30 years IHI Zittau: Prologue

Three peripheries want to become a Euroregion

It was not so easy to come together when in 1989 the restrictive travel regulations between the "socialist brother states" in the border triangle of Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia were abolished by newly elected democratic governments as absurd monstrosities: The only border crossing from Zittau to Poland was only peripherally connected to the supra-regional road network on the Polish side, and in order to get to the neighboring town of Liberec, 20 kilometers away as the crow flies, one first had to drive almost 20 kilometers westward to get from Seifhennersdorf back 40 kilometers eastward to Liberec....
Already in GDR times, the Oberlausitz was a constantly missing out fringe area of the district of Dresden, and the neighbors in northern Bohemia and western Lower Silesia were not much different from the point of view of their metropolises Prague and Warsaw or Wroclaw. Now they wanted to turn the perspective towards the neighbors and create a common Euroregion - with its own university landscape! The Academic Coordination Center of the Euroregion Neisse (ACC) based in Liberec was born...