摘要
Contemporary systemic, global crisis enhances the risks of internal and transnational aberrations. Precisely for that reason, the need for an inter-regional, cross-national cooperation emerges even more emphatically. South and Eastern Europe provides an area where enhanced intercultural, business and socioeconomic interrelations generate a fertile environment for collaboration. The region, consisted of a broad mixture of national and cultural identities, rather presents great diversity, heterogeneity and complexity in transnational cooperation. Since the emergence of new countries, and consequently the establishment of new frontiers, the region has been experiencing fundamental changes in economic, political, social and cultural patterns. The present paper starts from the characteristics of the wider region that came out of a historical analysis, in the frame of a broader research project. We proceed with a SWOT analysis of the prospects for an inter-regional, cross-national cooperation. Based on this analysis as well as on a comprehensive literature review of relevant theoretical contributions, we provide a specific proposal for the structural reorganization of the existing institutions for transnational collaboration in the area, co-integrated in a mutual context of democratically legitimized, socially and environmentally balanced cooperation, taking into consideration local and ethnic specificity.
