Paper Titles & Abstracts

The proposed paper examines the evolution of the legal framework of territorial cooperation whose roots reach back to the end of the Second World War and which has experienced significant progress in the past decade through the adoption of various legal instruments.Territorial cooperation started as bottom-up initiative of local and regional actors in border areas as a reply to the necessity of managing common problems and designing comprehensive development strategies. However, to a large extent these efforts initially took place in a "legal vacuum". The need of some kind of regulatory framework was soon filled by responses of the Council of Europe and the European Communities (later European Union). The paper will assess these CoE and EC/EU initiatives from a comparative perspective and explore how they differ and/or complement each other. Particular emphasis will be given to the state reaction to these initiatives and the evolution of the EC-Regulation on a European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) as a supranational legal instrument, whose direct applicability would remain in stark contrast to the international legal instruments developed by the CoE.The paper's conclusion focusses on the legal effect of the EGTC-Regulation and identifies its limits and opportunities. An assessment is also made on whether it contributes to the possible evolution of a multilevel legal framework of cooperation.