The border between Finland and Sweden in the Torne Valley, drawn in 1809, has often been described as a “borderless border”. The expression reflects the idea that despite the legal and political existence of the state border, it has not fundamentally structured life in the region. People, goods, services and social interaction have long crossed the border with relative ease, and the area has frequently been imagined as a shared social and cultural space.

After the Second World War, Finland and Sweden participated actively in broader processes of Nordic and European rapprochement. These developments also lowered the border in legal and regulatory terms, facilitating cross-border interaction in numerous practical ways. Following the end of the Cold War, both countries joined the European Union in 1995, and the Torne Valley increasingly came to be seen as part of a wider Europe of the Regions. In this vision, cross-border areas such as the Torne Valley were expected to emerge as more autonomous actors in an increasingly integrated European, and even global, context.

Yet this trajectory of integration did not continue indefinitely. In two of my recent articles — From Nordic Pragmatism to Legal Complexity: The Transformation of Finnish–Swedish Transboundary River Agreements (available open access here) and Finnish–Swedish Cross-Border Governance and the Primacy of Intra-State Equality (available open access here) — I examine how this process of regional and political integration appeared to stall in the early 2000s. In particular, the legal history of the Torne Valley raises a broader question: what role did changes in the legal and administrative context play in this development?

A Nordic Experiment in Cross-Border Governance

The border in the Torne Valley originated in 1809, when Sweden lost its eastern provinces to the Russian Empire and they were reorganised as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. Already in the Peace Treaty of Fredrikshamn and the subsequent border arrangements, Sweden and Russia acknowledged the distinctive character of the region and granted the local population various legal accommodations that allowed cross-border life to continue. Finnish and Swedish customs authorities cooperated closely in matters such as combating smuggling, and cross-border schooling was common.

For a long time, cooperation between authorities remained largely informal, relying on the socio-cultural unity of the region and on a pragmatic Nordic administrative and legal culture. This practice continued even after Finland became independent in 1917, when the border was transformed into a boundary between two sovereign Nordic states.

After the Second World War, this cooperation gradually became more institutionalised. One example was the 1963 Finnish–Swedish agreement on border customs cooperation, which largely formalised practices that had already existed for a long time. In the spirit of Nordic cooperation and following a recommendation by the Nordic Council, Finland and Sweden concluded the Finnish–Swedish Transboundary River Agreement in 1971. The agreement was based on the recognition that the waters of the Torne River basin constituted a shared resource and should therefore also be governed jointly.

Within its geographical scope, the states transferred significant regulatory powers to a joint Finnish–Swedish Transboundary River Commission. The Commission was granted powers comparable to national water courts and could independently decide on issues such as permits for water construction and fisheries regulation.

While transboundary river agreements and joint commissions had been established in many parts of Europe before, it was highly exceptional for such bodies to exercise extensive and autonomous public-law powers. Comparable river commissions, such as those established between Finland and the Soviet Union or between Finland and Norway, did not exercise similar decision-making authority. In this sense, the 1971 agreement represented an unusually far-reaching experiment in cross-border governance.

At the same time, cooperation between municipalities in the Torne Valley was increasingly organised through formal agreements, for example in the fields of education and shared infrastructure. More broadly, the Nordic countries concluded the 1977 Nordic Agreement on Local Government Cooperation across Nordic Borders, which in principle authorised municipalities to engage in cross-border cooperation.

However, the Nordic agreement explicitly prohibited the delegation of public authority to a municipality in another state. From the 1980s onwards, this limitation increasingly came to be seen as an obstacle, as meaningful cross-border municipal cooperation often required broader public-law competences.

In the optimistic climate of European integration during the 1990s, Finland and Sweden therefore explored the possibility of establishing cross-border public-law bodies between municipalities in the Torne Valley. Such bodies would not only facilitate voluntary cooperation but could also exercise public authority and take responsibility for statutory municipal tasks. As with the 1971 river agreement, the aim was to respond to practical cross-border needs through legal innovation.

Yet these efforts soon encountered growing legal and constitutional difficulties. By the turn of the millennium, the broader legal context in which cross-border cooperation operated had begun to change.

When Legal Complexity Overtook Nordic Pragmatism

The legal environment that had enabled the pragmatic cross-border arrangements of the 1960s and 1970s began to change markedly towards the end of the twentieth century. Across Western Europe, the consolidation of the rule of law and the expansion of welfare-state institutions were accompanied by a growing emphasis on legal regulation, constitutional guarantees and individual rights. Nordic legal systems were increasingly shaped by international obligations, human rights law and European integration.

Finland acceded to the European Convention on Human Rights only in 1990, after the end of the Cold War. In Sweden, too, the importance of the European Convention on Human Rights had grown by the 1990s, and the country incorporated it into its legal system by law in 1994. Around the same time Finland carried out a major reform of its constitutional catalogue of fundamental rights in 1995, the same year in which both Finland and Sweden joined the European Union and the EU acquis became fully applicable. These developments gradually transformed the broader legal context within which cross-border cooperation in the Torne Valley had previously operated with relatively little difficulty.

Within both the Finnish and Swedish administrations, the 1971 Transboundary River Agreement increasingly came to be viewed as legally problematic. It was argued that the agreement no longer corresponded to evolving international environmental obligations and that it conflicted with constitutional guarantees and fundamental rights, particularly because of the limited possibilities for judicial review. Concerns were also raised that the arrangement complicated the effective implementation of European Union law, which ultimately remains the responsibility of the Member States.

The reform of the agreement, prepared jointly but largely through separate national processes, began during the 1990s. In both countries the prevailing view soon became that regulatory powers should be returned to national legal and administrative frameworks. Cross-border cooperation would continue, but primarily through coordination rather than joint decision-making. This approach marked a clear departure from the thinking behind the 1971 agreement, where the creation of a genuinely shared institutional authority had been seen as both practical and legally unproblematic for governing the shared waters.

The new Finnish–Swedish Transboundary River Agreement, which entered into force in 2010, therefore replaced the earlier governance model with a more state-centred framework. A new Transboundary River Commission was formally established, but its role became largely advisory and coordinating. Reflecting this shift, the Commission itself now describes its role as serving as a regional resource shared by two sovereign states.

A similar pattern could be observed in attempts to deepen cross-border cooperation between municipalities in the Torne Valley. In the early 2000s, proposals to establish cross-border public-law bodies capable of exercising administrative authority encountered a wide range of legal concerns. Legal experts from state institutions and universities identified numerous issues, ranging from questions of sovereignty and the protection of fundamental rights to practical conflicts between different sectoral regulations. Eventually the ministry-led initiative quietly faded away without a formal decision and has since largely disappeared from public debate.

In practice, the idea of the Torne Valley as a borderless border persists, often as a political slogan or marketing narrative. Legally, however, the vision of a Europe of the Regions never fully materialised into substantial institutional reforms in the area. In the governance of the transboundary waters, the developments of the early twenty-first century even represented a partial step back from the earlier model of integrated governance. Later crises, such as the refugee crisis that began in 2015 and the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 onwards, further underscored that despite decades of integration rhetoric the Torne Valley had remained the border between two sovereign states seeking to protect their own authority and interests.

Yet it is worth asking whether the legal thinking that produced these outcomes has itself become outdated. The geopolitical and environmental challenges of the 2020s have changed the context in which cross-border governance is discussed. Growing concerns about supply security, as well as questions relating to the rights of indigenous peoples and other cross-border minorities, highlight once again the importance of cooperation across borders. They also raise the question of whether cross-border governance might require more flexible institutional imagination than the state-centred legal frameworks that emerged in the late twentieth century and culminated at the turn of the millennium.

Rethinking Nordic Cross-Border Governance

Since February 2022, many things in Europe have changed, and the northern regions of the Nordic countries have once again moved closer to the centre of foreign and security policy. Finland and Sweden have joined the NATO alliance and become parties to the institutional arrangements that follow from it.

These developments have also led to an almost unprecedented intensification of Nordic cooperation at the mental, political and practical levels. One example is the recently adopted Joint Nordic Strategy for Transport System Preparedness, which aims to strengthen the resilience of Nordic infrastructure and logistics.

In this changed situation, security-driven rapprochement has been achieved remarkably quickly, and legal problematisations have largely remained in the background. It may therefore be worth asking whether the legal development of Nordic cooperation could also be approached more broadly in a similar spirit of renewed pragmatism.

Only a couple of decades ago, legal assessments often suggested that cross-border institutional arrangements in the Torne Valley might pose risks to national sovereignty, the intra-state equality of citizens, or the protection of fundamental rights within the state. In today’s geopolitical context, however, many might instead argue that deeper Nordic cooperation is precisely one of the means through which both state sovereignty and the rights and interests of the people living in these states, as well as the protection of the environment and ecosystems, can best be secured.

Perhaps constitutional and public law debates could also gradually move towards perspectives that resemble the Joint Nordic Strategy approach already visible in sectors such as transport policy. Such an approach could make the border regions between Finland and Sweden, as well as elsewhere in the Nordic countries, somewhat more borderless once again.

At the same time, this could serve the broader interests of the states involved. In a world where peaceful cooperation is increasingly overshadowed by geopolitical rivalry, such examples may be more valuable than ever before.

---

Editorial note : The links to the open access papers were added on 27 April 2026.