Abstract
Cross-border cooperation has become an important dimension of South Tyrol’s territorial autonomy especially in the period following the settlement of the South Tyrolean dispute in 1992 and the foundation of the Euroregion Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino as a European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation (EGTC ) in 2011. On the occasion of the two anniversaries – 50 years of South Tyrol’s Second Autonomy Statute in 2022 and 10 years of EGTC in 2021 – this article investigates the public representation of the Euroregion in local media through meaningful empirical longitudinal data (2011 – 2020). Applying the concept of transnational regionalism and drawing on a large corpus of press articles from the three regions of Tyrol, South Tyrol and Trentino and employing qualitative and quantitative methods of content analysis, the article examines 1) how the topics Euroregion and cross-border cooperation are publicly presented in Tyrol, South Tyrol and Trentino, 2) which actors and topics play a role in the reporting, and 3) which border-confirming and border-transcending patterns the reporting shows. Detected border-transcending patterns are, for example, the quantity of reports on the topic Euroregion, which varies greatly in the three public spheres, and the related political topics, which are characterised by different territorially determined interests in each
public sphere. Border-transcending patterns that can be found in the data are alignment effects of Euroregional institutional or thematic events on the quantity of reporting as well as actor concentrations and networks around topics of common interest. However, these patterns are blurred by the marginality of certain institutions of the Euroregion and a rather superficial thematic coverage in the reporting. Accordingly, there is potential to expand the construction of cross-border cooperation and the territorial dimension of the Euroregion in the sense of transnational regionalism.