77 The Journal of Territorial and Maritime Studies Volume 2 Number 1 (January 2015) pp. 77-95 © NORTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY FOUNDATION The Consolidation of the Euro-regional Territory and Its Consequences: The Case of the Galicia-North of Portugal Euro-region Enrique J. Varela Celso Cancela Constantino Cordal Professors of Political Science, University of Vigo, Spain Abstract The Euro-regions are the institutional expression of a particular way of cross-bor- der cooperation between/among Member States of the European Union. They cre- ate organizations, policies, public services, processes and interactions of various entities, but also among citizens. That diversity allows us to analyze in the context of the borders of Spain and Portugal (one of the oldest border spaces in Europe) different types of cross-border cooperation, including models of formal and mate- rial cooperation, as well as informal and intangible processes that the residents of both sides of the border have developed throughout past centuries. To study these models and processes of cross-border cooperation we will focus the analysis on the regions of the North-West of the Iberian Peninsula, comprising Galicia and North of Portugal as political and administrative realities, asymmetric but comple- mentary, in a community space as that of the Galicia-North of Portugal Euro- region. The objective is to analyze if after those interactions we can conclude that the emergence of a cross-border governance strengthens the European multilevel governance; a question that we will try to answer by analyzing some elements of the Euro-region path dependence and some specific policy problems of this Euro- regional space. Keywords cross-border cooperation, Euro-regions, governance, formal-informal, material- immaterial, institutions, citizens