Vita e Pensiero

This article focuses on the most meaningful aspects of a research aimed at the analysis of the state of the art of cross-border cooperation in Europe – through qualitative systems and analysis of quantitative data in fifty-three European border areas – taking into account actors, shapes and objectives with a particular attention to the Euroregional process. The research hypothesis is that putting into action mechanisms of cross-border welfare systems, organized in Euroregional structures, can be the basis not only for the elaboration of an original model for local development, which can be applied in areas influenced by a border, but also for legitimating more strongly the cross-border dimension of integration, on a cultural, economic and institutional level. The article is divided into two parts. The first part aims at providing a theoretical framework on the concept of border, crossborder cooperation and Euroregion, subsequently developing them through the analysis and evaluation of cross-border cooperation in Europe, with a particular attention to Euroregional variables. The second part concerns the concepts of local development and welfare, overlapping them, with the aim of setting them within a strict cross-border dimension and so to understand those factors which allow for their development. The model for such a cross-border welfare system was applied to the Italian-Slovenian cross-border context, analysed in terms of the quality of its cooperative process, of the Euroregional prospects, of the cross-border third sector, and of the development of institutionalised cooperation in the context of cross-border health care. Key words: cross-border cooperation, Euroregions, cross-border welfare System.

Beginning with a critical examination of F. Nietzsche’ and M. Scheler’s account of individualistic and vitalistic resentment, this paper considers the emotional patterns of resentment in everyday interactions and in social relationships characterized by inequality, in the context of modernity. Resentment is a feeling experienced by social actors when an external agency denies them opportunities or valued resources (including status) that are socially represented as available to them. Such feeling inheres simultaneously in the social structures and relationships in which social actors are embedded. Arising from social relationships, resentment depends on the wider set of relations, that constitutes the social framework in which the agent plays his part. This analytic perspective puts forward the hypothesis that resentment is always socially situated and therefore it does not arise from psychological dynamics as generally considered, but from interactive and social dynamics. In the contemporary societies, social actors have growing possibility of individual choice, but they are unable to promote the conditions of equal opportunity required in order to achieve them. An increasingly ambitious and mimetic desire clashes with a selective and competitive reality. As a consequence, a widespread and deep resentment is embedded in everyday social life. Key words: social theory, emotion, resentment, social relationship, inequality.