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Cross-border working communities are, in principle, groupings of regional authorities seeking to establish multilateral cross-border cooperation. The majority of them cover a broad area united by a particular geographical feature (a mountain range, for example), and generally contain a large number of regional authorities. They are often rather informal, functioning with a non-binding legal basis and their members do not transfer any decision-making powers to a joint governance body. Thus, they have distinguished from the so-called Euroregions, which normally group together local or regional authorities from a small number of adjacent border regions with the objective to create a true cross-border area. That results in a more binding cooperation framework, which allows policies to be initiated and joint projects to be carried out.

Historically, however, the two concepts of working communities and Euroregions have been intrinsically linked. The first Euroregion to be created in Europe—the Gronau Euregio on the Dutch-German border—was indeed initially a cross-border working community. It began in 1954 when two local associations, one German and one Dutch, were founded in order to bring together five border regions which, between them, comprised more than 100 municipalities on either side of the border. This cross-border working community was transformed into a Euroregion in 1958, the Euregio, which was progressively institutionalised, with a common office built in 1985.

The same kind of development took place on the borders between the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany and in the Upper Rhine Region, at the...