union; these are institutionalised cross-border partnerships between local public, private and non-profit groups. EU programs have enhanced those territorial redistributive schemes and encouraged their successes; also, audits and reports have shown that cross-border regions peripheral areas are in growth areas and that their peripheral locations remain a developmental question where infrastructures and training are dearly needed – in sum, institutionalised border regions are probably on the rise and seem to have a future as a policy instruments for development, equalisation and democracy in the European Union.

Latin America: Limited Functional Cooperation

Border regions in Latin America are not always welcome by central state authorities. Indeed, a history of colonialism, and in particular of rather poor delineation of boundary lines weights on cross-border relations, also, the continued cross-border activities of indigenous populations is still perceived as an impediment to the firm establishment of Latin American States. Also, as illustrated by the situation in Columbia, for instance, spilling over its international boundary lines, internal difficulties, make cross-border regions and population mobility unwelcomed phenomena for central states.

In parts because Latin America was settled very early in the history of colonialisation, the boundary lines of most states exist in treaties that poorly establish their exact location on the ground. Indeed the phenomenon is similar in Africa, where many south of the Sahara boundaries are not demarcated. The border exists as part of a treaty but is not clearly demarcated either in writing or on the ground, which results in multitude frustration but also interesting situations whereby the border is also at the centre of social and economic exchanges – thus making the monitoring of the boundary line on the ground a complicated affair.

Historically, border disputes seem to have been frequent, and military responses in many ways seem to be the natural Latin American reaction to disputes. For instance, since the Second World War, there has been issues between El Salvador and Honduras (1969), Argentina–Chile (1978), Columbia and Venezuela (1987), Peru and Ecuador (1995) and Nicaragua–Honduras (2000). Also, there have been two cases of irredentism: Guyana (1966) and Belize (1981). And in the past, the presence of former colons such as the United States and the United Kingdom, because they were involved in separatist movements (Uruguay (1828) and Panama (1903) and/or stayed, for instance, in Guantanamo or the Malvinas Island, or more recently because they defended a territory, for instance, Argentina and Britain in 1982 point to borders being a sensitive domain. Positional disputes have been a prime reason, but in specific cases still debated, for instance, Patagonia where colonies were never established, the issue is the application of the legal principle of Uti Possidetis, which test is effective administrative control of the border (Brunet-Jailly, 2015). This principle is sometimes still in question because the administrative presence of the colon at independence is not underwritten by historical records – that is, the presence of extremely large regions that were never settled before the end of the colonial period. Indeed, for instance, the overall size of the European Union fits into half of Brazil, but there are more kilometres of boundary lines in the EU than in the whole of Latin America. Interestingly, Latin American states have been very successful also as mediating such disputes effectively: the Rio-Group and the Organization of American States in the Ecuador-Columbia disputes (2008) both point to a collective ability to resolve disputes regionally. Disputes in borderlands still exist to this day but are localised and result from population migration and criminal activities. Mobility and displacement remain the most important factor of instability in border regions but is not a positional dispute; the case of Columbia, and tensions with its neighbours, illustrate the difficulty: Latin American states struggle to control traffics, criminality and population mobility across their borders.

What emerges is a sense that a general context of proximity and common culture overshadows most cross-border relations; however, it is also in a context of historically tense borderlands that remains multi-cultural–economic–political areas of contestation of the ‘modern’ state system, where cross-border regions, when at the periphery of states, are also at the forefront of global market forces. While pan-Latin-American treaties of coordination exist, they are not as old as those found in Europe. The institutions of the MERCOSUR, the Common Market of the South, started in 1985 with the Iguacu declaration, as an expansion of the Latin American Free Trade Association (1960) and became a customs union in 1995, but have started looking at cross-border regions in 2009 (ECLAC, 2020) only. In 2019, intra-Latin America and Caribbean (Mercosur) trade excluding Mexico stands at 14.5%, which compares well to Africa (15.1%) but does not compare well with Europe or North America, including Mexico, respectively, 68% and 30% (UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), 2017) or Asia (59%) (UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), 2017).

Also, most Latin American States are centralised politically and economically, thus limiting the political and economic powers of their regions. In other words, regions, provinces and counties/departments depend on the centre for political, financial and planning resources, thus an important limit on the decentralising forces of market expansion and development beyond the territorial boundaries of states. Dilla, Cabezas and Figueroa (2020) note the pre-existence of specific studies of cross-border regions, for instance, on the Columbian–Venezuelan border (Valero, 2008-2009), on Brazil’s borderlands (Ministério da Integração, 2005) on Haiti and the Dominican republic, and on Peru and Chile (Dilla, 2016; Dilla et al., 2018) on the Peruvian and Ecuadorian border (Dammert and Bensus, 2017) and on the Amazonian borders (Zarete, Aponte and Victorino, 2017; Botia, Gilberto, Nohora, & Carvajal, 2017); but rightly, Dilla notes the absence of any systematic overview of the geopolitics of those cross-border regions. And, he notes a singular articulation of those regions with Latin American states’ territoriality and globalising forces, in a context whereby market forces and/or local cultures play determining roles, whereas the institutions of the Mercosur or anyone state play no central institutional multilevel coordinating role. One possible exception is found in the works done in Brazil by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in collaboration with Brazil’s Ministry of National Integration/Retis group. Indeed, in 2005, Retis commissioned a thorough study of the situation along the Brazilian boundary line; a very first attempt at coordinating knowledge.

However, for Dilla, Cabezas and Figueroa (2020), Latin America borderlands offer four types of cross-border regions: (1) the consuetudinary, (2) self-contained, (3) corridor and (4) globalised regions. The core dimension of the consuetudinary region is its immemorial culture and custom which comes in conflict with nationalising and globalising forces: the Mapuche (Argentina-Chile) or Aymara (Bolivia, Chile and Peru) are typical cases. Indeed, these vast regions are the new frontiers of globalisation, and resist.

Self-contained regions are much smaller and are adjacent spanning the boundary line: The Chuy and Chui cities spanning the Brazil Paraguay border, or the Ciudad Hidalgo and Tecun Uman on the Guatemalan–Mexico border are exemplar. Dilla et al., 2018 documents, for instance, 6.5 million border crossing take place between Tacna and Arica an urban region of about 500,000 inhabitants spanning the Chilean–Peruvian boundary line. Self-contained border regions illustrate cases of intense economic interdependency straddling relatively small urban regions bridging an international boundary line. These are spaces of production where the boundary line plays an important role as an economic resource (Sohn, 2014; 2018). For Dilla, the archetypical case of Corridor Region is the border crossing of Libertadores in Chile sees about 600,000 vehicles and 2.6 million people or 4.5 million tons of cargo cross the Argentine–Chilean boundary to link Argentina and San Antonio and Valparaiso in Chile on the Pacific Coast. These are transportation corridor regions bridging local, regional and global markets (Benedetti, 2015). The Mexico–United States borderlands are for Dilla the best example of the globalised region. Other such regions are found between Paraguay and Brazil (Alto Parana and Matto Grosso do Sur or Parana (Brazil side).

In sum, in Latin America, trade flows and culture are in a-tug-of-war in the formation and expansion of cross-border regions. States’ border controls struggle with human mobility, and with economic flows and wealth creation. Because of the nationalist forms of States territoriality are in contention with ancestral cultures these manifest themselves in the immense borderland spaces that have not yet been settled by globalising forces across the continent. Yet, globalised and corridor regions also exist as ports-of-entry into the global economy.

North America: Functional Cooperation

Boundary disputes still exist in North America (the Alaska Boundary, the Beaufort Sea, the Dixon Entrance, the Machias Island and North Rock and the Portland Canal) (Brunet-Jailly, 2015) but have been unresolved since the resolution of the Alaska boundary disputes in 1898. As a result of the Alaska purchase, the United States inherited a poorly delineated area of the Pacific North region. At the time, the United Kingdom and the United States followed up by establishing the International Boundary Commission in 1925 with mandate to survey, map and maintain a three-m-clear-vista on both sides of the boundary line, as well as, monuments and buoys. In other words, for nearly 125 years, there have not been any border disputes between Canada and the United States, and when looking at the details of the unsolved different, neither country sees them as priorities. Trade with Mexico

Indeed, in North America, intense cross-border trade, originally across the Great Lakes regions, has led to the development of forms of economic interdependency across a vast region that concentrates nearly 50% of all trade crossing the Canada/US boundary line: the great lakes region. Today, it forms one of the most economically integrated border regions in the world. Indeed, according to the work done by Harvard economist, Jeffrey Frankel (2000), benchmarking economic integration is a relationship between total world export with total export to a specific destination, whereby total economic integration would result in a score of one because no more trade between to locality across and international boundary could increase economic integration. In our case focusing on Canada and the United States, it is striking to realise that Canada/US score 2.06, that Ontario and Michigan scored 1.3, and that British Columbia and Washington, scored 2.2. In other words, Ontario and Michigan are nearly completely integrated and part of the same economy, while both Canada with the United States and British Columbia with Washington are highly interdependent and would only need to double the total amount of trade to be forming the same economy. Such extremely high level of economic integration between two side of a borderland region points to observations summed up in Kenishi Ohmae’s The End of the Nation State: the rise of regional economies (1995), an idea that has been further researched by Xiangming Chen (2005), where he suggests that across various sub-regions of China seas regional economies have given life to economic regions spanning international boundaries. For Chen, those economic regions are expanding across seas thanks to intense economic flows dependent on tight transportation systems. But these economic regions are not just emerging from intense good and services networks, in the great lakes these being waterways, railways, highways, and urban sprawl; they also result from the functional interactions of networked organisation that are as many lobbying organisations for those clusters of public and private sector managers, policy makers and legislators working together to make trading easier across those large regions. Regarding Ontario and Michigan, economist Thomas Couchene as early as 1998 suggests in From Heartland to North American Region-State (1998) that geographic and economic proximity is only half the picture because cultural and social values also straddle the regions. Historically, highly functional and specialised organisation organise those relations: The International Commission for the Great Lakes (IJC) from 1907 is concerned with water quality and conservation. And, many other such organisations have been set up since then: Great Lakes Commission, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, the International Associations of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Mayors, the Great Lakes Cities Initiative, the Great Lakes Governors and Canada United States Business Association (CUSBA); in other words, over the last decades, environmental, civic and business association have emerged, each time, to address issues of coordination and cooperation across the vast Great Lakes region (Abgral, 2005). Such functional partnership focusing on trade has expanded to include issues and organisations concerned by security. The Canada US relationship also includes the Integrated Border Enforcement Teams as part of both federal government efforts to coordinate and cooperate policies to limit cross-border traffics (Brunet-Jailly, 2004; IBET, 2011). Today, the construction of the Gordie Howe Bridge is also a manifestation of the ongoing need of modern infrastructures to serve the region (Nelles and Sutcliffe, 2011, 2013; Sutcliffe, 2008, 2014).

Indeed, one of the characteristics of the cross-border governance of this large economic region is the multiplicity of networks dealing with cross-border issues; the underlying assumption is that free trade and particularly the actors of free trade do not need the help of multi-functional organisation to succeed in developing policy agendas and resulting policies to facilitate trade. The prevalence of the automobile industries across the suburban lands straddling Lakes Huron, Erie and Ontario may be an explanation; it provides a history of extremely dense and ongoing criss-crossing the boundary line at a limited number of border gates: three on each sides of Lake Erie. Indeed, to this day, bulk commodities still transit thanks to waterways, but all other trade is heavily dependent on trucks. For instance, in Windsor, the automobile industries employ about 10,000 people and the largest employer today is Chrysler, which requires, because of just in time production, that about 1300 components shipments daily. Such works points to the specificity of this economic region, which has been identified by Bill Anderson (2015) as a site of bi-national co-production of cars. Indeed, the criss-crossing of the boundary line is part of the just-in-time production process. The new Gordie Howe Bridge is expected to reduce border crossing times, hence less wait time and less costs crossing, and thus improve the production chain.

Interestingly, on the other side of the North American continent, on the pacific coast in the broader Pacific Northwest region of Cascadia between Vancouver and Seattle, another cross-border regional form has emerged also from intense economic trade and interactions. Although rather closed to trade until the turn of last century, the Cascadia region has also seen much industrial manufacturing emerge out of the international export of lumber from Vancouver and Seattle. It is also the birthplace of North American aerospace industry with Boeing and of the software industries such as Microsoft. As early as the 1990s, Susan Clarke (2000) and Don Alper (2004) had identified the emergence of a specific sense of identity based on Cascadia’s own ecosystem. And, what is particularly interesting is the progressive rise of multitude functional organisations across this vast region stuck between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. For instance, Abgrall (2005), Brunet-Jailly (2008, 2012) or Storer, Davidson, & Trautman (2015) documents many organisations: the Cascadian Task Force, the Main Street Cascadia, the Cascadian Economia Council, the British Columbia-Washington Council and the Pacific Corridor Enterprise Council Cascadia Project. Today, all those organisations a part of the territorial and institutional networks of cooperation, where much of Cascadia’s policies, are initiated but by far the most influential is the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER), a public-private organisation that brings together on 22 committees’ dozens of US/Canada State and Provincial legislators and representatives from the private sector to discuss border issues.

All in all, in North America, a long history of trade and just-in-time-chains-of-production has disregarded the boundary line for nearly a century. Possibly, because of a common language, various cultures have not evolved into nationalist politics sufficiently to deter integrated cross-border regional economies. Interestingly, however, trade relations have not triggered major growth in cross-border binational international organisations, but multitude functional groups work to alleviate the taxing effect of the boundary line and border policies.

Conclusion

There are a few, possibly counter intuitive, findings that are emerging from this birds-eye view of cross-border relations across five large regions of the world:

One is that cross-border disputes, often resulting from past-colonial ill-fitted, and or ill-delineated boundary lines, continue to affect the international relations of contiguous states. It is markedly interesting to note that both in Africa and Latin America, both continents that suffer from relatively low economic integration, border relations are an important part of intra-continental state relations. Indeed, today border relations are part of diplomatic discussions both in the African Union and in the Mercosur. In South Asia, and in particular around India, borderlands resemble the European buffer zones of the 1920s–30s. They are militarised zones where civilian life is a continual state problem and where borderland minorities are continually oppressed. Unlike most military affairs, those buffer zones are very costly to the region’s states but also have a massive impact on trade relations. In Asia, where border disputes persist as well, trade relations have notably contributed to resolve disputes and seem to continue to be a driver of peaceful cross-border relations between China and its many neighbours. Clearly, not all maritime disputes have been resolved in Asia because of trade. But, terrestrial boundary disputes with a number of China’s immediate neighbours have been resolved alongside increasing successful trading relations.

Two, the regions of the world that are the most economically integrated are also those that have the most wealth and have most cross-border relations. It is difficult to infer that increasing economic integration provides a positive environment for cross-border relations, but there is much data to ponder, and Kenishi Ohmae (1995) and Xiangming Chen (2005) works do point to such conclusion: Trade relations lead to cross-border regions. This is also an argument found in all of Haroldo Dilla’s works on Latin American cross-border regions. However, in my previous works comparing European and North American cross-border relations, I was unable to conclude that intense trade led to the emergence of institutionalised forms of cross-border regions: Indeed then, I suggested various forms of cross-border regions emerged from such relationships: some were primarily institutionalised, in Europe, for instance, others were much looser network or regulatory in forms in North America (Brunet-Jailly, 2005, 2012). Today, the date presented in this paper leads me to suggest that all in all, when trade dominates the formation of a cross-border region, institutionalisation does not necessarily follow. But, (a) the Great Mekong sub-region’s coordinating secretariat is an interesting type of government-like form of coordination and cooperation; whereas (b) another example, the European Union cross-border programs that focus on cross-border region and inter-regional programs, when compared to the rest of the world, seems exceptionally institutionalised. The existence and expansion of the EUREGIOs and EUROREGIONs proceed from extensive European Union, supranational, policies and funding schemes. Also, it seems clear from the evidence that cross-border trading relations do not necessarily translate into increased border spanning government, and/or other authorities, forms of governance. In sum, this global overview confirms that the existence of such coordinating mechanisms always contributes to increasing trade and developing the cross-border economic region.

Third, as shown in Asia, Europe, and Latin American, cross-border coordinating networks or institutions do not work if not built with the foundational role of local and regional authorities, local governments and private sector organisations are indispensable. Indeed, the reverse situation is also interesting as shown in the Tumen estuary region, where massive connectivity infrastructure investments, the leadership of the World Bank, and the involvement of central government and agencies coordinating activities did not succeed because of the lack of involvement of local and regional authorities. The evidence discussed across the paper in particular in the Asian, European and Latin American sections point to this indispensable role of cross-border local and regional authorities and businesses in sustaining border-spanning trade relationships. The Vietnam–China case, where investments in local border spanning infrastructure are taken by local and regional authorities, is exemplary.

In sum, the world over, when trade is the prime driver of cross-border coordination and cooperation, trading relations are more often successful if some form of coordination is permanent and if local and regional authorities and private sector organisations are involved and work together, spanning the borderlands to facilitate those trading relations.

ORCID iD

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8524-8288