Áron Lėphart
Péter Remėnyi
DOI: 10.35666/28310438.2014.3.295
UDC: 911.3(497.113-04:439-04)
Abstract: The relation between the changes in the running and other characteristics (e.g. permeability) of state borders and the development potentials of the cities and towns of the borderlands has been in the focus of political geography for long time. The modern history of Central and Southeastern Europe is filled with border changes thus with changes in territorial power which influenced the development opportunities of the respective cities many times. In our work we focus on Vojvodina, a region with one of the most turbulent modern history in this part of Europe. We argue that the multiple border changes of the 20th century had determinative effect on the development possibilities of the region. In the majority of the cases in the era we may observe the establishment of new, highly uncooperative, barrier-like borders parallel with the deconstruction of similar ones. This caused, for the cities in new borderland position stagnation, while the new central position created new development opportunities. All this is overlapped in the region by serious ethnic tensions, major nation- and state-building efforts as well. A case study of the above mentioned processes is the Subotica-Novi Sad relation we also focus on in this paper. Besides the above mentioned we would like to emphasize that in the European integration there is the possibility of virtualizing borders, normalizing the cross-border relations and turn confronting borders to cooperative ones, which may create new opportunities for the cities of the Hungarian-Serbian borderland as well.
Key words: changes, the development potentials, cities, towns, the region, ethnic tensions, Subotica, Novi Sad, cross-border relations, opportunities.