Hardi Tamás - Tóth Károly (szerk.): Határaink mentén. A szlovák-magyar határtérség társadalmi-gazdasági vizsgálata (2008) (Somorja, 2009)
Esettanulmányok
230 Summary Their education should be supported primarily in those institutions that provide trainings missing on the Slovak side, so many argued that the specialised secondary schools should be supported in the first place, because grammar school training was also available in Slovakia. If the students come from Slovakia to Hungarian grammar schools, the demand in Slovakia decreases, which may cause problems for the Hungarian schools in Slovakia that are not in an easy situation anyway. One school leader emphasised that the movements with educational purposes of the Hungarians living in Slovakia should be treated separately from the education of students from other countries in Hungary, as they have a special situation coming from their foreign citizenship but Hungarian ethnicity. It should not even be an issue that the institution requires them to pay tuition fee; to the opposite, the Hungarian state should support their education. Almost all headmasters emphasised that very talented students come to study in Hungary who are happy to take up extra tasks. There is usually no problem with them; they successfully integrate into the school society. Many drew the attention to the necessity of a single and more unequivocal regulation. CONCLUSIONS Regular cross-border movements only concern a relatively small share of the total population of the border region. On the Hungarian side this is relevant for 1 to 2% of the total population, whereas some 20 to 30% of the inhabitants on the Slovak side are involved in such movements. The main driving forces of the movements are economic growth, economic interests and the characteristics of the spatial structure (revival of the centre and hinterland relations). The EU accession promoted the increase of the intensity of the movements in all fields and directions. The differences of the national systems (social security, training, taxation etc.) promote the penetration of the shadow or black economy; also, they set back the simplification of the affairs of everyday life. The official organs only acknowledge Hungarian citizens or foreign citizens living in Hungary. They have difficulty in handling cases when somebody is a foreign citizen, living in another state (in the proximity of the border) but working or wishing to use public services in Hungary. It is necessary to work out cross-border urban area strategies built on the cities, with feasible examples to be followed and also to carry out an in-depth survey of the operational rules of the institutions in order to harmonise them with their Slovak counterparts. The accession of the two states to the European Union in 2004 and to the Schengen Agreement later also contributed to the development of the everyday relations, but the process have decades of history by now. The occasionally “cool” relationship of the two states cannot be felt in the micro-level relations, in the economically more advanced areas of the borders we can see the first steps of the birth of single border regions. The private sector is ahead of the official relations. A part of the inhabitants and the economic sector “use” the other side of the border in their everyday lives. The separating role of the “mental border” is less of a problem here than in some other European border areas. In the areas more developed economically (especially in the western part, the areas along the axis of the Danube River, belonging to the hinterland of three capital cities: Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest) the joint development is very dynamic. The rapid economic development of Slovakia has also given a great momentum to the integration, and now areas at the same level of development are building a common cross-border region and urban network. On the eastern part of the border this dynamism is less palpable. This is an area where less developed regions
