The Tisza River valley tourism in regional planning documents of Serbia and Hungary: Common tourism development on the external border of the EU

Abstract

ABSTRACT: One of the key development goals of the EU regional policy is the development of the less developed regions and the enhancement of the cooperation with symmetrical cross-border regions, including the possibility of cooperation at the EU’s external borders. Serbia belongs to this category, and the current cross-border cooperational contacts in the border regions with the EU member states are mainly successful. The purpose of this study is to present the development documents that address the topic of tourism in the Tisza Region, a cross-border region of Serbia and Hungary, at the level of national, regional and local development documents in Hungary and Serbia, as well as according to international projects that focus in the complementary tourism sectors and joint activities in the region. The main research results show that the analyzed strategic documents point to similar and competitive guidelines for the development of tourism in the neighbouring Tisza Regions of Hungary and Serbia in terms of their content. It has been found that the focus is on the individual tourist motives in the cross-border region, but also that there are development processes that are coordinately implemented owing to the regional and rural policy and the EU assistance, on the one hand, and the open borders that allow free communication throughout the entire region, on the other.