The Multidimensionality of Regions in World Politics

Paul J. Kohlenberg, Nadine Godehardt, Paul J. Kohlenberg, Nadine Godehardt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000168648
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines what counts regarding the role and conceptualization of regions in world politics.

It presents a fresh look at which narratives awake, persist, fall dormant or re-emerge amidst diverse interlocking processes of environmental, technological and global political changes. It puts forward a thorough and multidimensional conceptualization of regions as embedded in changing, overlapping environments, and requires more attention to regions' shifting materiality, temporality and technological underpinnings. Combing the approaches, questions and analyses of Critical IR and Political Geography, it calls for a renewed emphasis on the puzzle of how the contextual environment of regions may become more (or less) multidimensional, or how some aspects of a region's contextual environment may be mutually constitutive in non-intuitive ways. Ultimately, it sheds light on the politics of regions and the regional scale in international politics in order to overcome the often-underlying territorial fixity of territory and space within IR approaches.

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of international relations, international political sociology, political geography, regionalism, geopolitics and area studies.

Part I

Historicity of regions in political geography and international relations

1 From bounded spaces to relational social constructs

Conceptualisation of the region in geography

Anssi Paasi

From the outside, it must sometimes seem very odd to see the ways in which academics and theorists scrabble around trying to understand words that most of us use most of the time without worrying too much about their meaning. And region is one of those words. Surely, we all know what a region is when we use the term in everyday conversation. Yet, for very good reasons, debates around the ways in which the regional should be defined and mobilised conceptually have been among the most heated in contemporary human geography.

(Cochrane 2018, 79)

1. Introduction

It has been something of a paradox that during the last few decades the region, a notion that was predicted to vanish along with the rise of “dynamic modernity” in societies, has re-emerged in both academic debates and wider social practices (cf. Keating 2017; Paasi 2009; Paasi and Metzger 2017). The 1990s in particular witnessed a renaissance in regional thinking. There were several factors that contributed to/led to this phenomenon. National states were facing worldwide neo-liberal globalisation, increasing economic competition, the rise of the knowledge-economy and demands for policies focusing on regional scale (Storper 1997; Scott 1998; Le Gales and Lequesne 1998; Dunning 2000). Separatist tendencies generated a wider search for regional identities and spurred claims for political autonomy in regions (Augusteijn and Storm 2012). At the same time, social and regional interests became fragmented and “stretched” across spatial scales. In many states, devolution of power to regional and local institutions took place. Efforts to cut costs and make services more “effective” led to mergers of regions at different scales. At the same time, city-regions were identified as critical in development policies, and networks of global cities were recognised as key attributes describing the spatialities of the globalising world (Knox and Taylor 1995). Cross-border regions, for their part, were seen as tools to lower the barriers of interaction between states (Perkman and Sum 2002). Such ideas resonated with Ohmae’s (1995) notion of the “borderless world”, which was based on the idea that borders and nation-states would gradually lose their power and that cross-border regions would eventually become critical in the globalising economy (Paasi 2019).

Region has been the most important category in geographical research since the institutionalisation of geography as an academic discipline. It was crucial when geographers were developing the early disciplinary identity of the subject and provided an elementary methodology for the discipline into the 1950s and 1960s. Despite being partly overshadowed by the ostensibly more general concepts of space and place since the 1960s (Paasi 2011; Agnew 2018; Entrikin 2018), it has stubbornly upheld its position among the core categories of geography. This has been partly based on the fact that the world is ever more often perceived and categorised through overlapping regional types, such as supra-state regions (EU, NAFTA, MERCOSUR, etc.), governmental sub-areas of such macro-regions (e.g. the “Europe of regions” in the EU) and “unusual”, “non-standard” cross-border regions (Deas and Lord 2006). The rise of such regionalisation has been paralleled by a tendency to contemplate in terms of connections, interactions and networks, which has challenged the region- and state-centric views of the world.

The 1980s was a particularly important period for regional geographers since they advanced both conceptually and methodologically in the study of regions and developed a new approach that drew on social theory, that is, “new regional geography” (Thrift 1983; Gilbert 1988). Since the 1990s, region has become an increasingly important category not only in geography, but also in other fields such as archaeology, history, political science and international relations (IR) studies. At the same time, a relational perspective on region emerged in geographical thinking, which questioned the self-evidence of bounded spaces and suggested that all borders have to be seen as porous and what matters are connections, interactions and networks (Massey 1995; Allen, Massey, and Cochrane 1998; Amin 2004; Paasi 2010). Just recently, scholars have called for the development of a “new new regional geography”, which would focus on the “chiasmatic” relation between territorial (bounded) and relational (networked) approaches instead of treating these two methodologies as separate (Jones 2018).

This chapter will assess the factors that underlie the resurgence of the region in geography and in wider social practices such as politics and governance, which are critical social contexts for the allure of regions. It also traces the transformation of regions from static entities to more flexible abstractions that allow regions to be interpreted as relational social constructs made by individual and collective actors in a socio-spatial division of labour and through institutional practices in domains such as politics, economy and state policies.

The following sections will focus on a number of specific perspectives that have been used to approach/study regions. The first section will map critical questions that geographers have presented regarding regions and will then discuss the shifting understanding of region in geographic thinking. The next sections will examine how regions are reified and at times fetishised in social and linguistic practice, and how regions are continually made and presented as meaningful entities. The ensuing section problematises in more detail why a wide-scale re-emergence of the region has occurred. Then, the institutionalisation of regions is scrutinised from two perspectives, that is, how “old” and “new” regions come into being. The concluding section makes a plea for more consolidating approaches in regional research that could provide constructive alternatives to the current fragmentation of regional studies.

2. Critical questions for the geographical debates on regions

Consolidation of the research on regions entails that we can diagnose the problems that thwart the development of the study studies of and debates on regions. Critical geographers relentlessly underscore that regions should not – neither as academic categories nor as categories related to the concrete empirical “realities” of states (and supra-state systems) – be taken for granted. Yet, many scholars do so in their research practices, particularly when they take regions as given governmental/administrative entities or as simple “containers” for statistical information. Another major question is how to imagine and conceptualise the never-ending regional transformation of the global system of spatialities and how to avoid falling prey to the ostensible fixity of regional constellations that consist of regions, territories and borders at and across various spatial scales. One more equally critical elementary question is how should we fathom social constructionism/ constructivism in the case of regions, that is, what does it mean that regions are increasingly acknowledged as “social constructs”? This label is widely used but rarely critically evaluated (Hacking 1999). These rather wide questions raise more specific queries:

• How to conceptualise region and the processual view on the institutionalisation of regions, as well as the relations of regions to spatial scales?
• What kind of agencies and forms of power are involved in the making of regions?
• How to problematise the role of agency (1) in the slow institutionalisation/de-institutionalisation processes of regions or, alternatively, (2) in the often-rapid ad hoc construction of non-standard regions (e.g. cross-border regions) that is particularly common today?
• Can we regard regions as “subjects” rather than objects without falling into spatial fetishism?
• To what degree are regions material and/or discursive formations and how does this impact how we conceptualise regions?
• What is the practical and ideological role of cartographical techniques and maps in making and representing regions and in creating imaginations related to regional worlds (maps bring together the past, present and future, see Wood 1992).

There are undoubtedly diverse answers to these questions, reflecting different views on regions and varying ontological and epistemological perspectives. For example, many critical scholars see regions as historically contingent institutionalised structures (Pred 1984), or sometimes as processes that are constituted by and constitutive of social processes (in the spheres of economy, politics, culture) that “stretch” a region across local, national and supranational scales and borders (Paasi 1991). Scholars following post-structuralist approaches, for their part, have suggested that regions that should be considered as assemblages are always “becoming”, not just being, and that both regions and their borders are expressions of networks (Murdoch 2006). A pragmatist scholar would probably be happy to start from given statistical units, such as the European Union’s NUTS regions, and understand these as meaningful entities needed in practice-oriented research.

Geographers today conceptualise regions characteristically as “social constructs” that are crafted for specific purposes at various scales and note that this act of making often reflects power relations that may stretch across borders (Murphy 1991; Paasi 2010; Paasi and Metzger 2017). Social construction/ism can refer to the processes of “region-building”, to the “products” of such processes, or to both. Such products, whether they are sub-state, state-level or supra-state regions, are materially and discursively rooted, and are always provisional solutions that will become de-institutionalised/re-institutionalised at some stage of the continual regional transformation.

The construction of regions brings together various modalities of power that may vary from external and coercive to inherent and entrenched, from powers that border and fix regions to powers that unlock and link them to wider spatialities. When a region becomes an established part of a wide-ranging regional system, this transformation, together with the existing dynamic assemblage of political, economic, cultural and administrative networks branded “region”, often achieves a sort of immanent capacity for reproducing itself. Contrary to the reified spatial fetishist ideas that see a region as a unit capable of acting, and thus, for example, proficient to “compete” or “learn”, such a capacity means in practice that a multifaceted set of practices, discourses, and competences related to spatial divisions of labour and to social positions, expectations, motivations and advantages will arise in the institutionalisation process of the region. This complex “action” is critical for performing and reproducing the territorial, symbolic and institutional shapes of the region and narratives on regional identity, but also for challenging these. In Latourian language we could perhaps regard a region as a network and an actor “that is made to act by many others” (Latour 2005, 46), where such “others” exist both “inside” and “outside” of the recurrently reconstructing socio-spatial process that we label as the region (Paasi and Metzger 2017).

While every academic discipline has keywords that are critical in the evaluation of the progress and reproduction of the field, the issue of the nature of key categories is particularly characteristic in social sciences that study “open systems”, contrary to the “closed systems” (“natural” or experimental) of natural sciences. One of the main reasons for the openness of social systems is the fact, Sayer (1992, 123) argues, that we can interpret the same material conditions and statements in different ways and thus learn new ways of responding, so that “effectively we become different kinds of people”. Paradoxically, Sayer continues,

it is because most systems are open and many relations contingent, that we can intervene in the world and create closed (non-human) systems. At the most, social systems can be only quasi-closed, producing regularities that are only approximately and spatially and temporarily restricted.

Sayer’s observations powerfully highlight the importance of context and this also holds true in the case of the concept of region, a point made by both geographers and IR scholars.

3. The region in geographical thinking: a brief historical review

Region has been the major keyword of geographical thinking, methodology and research practice practically since the institutionalisation of geography as an academic discipline at the end of the nineteenth century. Even before formal institutionalisation, region had been a keyword for early “geographical” research (Paasi 2011). The concepts associated with this word have varied dramatically over time. There has been no lack of due effort among geographers to define what the region is, a point made by Allan Cochrane in the epigraph at the start of the chapter. An exploratory study charting the changing connotations of the notion of region identified no less than 12 concepts that geographers have set forth since the institutionalisation of the discipline (Paasi 1996a). Most of these have gradually lost their significance and new terms have supplanted them. Since the 1990s, novel concepts have emerged related to the upsurge of relational thinking (Allen et al. 1998). “Relational region” can perhaps be seen as the thirteenth concept with the most recent efforts to find a balance between territorial and relational approaches as the fourteenth (Jones and Paasi 2015).

If it has been customary for geographers to understand regions as social constructs and historically contingent processes, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• Introduction
• PART I Historicity of regions in political geography and international relations
• PART II The reconfiguration of “regions” through bordering/ordering, security discourses and modes of crises
• PART III Regions and meta-geographies to come
• Index