A European Perspective on Anglo-Scottish Cross-border Cooperation: Lessons from EU-funded Territorial Cooperation Programs

The article aims to reflect on the development and prospects of cross-border cooperation between Scotland and England in a European perspective. Over the past 25 years the EU has supported specific programs of cooperation across the EU’s internal borders (INTERREG), which have allowed thousands of local and regional actors to work on common actions, projects or strategies to overcome long-standing processes of conflict, competition or lack of cooperation. The paper first discusses the added-value and shortcomings of these EU territorial cooperation initiatives, before considering recent developments and future options for cooperation across the Anglo–Scottish border. In capturing how the drive for local and regional actors within the EU to engage in trans-boundary cooperation is shaped by both the a priori existence of strong, historically-rooted cross-border relationships and by more pragmatic concerns to access new resources and policy ideas, the article goes on to examine how such motivations have played out across the Anglo–Scottish border. While acknowledging the benefits of trans-boundary co-operation, the article provides a more cautious assessment of the various barriers and asymmetries that can hinder cross-border co-operation and, in focusing on the area of spatial planning, highlights a particular challenge for economic and social collaborations across the Anglo–Scottish border. The article ends with a brief reflexion on the implications of the results of the 2016 Brexit referendum, before concluding with the most relevant lessons from European territorial cooperation initiatives for Anglo–Scottish cross-border cooperation.