Abstract

„New institutional spaces’ across borders“ in Europe have a lot to do with the decline of protectionism, up streaming neoliberalism, the end of the Cold War and political concessions on regional integration, while security politics were more important in border areas in previous times. A cross-border region is a fruitful research subject for analysing these influences. Especially in Europe these regions emerged after the end of the Second World War, some of them developed bottom-up on functional premises while others were constructed from above. How institutionbuilding in peripheral crossborder areas occurs is the leading question in this paper. The periphery is a central factor in the question and due to this the interdependences might be rather weak on a regional level. These premises are tested with two different theoretical models and the case of the Barents Region.