Hardi Tamás - Tóth Károly (szerk.): Határaink mentén. A szlovák-magyar határtérség társadalmi-gazdasági vizsgálata (2008) (Somorja, 2009)
Esettanulmányok
208 Summary trative borders. We made a questionnaire survey with the population, with a sample of 2000 people, and we also approached approximately 500 commuting employees. We also made interviews with non-governmental organisations, public institutions, local governments, economic actors etc. The Slovak-Hungarian border section is 679 kilometres long; this is the longest border section of Hungary. Moving from west to east along the border the development disparities are definite. A speciality of the border region is that even on the Slovakian side of the border the number and proportion of the Hungarian ethnic population is significant; there are settlements and areas where Slovak citizens with Hungarian ethnicity are the majority. In the border region the integration of the population and the economic actors is increasing. Approximately 30 thousand employees from Slovakia work in Hungary, and commuting from Hungary to Slovakia has also appeared by now. More and more businesses have locations in the neighbour country, other choose school or even placed of residence in the neighbour state. The agglomeration of Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia, has reached Hungary by now, several hundreds of Slovakian families have bought homes in the villages along the border of Northwest Hungary, in fact, the extension of the public transport of Bratislava towards Hungary is an issue today. At the same time, Budapest has a strong gravity on the border areas of Central Slovakia. On both sides we find smaller towns in the proximity of the border whose theoretical (and more and more often the practical) catchment areas reach into the other side of the border and integrate smaller areas. For a part of the population it has become natural by now to do the shopping or use services on the other side of the border. Due to the common past there are also family and friendly relations. 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 meet each other. Nevertheless the city of Košice and its environment is developing, and the labour market of this region is now seeking skilled employees on the Hungarian side of the border. Of course there are still many obstacles to the complete integration. The national systems (education, health care, public administration, bureaucracy etc.) still have difficulties in handling the natural processes of cross-border areas. Those who cross the borders are actually foreign citizens but still “local inhabitants”. It is difficult to put them into the traditional categories of “domestic” and “foreign” citizens, and the administrative problems coming from this may cause difficulties e.g. in the joint and thus more rational use of health care institutions. These problems often lead to harmful phenomena; some use the existing differences for e.g. tax evasion pur
