Last 18th and 19th of March took place a new edition of the “Castle talks on Cross Border Cooperation” in the Château de Pourtalès in Strasbourg.
It is the second such event out of the four that will take place in the framework of the new Jean Monnet Project focusing on “European Crises and Border Regions” (2018-2020) led by Prof. Dr. Birte Wassenberg, and to which the Euro-Institut is associated. Each edition will focus on a different crisis : This time, the centre of attention was “the Crisis of Europe without borders”.
Experts on this question, many of which belonged to the TEIN (Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network ; www.transfrontier.eu), as well as students from many different nationalities, seized this opportunity to think about the reasons, and the potential solutions to the functional crisis experienced by the Schengen area in the last few years.
The students had prepared presentations on various subjects, including the analysis of the situation in several border regions of the European continent. These were followed by round tables involving scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds, whose diversity was the source of sometimes rather intense – and always fascinating – debates.
These Castle-Talks were also used as a chance to organize (on the 20th of March) a reunion of the steering comity of the TEIN, as well as to bring together the participants to the TEIN4Citizens project (www.transfrontier.eu/tein4citizens/), in order to discuss its management during months to come. The next edition of the Castle Talks will take place in November 2019.