Questions of European integration have been subject to considerable scholarly attention for a long time. More than ten years after Poland's EU accession, it is not only the country's booming economy and changing society in general that both politicians and researchers focus on, but also the Polish-German border region, perceived as a “Microcosm of European Integration.” This interdisciplinary volume features eleven chapters written mainly by sociologists, but also by researchers from the fields of border studies, German philology, and political science.

In the introduction, the editors focus on questions of European identification in general and determine the scope of the volume. The authors deal with a fairly new border region that emerged only after the Second World War, a region that experienced forced migration and one that had a political border that cut through several cities and was closed to visa-free travel for most years after 1945. Katarzyna Stokłosa's chapter on “Border Regions as Laboratories of European Integration” is historical in scope and draws comparisons with other European regions. Elżbieta Opiłowska's contribution focuses on “the development of cross-border cooperation in Europe,” analyzing the EU's instruments to overcome the disparities at its member states' peripheries. The contributions from Maria Zielińska and Anna Bachmann look at cooperation on the institutional and administrative levels, burdened by the similar experience of forced migrations but enhanced by mutual economic interests and by funding from the European Union. The subsequent four chapters by Robert Knippschild/Anja Schmotz, Kamilla Dolińska/Natalia Niedźwiedzka-Iwańczak, Beata Trzop, and Dorota Szabań/Krzystof Lisowski are based on original surveys on the quality of life and the perception of the border by inhabitants in both Poland and Germany. Despite a relatively low level of cross-border activity in general, most people seem to perceive the border situation as an asset rather than a risk to their life prospects. As far as young people are concerned, the authors point to the phenomenon of “open borders—closed minds” (167). Paradoxically, despite frequent border crossings, Polish youth often do not get into deeper interactions with their German counterparts other than during shopping trips. The two last chapters by Tomasz Jaśków and Agnieszka Korman focus on the successes and shortcomings of Polish-German educational projects—mainly concerned with learning the neighbors' language. While in Polish Lower Silesia almost half of all pupils learn German, only a striking one-half percent do so in Saxony.

One of the few shortcomings of the volume is the lack of a coherent introduction. It fails to highlight the basics relevant to the contributions dealing with the border region, such as its recent history, relevant international treaties, its theoretical context in border studies, and the overarching questions that all authors would be committed to. Here, Bachmann's excellent chapter could have served as a guideline. As a result, the volume sometimes lacks coherence not only in terms of methodology but also with regard to its contents. Another problem some chapters face is the lack of historical accuracy as far as the development of European borderlands in general, and the new Polish western territories in particular, are concerned. From a historical perspective, European integration did not start in 1951 but long before (7), with many international agreements made in the realms of trade, politics, and infrastructure dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. They were interrupted or paused, however, by the First and Second World Wars as well as the Cold War. On the regional level, contacts between communities in East Germany and western Poland have existed since the mid 1950s, and the visa-free travel arrangements between the German Democratic Republic and Poland in the 1970s already brought many Poles and Germans closer together, long before 1989 and Poland's subsequent accession into the EU. On a darker note, Polish and German stereotypes are also much older than the Second World War (176). They date back at least to the nineteenth century (see Wojciech Wrzesiński, Sąsiad, czy wróg? Ze studiów nad kształtowaniem obrazu Niemca w Polsce w latach 1795–1939, Wrocław, 2007), making the fight against stereotypes a difficult undertaking.

Several chapters perpetuate the old myth that the people resettling Poland's western and northern territories after 1945 had mainly come from Poland's eastern territories (10, 195). While this is true for some smaller towns and villages, it is is not in the case of the big cities and the “Recovered Territories” in general (see Gregor Thum, Uprooted: How Breslau Became Wrocław During the Century of Expulsions, Princeton, 2011, 94). While the two last chapters give an excellent overview of the successes and shortcomings of Polish-German educational projects, the volume fails to mention the numerous Polish-German NGOs, organizing Polish-German festivals and other cultural projects such as Michael Kurzwelly's imagined city of Słubfurt (German Frankfurt and Polish Słubice as a re-unified, novel, transnational city), among others. The European Union generously funds these initiatives within the framework of “Small Border Projects.”

In some chapters, a comparative view would have been helpful. Thus, the reader walks away with the impression that the detailed knowledge about recent integration processes in the very special Polish-German border region still needs to be put into the context of the broader field of border studies. This criticism not withstanding, the volume is an important contribution to the growing field of border studies in general and research on European integration in particular. The reader will find new research and novel approaches that otherwise are not accessible to the English-speaking reader. This will enable researchers of integration, working on other European border regions, to draw comparisons and to frame more general conclusions of shortcomings and successes of both national and European integration policies.