Sonderband 2. International Council on Archives. Dritte Europäische Archivkonferenz, Wien 11. bis 15. Mai 1993. Tagungsprotokolle (1996)

2. Session /Séance. Regional (trans-border) Cooperation / Coopération régionale (transfrontaliere) - Brejon de Lavergnée, Marie-Edith: New economic Zones and their Archives / Nouvelles zones économiques et leurs archives (english 77 - français 100)

2. Session/Seance: Brejon de Lavergnée, New economic Zones and their Archives

public sources, research institutions, universities, chambers of commerc and industry, private developers, bodies of employers and employees ... (in March 1991 52 regions were involved in its operations). Finally, the fourth line of strategy consists of putting partnership into practice through which each of the regions opens up its work to its usual partners in order the better to take into account concrete proposals.

Every new group established or every administrative cut-back is a matter of concern or anxiety to archive services since they often take place without any coordination at national level and certainly not at international level. Just as euroregions, EDZ’s, working communities and other forms of cooperation will need organisational and legal structures, which will allow them, to give due notice of there group- term plans of action to the authorities of the relevant territories, the same applies to archive services. There should not be a too hasty rash to give more thought to archival legislation and archive offices: it is, it seems, preferable first of all to register support for a policy of negotiation, as has been said earlier, rather than for a policy of compulsion, in order that the new structures can get into their stride.

The Economic Development Zone at Longwy, for example, if it is indeed destined to become Europe at the scale of 1/1000, as Mr. Delors called it at Arlon in 1987, could also serve as the testing ground for archival partnership. For this to come about, all the leading personalities will need to be called to arms: governments, the Commission of European Communities, elected heads of businesses, academics and of course, archivists from Belgium, France and Luxembourg and above all those involved in the Zone.

To conclude and summarise, the archival situation in European economic zones is as follows: a legal void, no geographical consolidation either by the rénovai or disappearance of archive groups or by their transfer in accordance with the cycle applied by the producers. To bring whole groups together again will mean chasing them to the ends of Europe and going to Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Brussels and elsewhere. To find common ground, the first question that arises is that of knowiong to whom this or that group belongs. It would seem the simplest thing to do would be to hand them over to the archive service, which is territorially competent to receive them, taking the risk that, if the headquarters of the transferring body is elsewhere that records of no interest will be taken in, such as „clients“ files of a business, whose design files are at the headquarters.

At least the archives might, for preference, be entrusted to an international body located in the relevant European Zone or handed over to one of the countries, which is a contracting party to agreements, which can only be done with the difficultés of reaching agreement already mentioned. This problem is not easy to resolve and proof of this is to be found in the search for the person or body, who/which sent a consignment to the archives of the central commission for navigation on the Rhine.

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