ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on border areas because the frontier situation highlights the problems of the post-communist economic transition and because borders are so important in the history and geography of the country. Borderlands acquire their basic identity from interaction with the frontier and its rules and from cross-border transactions, but are not just passive spaces. The chapter describes two villages on either side of the Austro-Hunganan border, south of our study area, Doris Wastl-Walter et al. show that there is a total lack of communication between the settlements. On the Hungarian-Romanian border, the presence of illegal traders and their catering, accommodation and health problems cause difficulties for border settlements. In the south-east Romanian border region, although there is some industrial production, export potential is low because both sides of the border have few resources and are peripheral to their respective countries. These differences are reflected in the number of border crossings in the two case study areas.
