Home   About the Project   Project Study Areas   Newsletters   Reports and Publications  
 





Research on the Policy of the European Commission Towards the Re-bordering of the European Union

Finnish - Russian

Estonian - Russian

Polish - Ukrainian

Hungarian - Ukrainian - Romanian

Moldavian - Romanian

Greece’s borders with Albania, FYROM and Bulgaria

German-Polish

Austrian-Hungarian

Cyprus









Case Study: Hungarian-Romanian and Hungarian-Ukrainian border region

Geography, population profiles

The present Hungarian-Romanian and Hungarian-Ukrainian state borders are originated from the Trianon Peace Treaty having been signed at the end of World War I. The Hungarian-Romanian section is 448 and the Hungarian-Ukrainian section is 137 km long. This is a special area as the presence of Hungarian ethnic minorities on the Ukrainian and Romanian side is significant. Four counties cover each side of the Hungarian-Romanian frontier zone. Satu Mare, Bihor, Arad and Timis are the Romanian counties (with a total area of 28,845 sq. kilometers and a total population of 2.17 million) while Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg, Hajdú-Bihar, Békés and Csongrád (22,045 sq. kilometers, 1.94 million population) are the Hungarian ones. Transcarpathia (12,800 sq. kilometers with a total population of 1.28 million) is filling up the Ukrainian frontier zone.

Project Coordinator: Dr. Béla Baranyi

Socio-economic and political situation of the area

The region's socio-economic development is significantly lagging behind the European Union's average indicators. The total Hungarian-Ukrainian frontier zone and the northern Hungarian-Romanian border are peripheral areas within their mother countries. Thus, two peripheral areas are meeting at the border. After Hungary's EU accession the Hungarian-Ukrainian border will be a long-term, the Hungarian-Romanian border will be a short-term external border of the EU.

Principal cross-border cooperation challenges

Before the change of the political system (1989) East-Hungarian borders were very strict. The East Central-European political transformation opened them up but the quality and intensity of cross-border cooperation is still low, very few economic cooperation projects have been established so far. The enhancement of cooperation activities is further hindered by ethnic problems. For this reason the current researches are seeking for further areas of CBC.

Overview of CBC -studies

The socio-economic, institutional, interregional and environmental aspects of CBC are investigated by several research organizations, including the departments of CRS HAS (Békéscsaba, Debrecen, Gyor) and the universities of the affected regions (Debrecen, Miskolc, Szeged). Related reports and publications