Although Finland's eastern border was in the era of the Soviet Union a part of the East/West divide, transborder relations strictly limited in their scope and numbers were organised on a bilateral basis in the context of the political and economic arrangements between the two countries. This setting has undergone a major overhaul in the 1990s. Firstly, as soon as transborder local and regional activities were allowed, they started to grow in importance. Secondly, Finland's membership in the EU has had clear cut implications for the border regime: the Finnish-Russian border is the only joint border between the Russian Federation and the European Union.

The paper investigates the introduction of and applicability of the European border regime in the case of the Finnish-Russian border. The focus is on the reconciliation of activities organised and conditioned by actors at different spatial scales. The analysis is based on empirical findings concerning the plethora of various programmes and initiatives (e.g., Interreg IIa and Tacis CBC) which are related to transborder activities and the development of the border regions.


1. Introduction

Patterns of cross-border interaction have undergone a major upheaval in Europe in the 1990s. An extreme example of such is the Finnish-Russian border. Interaction across it was very strictly controlled until the final years of the Soviet Union: there were only a few crossing points for the flows of bilateral trade and Intourist-guided tourism, cross-border contacts based on the geographical proximity of individual partners were not allowed, and the bulk of the border region in the Soviet Union was completely closed to foreigners. Today, the number of crossing points has increased, travel restrictions to Russian regions have been abolished, national and EU-sponsored initiatives strive to strengthen cross-border cooperation, and a local variant of a Euroregio is under preparation.

Cross-border cooperation is one form of a more general phenomenon, interregional cooperation, and as such a vehicle for ongoing regionalisation processes. The increased permeability of borders is reflected in the institutional and functional position of border regions, and thus they provide a kind of testing ground for transboundary regionalisation. The Finnish-Russian border region is one such ground, where potential regionalisation processes facilitated by cross-border cooperation have been introduced through spatial arrangements varying from large multinational arrangements, such as the Baltic region, to very small, local regions next to border crossing points.

This paper analyses the first experiences of cross-border cooperation between Finland and Russia. Special attention is devoted to the introduction and impacts of the EU cross-border cooperation regime; the Finnish-Russian border is the only land border between the European Union and the Russian Federation.

The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 gives a short account of the European cross-border cooperation regime. Section 3 outlines the peculiarities of the Finnish-Russian case. In Section 4, the history of cross-border cooperation between Finland and Russia is surveyed and evaluated. The focus is on the border of the Karelian Republic (Russian Karelia), which is the region between the Leningrad region (and St Petersburg) on the Baltic Sea and the Murmansk region on the Barents Sea. Section 5 summarises the findings and draws some conclusions.


2. Cross-Border Cooperation

The regime of European cross-border cooperation here refers to the norms, imperatives, institutions and instruments regulating interaction between border regions, and thus influencing the processes of transboundary regionalism (see Figure 1). This approach to cross-border cooperation has been developed in the context of the European Union mainly since the 1980s. Although it was originally designed for the internal borders between Member States, more recently it has also been applied, with some adjustments, to the Union’s external borders.

Figure 1. Basic Elements of the European Cross-Border Cooperation Regime (according to Scott 1998)

Cross-border cooperation is not as such a new phenomenon. For decades, many border regions in Europe have had various forms of local cooperative arrangements and joint paradiplomatic activities, which have only relatively recently been streamlined to fit the constraints of a European regime. This process has not been straightforward, but has instead resulted in a plethora of models of action, which have been adjusted to specific local circumstances and which are run by actors at different spatial levels. A common characteristic of this organised cross-border activity is tension between the domains and authority of different actors; the realms of "high politics" and "low politics" are constantly in flux in cross-border cooperation.

The main motives of the EU for supporting cooperation across its internal borders derive from the targets of regional development and functional integration. Many border regions lag behind in development, and therefore cross-border cooperation is seen as an important strategy in tackling their structural problems (see, e.g., van der Veen and Boot 1995). Yet, the involvement of the EU is not only prompted by concerns of regional development, but from even more fundamental targets: the one-sided orientation of many border regions towards national centres clearly undermines the plausibility of the integration process itself.

Motives for cross-border cooperation on the external borders of the European Union, as well as its targets and arrangements, differ from those on its internal borders. In terms of motives and targets, a major difference stems from the fact that cooperation across external borders is far from being only of local relevance, but has in several cases profound implications for international politics. Cooperation across the East-West divide with the former socialist countries is an obvious case in point, and the setting is especially intricate in the case of multinational cooperation regions such as the Barents region and Baltic region in northern Europe. Also, circumstances tend to differ considerably on the external borders from those on the internal borders: the discrepancy in living standards is usually deeper, infrastructure networks more deficient, and problems of institutional incompatibility more severe. An additional obstacle is the lack of any earlier tradition in cross-border cooperation; the East-West divide quite literally disconnected neighbouring regions from each other for a long period. Furthermore, the European regime has created a new culture and organisation and knowledge of this and of concepts used in its procedures is insufficient.

Programmes of cross-border cooperation are usually proposed on functional grounds in the sense that they are based on problems and opportunities faced by the partners. Thus their results are conditioned by the appropriateness of the functional linkages concerned and their potential: the existence of complementary assets tends to contribute to the construction of interdependencies, whereas regions with completely different resource bases and competing goals find it difficult to initiate successful cooperation. Also, possibilities of developing cooperative practices obviously depend on relations between local cooperative arrangements and national and multinational ones, and cross-border initiatives can be used for purposes of extending the scope of decision-making at regional and local level (see, e.g., Keating 1998).


3. Finnish-Russian Border

Since Finland became an EU Member State in 1995, the European Union has had a land border with the Russian Federation. This border, which is more than 1200 kilometres long, runs from the Baltic coast almost up to the Barents Sea. The circumstances in the border area differ in several important respects not only from the ones on the internal borders of the EU but also from the ones on most external borders, making this area an extreme case for the introduction of the regime of European cross-border cooperation.

Figure 2. Finnish-Russian Border Area

The Finnish-Russian border region has historically been an interface and a battlefield between eastern and western cultures and politico-economic spheres of influence in northern Europe. In the past, the border through the region has been transferred several times, but it did not make itself felt as a categorical dividing line and an effective barrier to interaction until after the October Revolution and Finland's independence (see, e.g., Laine 1994, Paasi 1995).

During the Soviet era, there was no direct cooperation across the border between individual partners, and foreigners were allowed to visit only a few places on the eastern side of the border. After the Second World War, economic relations between Finland and the USSR were arranged through centralised bilateral agreements. Crossing points for international passenger and goods traffic were located in the southern corner of the border area, along the routes to St Petersburg, which is by far the largest centre of the border region.

Obviously, the divide had a negative influence on the development of the regions adjacent to it. In the Soviet Union, activities in the closed border zone were subordinated to security and military considerations. Consequently, the deficient transport and communication infrastructure of the zone is nowadays a major practical obstacle to connections across the border (see, e,g., Eskelinen 1995). In Finland, the eastern part of the country has suffered from the lack of contacts to its historical centres of gravity (St Petersburg, and since the Second World war also to Vyborg), and its regional economy has declined relative to the rest of the country.

In general, the legacy of history has meant that interaction on the Finnish-Russian border regions had to begin from scratch after it became gradually possible during the perestroika years of the Soviet Union. With regard to the basic preconditions for cross-border cooperation, that is, factors such as a network of infrastructure links, a sufficient supply of public and private services, and the compatibility of institutions, the conclusion is straightforward: viewed from a European perspective, the technical and organisational prerequisites for efficient cooperation across the Finnish-Russian border have to be regarded as very bleak indeed. It is not only history but also geography which matters here: with a few exceptions, the border region is very thinly populated, and part of it practically uninhabited. For instance, along the 1200 kilometre long border, there is only one point where towns on both sides are located next to each other, thus making the formation of a cross-border urban region possible.

Notwithstanding the above mentioned severe constraints, interaction and cooperation across the Finnish-Russian border has emerged in many forms in the 1990s. Clearly, various actors in the border area have been sufficiently well-motivated to create contacts. This striving for transboundary regionalism is in various ways linked with changes in the relationship between central and regional levels of governance and administration on both sides of the border, and more recently, by the involvement of the EU in cross-border cooperation. However, as the Russian Federation will not be a candidate for EU membership in the foreseeable future, preintegration, that is, preparation for the membership, is not a relevant motive of EU involvement in cross-border cooperation between Finland and Russia. This is in a sharp contrast to the situation prevailing on several border regions in Central and Eastern Europe.


4. Stages of Cross-Border Cooperation

The first direct contacts between partners across the Finnish-Russian border were created spontaneously as soon as travel restrictions were relaxed in the late 1980s. Persons who had been compelled to leave their homeland in the aftermath of the Second World War especially went to see it as soon as this became at all possible, and they soon initiated collaboration in various grassroot-level projects. Also, several civic associations and local organisations, such as municipalities and schools in the border region, created links across the divide, and the central governments had to react to this activity as fait accompli. The governments of Finland and Russia signed treaties concerning neighbourhood relations, trade, and so-called "near-region" cooperation in 1992. The last- mentioned treaty was the first one of its kind in Russia.

The most important political precondition for improving economic, cultural and other connections across the border was Finland’s decision not to advance territorial claims against the Russian Federation. This was also an important prerequisite for EU membership, although it did not play an explicit role in the public debate which preceded the referendum.

Before Finland's membership in the European Union, cross-border cooperation was primarily a bilateral issue between the two countries. Their motives for this activity differed and the actual partners and targets of this activity, that is, actors in the border regions themselves, have looked at cross-border exchanges from different perspectives. However, there seem to have been a shared motivation: both border regions have conceptualised themselves as peripheries in their own institutional and functional systems.

In Finland, the issue of cross-border cooperation was first placed on the agenda of national policy-making mainly in two contexts, in regional policy and as so-called near-region cooperation.

Domestic Regional Policy

As part of the anticipated and later realised membership in the EU, domestic regional development policies have undergone a major upheaval in Finland in the 1990s (see Eskelinen, Kokkonen and Virkkala 1997). The most important institutional change has been the transfer of responsibility for regional development to regional councils which are bottom-up organisations based on municipalities, whereas in the past this responsibility lay with top-down regional organisations of the central government. In addition, regional development strategies have been rearranged to harmonise with EU practice in terms of programmes. The promotion of border region development is one such programme. However, the state government has still had a decisive say on funding due to the fact that regional councils have no right to levy taxes. Thus, the actors most motivated to cooperate across the border have not had (before the implementation of the Interreg programmes) resources ear-marked for such, but instead have been required to adjust their activities to fit the frame set by the central government. However, these actors, with regional councils and municipalities in the forefront, have created unofficial consultative bodies (for instance, between eastern Finland and the Republic of Karelia), which have been of major practical importance in information exchanges and also in the preparation of cooperative projects across the border.

Specific state-funded measures for purposes of border region development have thus far primarily focused on the improvement of transport connections and border-crossing facilities. The rapid growth of new economic links and transit traffic has been the most important reason for these measures, and upgrading interaction between the neighbouring border regions only an additional argument. Overall, the development of border regions and cross-border cooperation has not gained any important role in domestic regional policies in Finland.

Near-region Cooperation

The targets of the so-called near-region cooperation, which is funded from the Finnish state budget, are the Karelian Republic, the Murmansk and Leningrad regions, as well as the city of St Petersburg (see Figure 2). This activity has been geared to the peculiarities of these regions, which in the case of Russian Karelia also include its ethnic-cultural background in relation to Finland.

Several governmental ministries have practised near-region cooperation or even competed in so doing, and organisations in border regions such as municipalities and universities have in several cases been responsible for the actual implementation of projects. More recently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken a more decisive role as the coordinator, and the activities are regulated by regional working groups which include representatives from governmental ministries and regional organisations. According to the revised strategy for this policy, accepted in 1996, official policy should include the alleviation of environmental risks, the promotion of stability, security and welfare, and the improvement of preconditions for economic cooperation. In practice, various environmental and educational projects have been the most important instruments towards these aims. Finland has allocated approximately 490 million FIM (incl. humanitarian aid and loan guarantees) of national budget funding for the near-region cooperation with Russia 1990-96 (Julin 1997, Statistics Finland 1997). The significance role of the historical background can be seen in the fact that Russian Karelia has received approximately one-third of this funding, that is, a proportion considerably higher than its relative population or economic potential among Finland’s neighbouring regions.

From a Finnish perspective, near-region cooperation has faced problems similar to those often encountered by recipient and donor countries in development aid programmes. A weak commitment by Russian partners has presented one of the most serious problems, although this has more often been caused by a lack of funding than a lack of motivation. Expectations have also been contradictory, in about the same way as in the EU’s Tacis programmes: the focus is on technical assistance in the west, whereas direct investments are called for in the east. Yet, contradictions are not limited to implementation of projects in Russia, but they are also evident in the allocation of funding to actors in Finland. Large projects in certain priority areas are the declared purpose of the state-funded near-region cooperation, but this is bound to conflict with local needs and plans, as small local and regional partners are easily sidelined.

Perspectives of Russian Border Regions

Finland's neighbouring regions in the Russian Federation differ from each other in several important ways. The relevance of these differences has been accentuated as a result of the process through which regions (oblast, respublika, krays, okrug) have in general grown as political and economic actors in relation to the Federation. Yet the four neighbours (St Petersburg, Leningrad, Russian Karelia and Murmansk) share at least two common characteristics.

Firstly, the treaty on near-region cooperation implies that not only Finland but also the Russian Federation accepts the development of direct interaction and cooperation between border regions and, at least in principle, supports such a strategy. Yet in practice the political and economic transition period in Russia has led to a situation in which the development of cross-border connections in the north-western part of the Federation has become even much more complicated than in neighbouring Finland.

Secondly, in contrast to many fringe areas in Russia, the regions bordering Finland have not attempted to sever their ties with the Federation, but have utilised their geographical position to initiate direct ties with foreign countries (Bradshaw & Lynn 1996). Cooperation with neighbouring regions has been the main line of action in this opening strategy.

The city of St Petersburg, located inside the Leningrad region, is by far the largest city in the Baltic area, and its role in relation to Finland and also to other European countries obviously depends on the trends in the Greater Baltic Region (see, e.g. Eskelinen & Vartiainen 1996). The Barents region - in institutional terms, the Barents Euro-Arctic Region (BEAR) - forms a similar context for the Murmansk oblast (see, e.g., Bröms et al. 1994). In the following section the focus is on the region in between these prospective major regions, the Republic of Karelia (Russian Karelia).

The Case of the Karelian Republic

As in other border regions of Russia, the political and economic crisis has contributed to the Karelian Republic's efforts to establish direct relations with foreign countries, and also implied an increase in its internal autonomy. In practice, the Republic has had more say in taxation, use of currency revenue, natural resources and environmental issues. Simultaneously, however, its financial base has dwindled along with the ineffective redistributive policies of the central government.

In more general terms, Russian Karelia is an example of a region which is attempting to redefine and reconstruct its role as a kind of national unit within the context of the Russian Federation. This form of regionalisation derives from its institutional position in the Soviet ethno-federalist system where there was a link between a titular group (in this case: Karelians) and its administrative territory (until 1991: the Karelian ASSR), even if the actual role of the minority was politically and culturally marginal (see Lynn & Fryer 1998). The development of direct economic and political links with foreign countries, with Finland and its border regions in particular, has been an important instrument in this kind of nation- or region-building process.

In a wider international context, the Republic of Karelia is a member of the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. However, an important obstacle to the implementation of various activities in this setting is the fact that the bulk of its neighbouring region in eastern Finland has been excluded from the Barents cooperation.

Legislative changes in the Russian Federation have been necessary preconditions for creating direct links between Russian Karelia and foreign countries. Many of them have been based on case-specific agreements between the Republic and the Federation, and thus have contributed to the increasing variation in the rules of the game facing foreign firms and other organisations in Russia. The privileges given to the Karelian Republic in 1991, and the liberalisation of foreign trade in 1992 have been the most important institutional changes in this respect. However, the impact of these changes has remained limited due to the unclear division of power and responsibilities between the Republic and the Federation, and some privileges were also cancelled in 1995 (see Eskelinen, Haapanen & Izotov 1997). In addition to legislative changes, direct links have been supported by the opening of crossing points for international traffic without case-specific permissions. This occurred on the western border of the Karelian Republic in Vartius in 1991 and in Niirala in 1993 (see Figure 2).

Indisputably, links between Russian Karelia and foreign countries have grown very clearly in the 1990s. This can be seen in, for instance, the fact that approximately 800 000 people crossed the western border of the Republic in 1996, and its exports grew in 1992-95 to more than three-fold, from USD 168 million to USD 575 million (see Eskelinen et al. 1998). However, for the present purposes it is important to emphasise that these exchanges have not saved the Karelian Republic from the serious all-embracing crisis in Russia. The positive expectations, which characterised the partial opening of the border in the early 1990s, had already turned bleak when the European Union came along with cross-border cooperative activities as a result of Finland's membership.

Karelia Interreg Programme

The Interreg initiative is the EU's most concrete instrument for the support of cross-border cooperation. It was introduced on the Finnish-Russian border at the end of 1996 when the first projects were given funding. This activity is organised through three programmes; in South East Finland (St Petersburg and the Leningrad region), Karelia (the Republic of Karelia), and the Barents (the Murmansk region).

These three programmes, which receive a total of MECU 33.9 from the EU during the period up to 1999, have at least two significant implications for cooperation across the Finnish-Russian border.

Firstly, they emphasise the role of regional actors, because the regional councils have been given responsibility for the administrative tasks of the programmes. In the case of the Karelian programme, for instance, three regional councils (North Karelia, Kainuu and Northern Ostrobothnia) share this responsibility. This institutional solution has, in fact, created a new cooperative region in Finland, defined on the basis of neighbourhood: the Republic of Karelia borders these three regions. In practice, the division of labour between the three different Interreg programmes on the Finnish-Russian border is not without problems especially because functional connections between St Petersburg and more northern areas in eastern Finland were not paid due attention in their preparation.

Secondly, the Interreg funding, although its use is limited to the territory of the EU, Finland in this case, has clearly provided additional resources for cross-border initiatives. Many projects are genuine results of the programmes in the sense that their realisation would not have been possible from other funding sources. In terms of substance, their novelity is less clear: several projects in the fields of education and culture, for instance, are only creating preconditions for cooperation, and the actual involvement of relevant partners in Russia remains an open issue. The commitment and motives for cross border measures vary a lot. Best practise as far as commitment is concerned can be found in local grass-root measures involving true cross-border activities. In some projects Interreg financing has been substituted for lacking regional or national funds and thus enabled the implementation of measures that would have been financed from the national budget anyhow. In any case, the Interreg initiative is a policy innovation in Finland because no corresponding funding mechanism has been developed for purposes of domestic regional policies or near-region cooperation. In addition, the fairly comprehensive programming activity involved in the Interreg programme contributed to a more careful selection of policy priorities.

Given the short implementation period thus far, only very tentative conclusions concerning the effects of the Interreg programmes can be drawn for the time being. Some findings seem, in any case, quite evident.

Firstly, the constraints set by history, geography and the transition in Russia (see Section 3) are reflected in the implementation of the programmes. This can be seen, for instance, in cross-border initiatives by firms: only a few have been proposed in the Karelia programme. Notwithstanding the superficial similarity in production structures (that is, the dominant position of the forest sector on both sides of the border), the development stage of these neighbouring regions differs so much that economic resources are only to a very limited degree complementary (see Eskelinen et al. 1998).

Secondly, national government ministries have not been particularly interested in the Interreg programmes. This has been a problem in their initial stages for the reason that the ministeries serve in most cases as sources of additional domestic funding. Not surprisingly, this has increased the interest of regional councils towards the genuine regionalisation of the programmes, especially if this involves the transfer of domestic funding as a lump sum under their control. This has been tested in the Barents programme.

Thirdly, the classical problem of the EU's external borders, the reconciliation of different programmes, has also been encountered on the Finnish-Russian border. The EU has no mechanism which would secure links between the Interreg projects and the Tacis CBC projects, which are currently underway on both sides of the border. In actual practice, however, the importance of this incompatibility seems to be exaggerated; the regional councils have utilised their existing unofficial contacts to exchange information on various projects, which has created links in several relevant cases. In fact, the lack of funding for potential cooperative projects on the Russian side is a much more serious problem: the Tacis and near-region cooperation funding are only small drops in a sea of urgent needs.

Both the tension between the central government and regions in the implementation of the Interreg projects, and the technical problems of cross-border programmes (e.g., between Interreg and Tacis) have contributed to the fact that the regional councils in the Karelia Interreg region have launched preparations for a Euroregio (Cronberg 1998). They aim at creating an integrated system of decision-making and administration for the purposes of cross-border cooperation. This is clearly a very ambitious target with wide implications, and it will in practice put EU policies towards external borders and Russia into a serious test. The relevant strategic decisions have to be made in the preparatory stages of the next Interreg programme period - according to Agenda 2000 the Interreg initiative is here to stay and will even grow in importance.

Although it can be argued that structural policy management in Finland is centrally controlled and lacks transparency, it has meant at least a partial regionalisation of economic development policies. Regional councils have been given institutional and financial tools for development. The Interreg programme has also opened the way for official transnational cooperation that was previously dominated by the state. The financial competence of the regional councils is still limited and they struggle to wrest more competence from the state, and even from the member municipalities. A threat to the legitimacy of the regional councils may be that they have not actively tried to hinder territorial competition between regions and localities for structural fund financing. This has led to a situation where subsidies are dispersed to many small regional projects instead of common key projects as the EU would prefer. Interreg programme management - not unlike the whole EU structural policy administration - seems to have become an arena of "contested governance" (Lloyd & Meegan 1996), with competition not only vertically, between the EU, state and regions, but also horizontally between local actors, or respectively the ministries.


5. Conclusions

The Finnish-Russian border is still guarded as carefully as in the Soviet era and one needs a visa to cross it. By contrast, the institutions and practices of border region interaction and cooperation have changed dramatically: direct transboundary links, which were illegal only a decade ago, are now supported by means of specific programmes. The process towards proximity-based relations between actors in the border regions was initiated at the grass-roots level in the late 1980s, a political framework for it established in bilateral agreements between the two governments in 1992, and since 1995 the European Union as well has become involved in promoting cross-border connections. At the regional level, informal information exchange between neighbours has developed into a conscious political strategy to create integrated administrative structures spanning the border.

The evolution of cross-border cooperative structures and policies is intertwined with the processes of regionalisation in several ways. On the one hand, to constructing them regional actors must have gained - or be entrusted with - the decision-making capacities required for building external links with foreign partners. On the other hand, cross-border cooperation aims at compensating for the negative influences of divisive and separating borders, and in the final analysis aims at developing functional transboundary regions. In the present case, the partners are highly asymmetrical, and thus the regionalisation processes related to cross-border cooperation have also evolved along different lines.

In Russia, border regions have tried to create direct links with foreign partners for purposes of escaping from the economic crisis in the Federation, as its capacity to control decision-making in the regions and redistribute resources to them has largely waned away. In the case of the Karelian Republic, for instance, the search for a kind of "national sovereignty" can be interpreted as a continuation of its earlier role as an administrative region nominally devoted to an ethnic minority - although the region was and is ethnically very much a Russian region. In practice, the vagueness of relations between the Federation and the Republic thoughout the 1990s has been an important impediment to the formulation of any coherent policy in utilising cross-border links for alleviating the crisis.

In Finland, a partial regionalisation of the domestic regional policy institutions was a precondition for EU membership . The Interreg programme has been a step forward in this respect, as it is administrated by regional councils, even if national government ministries have a final say in decisions on additional domestic funding. The so-called near-region cooperation, which was started earlier, has been a centrally-controlled activity, and it has only to a very limited extent provided regional and local actors in Finland with resources for cross-border activities. Viewed against this background, the Interreg initiative has been an important policy innovation in Finland. It has also led to cooperation between regional councils in constellations based on a new functional basis.

Currently, the regional councils of the Karelia Interreg region in Finland and the Karelian Republic in the Russian Federation are jointly preparing to form a Euroregio. The aim is to establish cross-border cooperation on a more permanent basis, and hopefully avoid dependency on the specifities of a certain EU programme period. Seen in a wider perspective, this Euroregio strategy attempts to fulfil the empty space, a "no sea's land" between the two major prospective transnational regions in northern Europe, the Baltic region and the Barents region. Yet, whatever the merits of the Euroregio Karelia conception, there is no guarantee that the region could evolve towards a functional region. Even its identification as a region is an ambitious target: a major obstacle is simply the fact that the prospective Karelia Euroregio is very large, and its different parts at present have quite different functional links and interests. In addition, the necessary complementarities of the partners are hard to find.

Overall, the findings on developments along the Finnish-Russian border are paradoxically dichotomous. On the one hand, the whole cross-border cooperation regime has been turned upside down in the space of a decade, and the region, to an increasing degree, resembles a normal European border region: as Christiansen and Joenniemi (1998, 11) put it, room for "regionality" has been created in the political landscape. On the other hand, cross-border cooperative activities have not been able to make a visible contribution to the fulfilment of the targets usually put forward as their primary motivation. In autumn 1998, the possible need for humanitarian aid is the foremost issue on the agenda of cross-border cooperation between Finland and Russia.

In the future, a fundamental strategic question will concern the extent to which these peripheries are able to link their mutual cooperation to structures and lines of action at different spatial levels, from the local to the multinational. This is a very demanding target for several reasons. In Russia, the Republic of Karelia might strive for a role as a kind of free economic zone next to the border. However, this goal is in contradiction with the idea of escaping from the Federation's problems, as realising it would need coherent policy support from the Federation. On the Finnish side, the competitive setting between various regions along the long border, especially for various gateway functions, tends to place the Interreg Karelia region on the sidelines.


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