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AbstractNon-territorial autonomy (NTA) is a concept to ensure political and cultural participation of national minorities in society and thus a tool to manage diversity without challenging territorial integrity. This article relates to the experience of Schleswig, which is widely perceived as a model of successful border-delineation based on national self-determination and subsequent reconciliation and accommodation of national, linguistic, and cultural binarity in a majority-minority framework. Minority membership is based on subjective self-identification and not registered.The principle of subjective self-identification and its fluidity challenge attempts to implement a legitimate, democratic structure of minority self-government. The non-definition of "minority" based on objective, measurable criteria is due to the apparent social integration of the Schleswig society: today, it is socially more divided by the national border drawn 100 years ago than by respective majority-minority divisions. It has become apparent that the territorial restriction to the boundaries of the former Duchy of Schleswig does not cohere with social practices and mobility frameworks and thus questions the present NTA infrastructure, which is restricted to a historic territory no longer relevant in contemporary administrative frameworks or in patterns of social practices.

This paper examines the role of Euroscepticism on regional cross-border cooperation between Germany and Denmark. It demonstrates that Euroscepticism, while absent from local mainstream politicians, had already caused civic unrest in the 1997 attempts to construct a return to history Euro-region Schleswig. It resulted in a re-scaling of the Euro-Region to Region and Schleswig to "Sønderjylland/Schleswig", omitting any reference to Europe, European identity or a commitment to a closer European union in the relevant agreements. Border controls, on the agenda in 2011 and again since 2015, have demonstrated the institutional weakness of cross-border politics when faced with determined initiatives from the national center. Furthermore, the Eurosceptic Danish People's Party had its best results in the border precincts both at the latest European and Danish national elections. Euroscepticism, even though difficult to measure on a regional level, seems to have been an ever present underneath current despite a political rhetoric of successful cooperation and cross-border reconciliation. The Danish-German case's development might be more distinct, but nonetheless representative for European border (and cross-border) regions. While European metropolises develop into thriving cosmopolitan post-nation state societies, this is not necessary the case at Europe's borders, where categorization and bordering remain common social practices by the large majority of national borderlanders with only a small portion of transnational borderlanders or 'regionauts' getting involved in border crossing social practices on a larger scale.

Border zones are characteristic for being the site of competing national movements' struggle on a territory and its population: a population did not only have to awaken to a nationality, but also to the 'correct' nationality.
Studying national protagonists of competing national movements in border regions therefore promises solid evidence of the reasons underpinning national movements' success and/or failure to attract the masses.