Cross-Border Cooperation: Challenges and Perspectives for the Horizontal Dimension of European Integration

Starting from a perception of cross-border territories being sub-systems, created by the respective national politico-administrative partners involved, the paper asses how cross-border cooperation in Europe can be improved by a new approach of integrated capacity-building. Based on both the achievement but also central challenges that all cross-border territories in Europe are facing in practice, two central fields are interpreted in this regard: training/facilitating and cross-border institution building. The paper concludes that a more effective cross-border policy-making of the future depends on approaches of systemic capacity-builduing and suggests “horizontal subsidiarity” as a new operating principle, to be developed as part of a multi-level governance approach.