While a circular issued by France’s Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, dated 12 May has just extended France’s internal border controls until 31 October 2020,1 there have been growing calls to give attention to the difficulties faced in border territories, notably for the 360,000 cross-border workers who cross the French border every day to work in a neighbouring country.
The barriers that were put up between the two countries from the start of the health crisis have had a major impact on citizens who were used to crossing the border on a daily basis*. In this context, there have been many local cooperation initiatives and the MOT would like to highlight them.
"The coronavirus crisis is putting our European ideals to the test, and obliges us to invent tomorrow’s world. We need to think, in the design of our policies, about the impact of our decisions on our neighbours."
GeoRhena, the Upper Rhine geographic information system, has developed a simplified dynamic mapping tool that enables people to view and search for regularly updated data on developments in the Covid-19 epidemic in the Franco-German-Swiss trinational region.
The National Agency for Territorial Cohesion, which was created out of the merger of the CGET, the EPARECA and the Digital Agency, was founded on 1 January 2020. Its name well encapsulates its purpose – which is to strengthen territorial cohesion and combat social division. To do this, the ANCT supports local elected representatives in the implementation of their projects, adapting to the needs on the ground.
Anne Sander, Vice-President of the MOT, and Pascal Arimont and other MEPs have called on the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, "to firmly recommend the immediate ending of checks and entry restrictions on our internal borders".
The MOT has published on its website and on social media a series of maps showing the situation with respect to the easing of lockdown measures along France’s borders.
Six local authorities bordering the Strait of Dover and the North Sea have decided to turn their bilateral relations into a multilateral area for dialogue in order to encourage the emergence of cross-border projects across the territory of the Strait.
The INTERACT programme offers training courses to players involved in the management of and decision-making for Interreg programmes. Jean Peyrony, the MOT’s Director-General, contributed to a training session devoted to the relevance and concepts of territoriality and functional areas in the upcoming 2021-2027 programming period, in which political objective 5 aims to give greater prominence to territorial strategies and action by local players.
The European Committee of the Regions, the European Commission (DG REGIO), the MOT, the Association of European Border Regions (AEBR) and the Central European Service for Cross-Border Initiatives (CESCI) are working together to give a voice to local and regional players in border territories in the context of the Covid-19 health crisis. You can now share your border region and cross-border experiences on the platform created by the Committee of the Regions.
The European Commission, in cooperation with the President of the European Council, has put forward a European roadmap towards lifting coronavirus containment measures.
The Covid-19 crisis demands that European and cross-border cooperation be strengthened. The 2021-2027 programmes, the preparation of which is continuing, should be informed by the lessons learned from it. The draft regulations proposed by the Commission, which are in the process of being negotiated with the Parliament and the Council, contain positive innovations for cross-border territories that address their aspirations, as expressed in the Cross-Border Cooperation Strategies along France’s borders. The MOT encourages all of the stakeholders to take them on board.
On 15 December 2018, the Basque Country Community approved a “cross-border cooperation” competence. Drawing on the Cross-Border Cooperation Strategy approach, it embarked on a consultative process to draw up its cross-border cooperation strategy up to 2030. The objective was to codesign cross-border public policy and to be aligned with the framework of the forthcoming 2021-2027 European programming period.
The Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis is a unique cross-border territory, located between the sea and the mountains and adjacent to two borders: an internal EU border over 100 km long with the Piedmont Region in Italy and an international border with the Principality of Monaco. Its 2020-2030 Cross-Border Cooperation Strategy, adopted on 16 December 2019, is organised into four complementary levels of work.
The territory of the Strasbourg Eurometropolis has an abundance of players and initiatives in the area of cross-border cooperation, for the most part designed and implemented with its German partners in Kehl and Ortenau. It also has several tools for dialogue and cross-border governance that enable it to foster and coordinate the daily contacts that make it one of the centres for cooperation in the Upper Rhine area.
The MP for Moselle, Christophe Arend, and his counterpart, Andreas Jung, have published a joint Franco-German declaration entitled "Together against coronavirus!", calling for Franco-German and European solidarity in this period of crisis.
The need to draw up a Cross-Border Cooperation Strategy was an opportunity for the Lille European Metropolis to rethink its cross-border strategy and regional leadership in this regard. In order to better assess the aspirations and orientations of its Cross-Border Cooperation Strategy, in 2016 the MEL commissioned the MOT to help prepare it, and set up a technical committee bringing together central government, the Region and the Department as well as the territories and urban planning agencies along the Franco-Belgian border.
The Cross-Border Cooperation Strategy first appeared with the French MAPTAM Act of 2014, which affirmed the role of metropolises. It is a strategic coordination document for the French side of the border aimed at enabling cross-border actions. The act provides for its drafting by metropolises that border on a foreign country, in association with "the department, the region and the municipalities concerned".
A new decree concerning the right of derogation available to prefects was adopted on 8 April 2020, in France. In accordance with the commitment made by the French President, and following an experiment conducted over nearly two years, it was decided to extend the power of derogation to all prefects and thereby step up the devolving of decisions to the local level.
On 2 April the European Commission put forward a new set of measures, the Coronavirus Response Investment Initiative Plus (CRII+), which introduced greater flexibility and simplified procedural steps to allow all unutilised support from the European Structural and Investment Funds to be mobilised to the fullest.
On 3 April the Commission published guidelines on EU emergency assistance with respect to cross-border cooperation in the area of healthcare.
