Heikki Eskelinen

Ilkka Liikanen

Jukka Oksa

First published in 1999, this book examines the construction of new political, economic and mental borders in post-Cold War Europe. Various national and regional settings are analyzed along the old East-West divide. In post-Cold War Europe the East-West divide no longer exists in the form of the clear-cut Iron Curtain, separating two security blocs, two politico-economic systems, and two ideologically and culturally distinct worlds. Still, it remains clearly discernible, both in the form of unrelenting politico-cultural differences and as an economic Golden Curtain. At the same time, a more complicated system of intersecting political, economic and mental borders keeps developing. Today, there are various scales of interaction, which produce distinctive national, regional and local experiences of borders. In this book, the construction of new political, economic and mental borders is analysed by specialists from both sides of the former East-West divide. The future of European borders is discussed in various national and regional settings, from the Barents Region in the North to the Old Habsburgian lands in ‘Mitteleuropa’.

Reconstructing Borders and Scales of Interaction

Curtains of Iron and Gold

Folke Snickars

Europe's space is in a flux. Earlier cores and peripheries in Europe are experiencing a profound transformation. The driving forces include, amongst others, Western European economic and political integration, and Eastern European transition. We are also witnessing fundamental technological and organisational restructuring of industrial systems. Information technology and telecommunications are rapidly altering the requisites for comparative advantage. Peripherality is being determined more by access to networks than by geographical location. Economies of scale can be attained in distributed networks of production with good access to markets as well as in large agglomerations. Clearly, these changes also call for new perspectives in regional analysis. This book derives its impetus from an Advanced Summer institute in Regional Science which was arranged in Joensuu, Finland, in 1993 under the auspices of the European Regional Science Association. Some of the papers, which were discussed at the institute, were thoroughly revised for the present purpose. In addition, chapters on specific topics were specially written for the volume. In most contributions, the focus is on the Nordic countries and their internal peripheries. They form a particularly interesting case in assessing prospects for the multi-faceted centre-periphery confrontation in Europe.

Heikki Eskelinen

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