Transregional Europe

William Outhwaite

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781787694958
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Transregional Europe continues a line of argument developed in European Society (2008), Europe Since 1989 (2016) and Contemporary Europe (2017). It integrates work in human geography and planning with related scholarship in history and the other social sciences, covering public perceptions of European macro-regions and EU macro-regional planning.
Are Europeans increasingly thinking, like North Americans, of their (sub-) continent in broad North/South and East/West categories? Are the macro-regional constructs such as the Danube or Baltic region identified or constructed by European policy-makers real, imaginary, or both? What is the relation between Europe and Eurasia and their respective political structures?
Transregional Europe bridges the gap between stereotypical generalisations about southerners, the 'wild East', and so on and the constructions assembled by national and transnational policy-makers. It should be of interest to students of Europe within a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary programmes: not just sociology or European studies but also human geography, politics, economics, international relations and cultural studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book examines how far we are beginning to think of Europe in terms of broad regional concepts familiar in the US: East/West/South/Midwest etc. The focus will be both on popular perceptions and on European Union (EU) macro-regional planning in the Baltic, Danube, Adriatic and other regions. Europe itself has passed from being a ‘core region’ of the world, in the imperial age ending in the mid-twentieth century, a ‘divided region’ in the Cold War period, to a (more-or-less) ‘unified region’ in the present century (Schimmelfennig, 2016: 180). The degree and extent of unification can of course be disputed; my concern here is rather to look at ways in which the European cake is sliced. My aim is to bridge the gap between essayistic discussions of regional stereotypes in the popular imagination such as the ‘lazy south’ or the ‘wild east’ and detailed accounts of the EU's controversial and contested attempts to develop planning strategies at a transnational level to address common environmental and other problems in member states, subnational regions and the states and regions adjacent to the EU. The focus, in other words, is on what have been called ‘mental maps’ (Gould & White, 1974), located in the minds both of European planners and of ordinary Europeans and visitors from abroad. ¹ In a particularly upbeat edited volume published in 1994 and reissued in 2013, Ashworth and Larkham (2013) wrote of the need for ‘a reformulation of the mental map of Europeans to encompass a new place-identity at the continental scale.’

The idea of the nation state was strongly reinforced by nationalist interpretations of the past, and it is no coincidence that the timing of the rise in interest in the conservation of relict artefacts of the built environment in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Europe coincided with the creation of the nation states of Germany, the Balkans and Italy…The shaping of a European place-identity to complement, if not replace, national identities has…never been more urgent or more necessary.

Another main theoretical reference point is the notion of imagined collectivities, introduced by the psychoanalyst and social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) in L'institution imaginaire de la société, in which the representation of a social entity by its members is analysed as a constitutive part of it. The French term imaginaire, earlier presented by Sartre (1940), was taken up in the English-speaking world by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (2003) in his discussion of individualism and the representation of social relations and ‘social space’ in modernity ² ; it is also echoed implicitly by Benedict Anderson (1983) in his analysis of nationalism, in which members of a nation imagine a connection with fellow citizens whom they have never met. It was introduced into the study of Europe by Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford (2005), for whom social, political and cultural representations of Europe coexist with, complement and sometimes conflict with national imaginaries, as in the standard survey question which asks whether people identify primarily with their region, their national state or with Europe (See also Biebuyck, 2010; Debarbieux, 2015). To establish the connection with territoriality, which is central to this book, it is enough here, summarising a few hundred years of history, to make the point that, whereas the European states of the middle ages and other contemporary social forms, such as feudalism and the Church, were largely non-territorial, the modern state as it emerges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is centrally concerned with its territory and its boundaries. Christopher Saxton's atlas of the counties of England and Wales of 1579 is an example (Debarbieux, 2015: 118–9). As we shall see, the EU continues this cartographic drive (Foster, 2015).

The term ‘Europeanisation,’ meaning the modification of the politics and other aspects of member states in terms of a European framework (see Radaelli, 2018), has increasingly been brought to bear on everyday patterns of thought and action, sometimes called ‘horizontal Europeanisation’ to distinguish it from the influence of European-level institutions on those of member states and their component regions (Büttner & Mau, 2010; Mau & Verwiebe, 2010: 303–27). A recent example is a study based mainly on Eurobarometer, the European Values Study and the European Quality of Life Survey (Deutschmann, Delhey, Verbalyte, & Aplowski, 2018). The authors focussed on the relation between actions, such as travel, and subjective orientations. They found, not surprisingly, that inhabitants of smaller and richer countries were more transnationally active within the rest of Europe, but also that ‘doing Europe’ in this way did not correlate with ‘feeling [identified with] Europe’; a postcommunist past and/or location in central Europe was a stronger determinant of positive attitudes.

As with other social scientific concepts such as class, there has been considerable debate over whether a scalar concept such as region, and scale itself, should be seen primarily as a discursive product or as a ‘real phenomenon’ ³ with causal effects. The obvious scalar differences between, say, the city of Paris, the country of France and the EU do not in themselves explain the complex interactions between them or, more precisely, between institutional actors primarily identified with one of these spatial levels. John Agnew (1993: 258) pointed out the danger that ‘one can start out using spatial concepts as shorthand for complex sociological processes but slip easily into substituting the spatial concepts for the more complex argument.’ This ‘spatial fetishism’, as Andrew Sayer (1985) described it, is more seriously dangerous in the analysis of nationalism and national identity, where it may replicate and reinforce national mythologies. As Rogers Brubaker (1996: 16) suggested, ‘We should not ask “What is a nation?” but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalized within and among states?’ ⁴

In the case of the EU, member states are divided for statistical and planning purposes into three levels of regions in the NUTS classification (Nomenclature des Unités Statistiques Territoriales). ⁵ At the highest level (NUTS 1), Sweden, for example, has three, Finland just one, and Germany the sixteen federal states (Bundesländer). The UK is divided into 12 (Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and 8 English regions, including London). This immediately points up the difference between substantive entities such as the three peripheral nations of the UK, which may well end up leaving it, and the English planning regions which lost their administrative functions in 2011 and have little importance except as constituencies for European Parliament elections. ⁶

The largely nationalist discussion of ‘natural frontiers’ is a notorious example of the attempt to naturalise more contingent social divisions between states. Rivers and mountain ranges can unite as well as divide. François Walter (2004: 345) cites a Swiss politician, implicitly making both claims in celebrating the centenary of the incorporation of Geneva into Switzerland in 1914 with the bizarre assertion that the Swiss cantons ‘form part of a geological and geographical system whose demands led them to form a single political system.’ United by the Alps and divided from Germany and France by the Rhine and the Lake of Geneva, respectively, Switzerland could perhaps claim to be a natural entity, but not very convincingly. In revolutionary France, Danton in 1793 referred a little more plausibly to the boundaries formed by ‘the Ocean, the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees’, though Walter (2012: 91–2) notes that the hexagonal image did not really become entrenched until after World War II and France's loss of its empire.

Rivers are very frequently used as defining symbols of nationality and national borders, as in the now retired verse of the German national anthem which traces the country's extent ‘von der Maas [Meuse] bis an die Memel [now the Lithuanian Neman]’. The Rhine in particular was the object of nationalistic claims (‘Deutschlands Strom, aber nicht Deutschlands Grenze’ in the title of a work by Arndt, 1813), seen by both France and Germany as a protective barrier against the other (as in Die Wacht am Rhein, a poem of 1840), ⁷ and finally rebadged in the 1950s as a symbol of reconciliation and European unity, marked by the location of the West German capital in Bonn and the otherwise incomprehensible retention of Strasbourg as one of the sites of the European Parliament. Rivers also play an important part in the theorisation of transnational historiography and ‘reterritorialization’ (Hadler & Middell, 2010; Middell & Naumann, 2010). The Danube, in particular, has been taken to exemplify this process, given the peculiarly shifting patterns of the national states along its course (Pohl, 2010: 126). ⁸

The term ‘region’ has survived, and probably benefited from, the critique of ‘methodological nationalism,’ the assumption that national states are the principal reference points for social scientific analysis, and the controversies over globalisation. ⁹ Regions, which come in very different sizes, are intrinsically fuzzy and less prone than ‘nations’ to accrue an emotional charge (Kramer, 2012, Ch. 13; Middell, 2018). ¹⁰ Regions are perhaps best defined negatively as territorial entities which are not states (Van Langenhove, 2016). ¹¹ The US is a state; North America is a region, as are sub-national regions such as the ‘mid-west’ or the Florida Everglades. The north of England is a region; Scotland is a state, even if not (or not yet) a sovereign one. As for the real or constructed nature of regions, it seems best to see them as both. To take the Danube as an example, the river itself is a defined physical entity, with at most some controversies about the location of its source. The Danube basin, similarly, is a physical entity, though less precisely defined (Pohl, 2010: 126). The ‘Danube region,’ by contrast, is an open-ended human construct, though related to the natural object of the river. ‘At best one can speak of a large region, which overlaps with other large regions – the Eastern Alps, the Carpathian basin, the Balkan peninsula’ (Pohl, 2010: 127).

The relation between physical space and representations was well captured by the geographer Richard Hamilton Williams (1996: 97) in his concept of ‘spatial positioning’ ¹² :

The capacity to conceptualise or think about one's location or situation within the spatial structure of Europe as a whole is a skill which often needs to be developed…Through such a process, it is sometimes possible to identify opportunities, comparative advantage and possibilities on the basis of which new links and relationships could be developed and strategic policies formulated.

Macro-regional conceptions are not unique to Europe: we think of Latin America, Polynesia, Australasia and so on. ¹³ Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) described a thirteenth-century world system made up of intersecting circles: north-west and south Europe, the Mongol empire in Eurasia, the Middle East and Egypt, eastern and western India, and China. ¹⁴ Almost all the world's states are members of one or more macro-regional groupings; Powers and Goertz (2011: 2414) found only 15 which were not. ¹⁵ It is, however, in Europe, in the territory of, and largely at the initiative of, the EU, that macro-regional planning has been pursued as an explicit goal and with substantial political and administrative underpinning. Transregional coordination of planning policy within and between states and regions is an early aspect of what has become the EU itself, though it is only in the last decade that it has become an explicit and prominent part of the EU's activity.

At the same time, roughly over the EU's 70-year history, and largely independently of deliberate policy initiatives, the map of Europe has been reshaped, with some parts of the south, as earlier in West Germany or the US, developing faster than the previously dominant north. (Sometimes, as in Belgium, the north–south polarities are reversed, with Flanders overtaking old-industrial Wallonia. In England, the division, usually located on a diagonal line between Bristol in the south-west and Grimsby in the north-east, between wealthy south and impoverished north has been dramatically exacerbated, despite pockets of prosperity in Manchester and Leeds and vapid slogans of the emergence of a ‘northern powerhouse.’)

The stereotypical oppositions of East/West and North/South persist, however, with the impact of the 2008 crisis linking Ireland and Iceland with the south of Europe in an imaginary southern PIIGS-sty. ¹⁶ The Romanian art historian Andrei Pleşu (2017: 4) addressed these tensions, locating his own country and the rest of the Balkans ‘between the reforming West, the source of modernity, and conservative Byzantium, contaminated by the Slavic and the Ottoman world…’ ¹⁷ Tensions between the centre and periphery are also salient, with the north-western core of Europe challenged by more ‘remote’ regions. At the same time, European integration strengthens the position of regional centres in member states in relation to national capitals, giving them direct access to ‘Brussels’ in macro-regional planning as well as in other areas of EU policy. The EU has of course been central to much macro-regional planning, with a host of initiatives of which the more visible include the construction or improvement of train lines, long-distance roads, such as the E80 running from Lisbon to Eastern Turkey including a sea crossing of the Adriatic from Pescara to Dubrovnik, or trans-European waterways such as the Rhine–Main–Danube.

The background to the later chapters of this book is the development of what has become the EU's territorial or spatial planning. While these terms are often used interchangeably, as in this book, an important recent overview stresses that ‘…spatial visions for the European territory…have tended to be replaced by an emphasis on territorial development policies largely designed to support economic development and competitiveness’ (Atkinson & Zimmermann, 2018: 157). The EU's development strategy has assumed that these two priorities, competitiveness and what has come to be called cohesion, the balance between prosperity in different parts of Europe, can be harmoniously combined. In practice, however, as well as in theory, they are distinct, as noted by David Evers (2008) in a classic article which discussed two alternative scenarios drawn up the previous year by the EU's ESPON, the European Spatial Planning Observation Network, established in 2002 and now renamed as the European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion. ¹⁸

ESPON produced two scenarios, one oriented to competitiveness and the other to cohesion. ¹⁹ Briefly, the first, labelled the Rhine–Rhone scenario, favoured existing areas of development running south-east from London to Bavaria and, in the south, from Northern Italy through southern France and Catalonia. The second, ‘Danubian’ scenario would have greatly benefited Greece and the former East Germany, as well as a wide range of areas ranging from northern Finland and Sweden (and the north of Scotland) to Sardinia and much of Spain and Portugal. ²⁰ The impact of the latter on income disparities across Europe was, however, not much greater than the competitiveness scenario.

The EU's rather halting development of a spatial planning policy ²¹ is paralleled by the evolution of the conceptual frameworks in which its history has been theorised: from the integration of previously (or at least recently) disconnected territories to the Europeanisation of decision-making in multi-level governance, guided, in theory at least, by the principle of subsidiarity, that decisions should be taken at the lowest appropriate level. Briefly, the EU practises the two forms of multi-level governance distinguished by Hooghe and Marks (2001): Type I (the nesting of authorities at different levels, as in a federal system) and Type II, a more informal and ad hoc combination of official and unofficial bodies addressing specific issues. ²² Whereas integration was conceived in relatively technical terms, Europeanisation was a way of conceptualising the convergence of economic, political and legal institutions and practices across (and to some extent beyond) the member states of the EU, as the result of its direct agency or its centripetal influence. ²³ This to some extent undercuts the endemic co...