Local social capital and trans-national civic engagement - Potentials for transnational civil societies in German, French, Czech and Polish border regions

Border regions provide particular opportunities to analyse the development of civic engagement across social and territorial borders. In this article, we present such an analysis based on the social capital theory in the tradition of Robert D. Putnam. We take on a comparative perspective by considering the border regions of Germany to France, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Data were collected on both sides of the borders using standardized survey methods. In order to be able to carry out multi-level analyses, we selected two pairs of cities per region on both sides of the border. In the analytical part of the article, we will first describe the local civic engagement in each region, focusing also activities across the borders. Furthermore, we will analyse the relationship between the existing local civil society, individual dispositions of the local residents, and local conditions on the one hand and the extent of and interest in transborder civic engagement on the other hand. We found that the existing potential for local civil society activities particularly advances the development of transborder civic engagement. Additional factors on the individual and the contextual level such as prosperity or the salience of historic conflicts in the regions proofed to be less relevant than initially expected.