This article examines how state-centric interpretations of legal equality have affected cross-border governance in the Torne Valley between Finland and Sweden. It focuses on legal sources regulating the border, in particular the Transboundary River Agreements of 1971 and 2010 and the unsuccessful attempt to establish cross-border municipal public-law bodies around the year 2000, with preparatory works and parliamentary materials analysed in the wider context of Nordic legal culture and supported by historical and socio-legal scholarship. The article shows that constitutional and legal frameworks emphasising national equality limited recognition of the border region’s distinctive socio-cultural and legal conditions. While the Torne Valley has often been imagined as a shared space or ‘borderless border’, in practice it has been incorporated into the state-centred welfare and rule-of-law order. The legal history of the Torne Valley suggests that the Nordic legal tradition may provide resources for rethinking equality and fundamental rights in a cross-border context.
Sami Pekola (Wed,) studied this question.