The Rise of Regionalism

Causes of Regional Mobilization in Western Europe

Rune Dahl Fitjar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415494755
• eBook ISBN: 9781135203290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

During the past 40 years, regions have become increasingly important in Western Europe both as units of government and as sources for political mobilization.

This book examines why regional identities are stronger in some regions than in others, and why regional elites attempt to mobilize the public on a regionalist agenda at certain points in time. The author develops a model that explains change across space as well as time and provides a comprehensive discussion of the causes of regionalism. It focuses on endogenous developments in the regions and on change across time in the economic and political landscapes of the regions. Using a quantitative study of 212 Western European regions, which examine whether regionalism is related to cultural, economic and political characteristics of the regions, the book builds a model of the causes of regionalism. The issues are further explored through case studies on Scotland (UK) and Rogaland (Norway).

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political and social sciences, especially those with an interest in regions, regionalism and regional nationalism, Scottish politics, Norwegian politics, territorial identities and territorial politics.

1
Regions and regionalism

The twentieth century saw the victory of the nation-state over all other forms of political organization. Empires and city-states have almost receded into history. Today, the principle of national sovereignty serves as the fundamental guide of international relations. The ideology of nationalism has reached all parts of the globe, and it is seen as natural that the world should be divided into nation-states, with each nation controlling its own state—however impossible that ideal might be to achieve. This is an ‘age of nationalism’ (Gellner 1983). However, over the past forty years there have also been signs that this world order might be changing. While states are still the most important actors on the world stage, the pressures of globalization and international trade have reduced their capacities to control their environments. In Europe, the European Union has gradually extended its own authority, taking over many of the competencies that were traditionally the responsibilities of its member states.

As the political authority of states has been gradually dispersed to international organs, their internal homogeneity has also come under pressure. Sub-national actors, such as regions, have begun to assert themselves on the international stage, with potentially severe ramifications for the economic and cultural coherence of the state. Growing spatial inequalities within states based on the success of some regions in attracting capital in the global market put pressures on national solidarity and give regions an incentive to mobilize in protection of their own interests (Bullmann 1997:9). The effect of these historical developments has been to disperse political authority between the various layers of government to an extent not seen in Europe in the past seven centuries (Marks 1997:20).

As a result of these developments, political scientists have become increasingly preoccupied over the past twenty years with the topics of regions and regionalism. Whereas political science, and especially the comparative politics sub-discipline, used to focus mainly on states and nations, there is today a considerable body of literature on regions, cities and other sub-state levels of government. Much of this literature concerns regionalization within the context of the European Union (EU), focusing on new institutional phenomena such as regional information offices, the Committee of the Regions, multilevel governance and the ‘Europe of the regions’ agenda. It is the developments towards regionalization and its consequences for nation-states and for the EU that have been at the centre of interest, while inquiries into the causes of regionalism have received comparatively less attention.

However, there is significant variation in the mobilization of regions across different parts of the continent. Regions have long held substantial autonomy in federal countries such as Germany and Austria, and the German regions have consequently also acquired a substantial role within the political system of the EU. In Belgium, Spain and parts of the United Kingdom, they have become increasingly important, gaining authority over a wide range of policy areas. However, large parts of Western Europe have held on to unitary state structures, including the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal and Greece, or have regionalized power only to a limited extent, such as France. Even within states, there are substantial differences in the degree to which the populations of different regions identify with their regions, and hence in the extent to which they mobilize on a regional basis. What causes such differences between regions in their capacity to mobilize local populations? Equally, if regionalism has been growing in many parts of Europe over the past few decades, what causes the levels of regionalism to vary across time within individual regions? These are the main questions addressed in this book.

Regions and regionalism

Regionalism is a notoriously imprecise term that has been used to describe everything from decentralization of political power via economic restructuring to the mobilization of sub-national identities. Even the term ‘region’ itself poses frequent problems for researchers, with a wide range of definitions in use. Ahead of any meaningful discussion of the causes of regionalism, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the terms ‘region’, ‘regional identity’ and ‘regionalism’ in this book.

What is a region?

There is much confusion among analysts and policymakers alike as to what constitutes a region. The definition of the term varies across state borders, and sometimes even across sectors and departments within the same state. For a student of international relations, the term refers to something else altogether. Even if one restricts oneself to sub-state regions, as in this book, the concept has at least four different meanings. One can conceive of regions as economic or cultural territories, or as units of economic planning or regional governance. The regions as defined by these concepts rarely coincide, making the matter of definition a crucial one (Loughlin 1997:154).

Survey data illustrate the problems involved in defining a region. In a 1991 Eurobarometer survey,¹ respondents were asked what they considered to be ‘their region’, or the region to which they belonged. At first glance, this seems to be a natural starting-point for establishing what should be considered a region. After all, people living in a territory should be in the best position to determine which region they live in. Just like nations, regions are imagined communities whose territories must be defined by their members (Smouts 1998; Süssner 2002). Unfortunately, there seems to be little agreement on what a region is, even among local populations. Only in fifty-eight of all the regions included in the survey did a majority of the respondents agree on any one definition of their home region. These fifty-eight regions constituted a biased subset of large regions that were concentrated in a few countries (Germany, Italy and Spain, along with a few French, Portuguese and English regions),² and they also exhibited stronger regional identities than the average region. Elsewhere, there was no uniformity with regard to what people identified as a region. More often than not, respondents from the same territories spread their answers evenly across a variety of units of different sizes, with a substantial proportion identifying regions smaller than the NUTS 3 level.³ The conclusion must be that quite often people simply do not know—or at least do not agree on—what a region is.⁴

A way out of this quagmire is to focus on meso-level sub-state authorities. If one considers regionalism to be a strategy for regional political elites to augment their power vis-à-vis the central state, regional government structures must be taken as the starting-point. This is where the resources of regional political elites are to be found, and this is where their efforts at building a regional identity must begin. The two case studies covered in this book are both examples of meso-level sub-state authorities, and they are both the highest level of political unit beneath the central state in their respective countries.

Regional identity

The concept of regional identities refers to the feeling of belonging in a particular region. This is one of the many geographical and functional identities that people can use to define themselves vis-à-vis others. Political scientists have traditionally focused on national identities, and the concept of multiple identities is relatively recent in the literature. Yet people have always had more than one identity. They are men, women, young, old, working-class, students, Japanese, Europeans and Londoners. These are all objective categories, but people may identify and feel a sense of common purpose with others who share the same characteristics. Indeed, in psychology it is widely believed that people need to identify with certain sub-groups in order to establish a perception of themselves and bridge the gap between the self and the outside world (Bruter 2004:25). Identities ‘provide the feelings of self-esteem and belonging that are as essential for human survival as food in the belly’ (Friedman 2000:31).

Regional identities form part of this package, complementing other identities as well as competing with them for primacy. Yet the extent to which people identify with their region varies, and hence the levels of regional identity (i.e. the sum of regional identification among a region’s inhabitants) vary across regions and time. In tune with the definition of identity, one can say that the strength of a regional identity depends on the extent to which people feel that they belong in the region and see themselves as part of a group involving all the inhabitants of the region.

In this sense, regional identity can be understood as a sense of membership of an imagined regional community. Almost all political communities are imagined, in the sense that they are not based on everyday face-to-face communication among the members. Rather, they are based on mental images in the minds of their members about the fraternity between them (Anderson, 1991:6f.). Although Anderson discusses nations, all political communities above a certain size are imagined in this sense. Applying Anderson’s terminology, a regional community is imagined in so far as people from a particular region never meet or even hear of most other people who come from that same region. It is also imagined as a community, where people feel a sense of comradeship with others from the same region, and indeed as a limited community, in so far as this regional comradeship extends only to people from the same region, and not to outsiders. However, regional communities do not necessarily imagine themselves as sovereign communities, desiring their own state. Some regional communities do desire sovereignty, whereas others form part of a wider national community that is imagined as sovereign. The desire for sovereignty is closely connected with the concept of a nation, and regional communities desiring sovereignty are indeed commonly referred to (by themselves as well as others) as stateless nations.

Imagined regional communities are created by regionalists just as imagined national communities are created by nationalists. Gellner (1983:55) argues that nationalism ‘engenders nations, and not the other way round’: nationalism promotes a shared culture and a common identity among the people it defines as belonging to the nation, in effect encouraging them to imagine themselves as belonging to a national community. This is the process of nation-building. Similarly, regionalists attempt to build or strengthen the imagined regional community among inhabitants of the region through processes of region-building.

While a person’s identity is essentially a subjective matter, it is unclear to what extent people can actually choose which groups to identify with. The question of choice when it comes to regional identity maps directly onto the debate between subjective and objective definitions of nationalism. Gellner (1983) distinguishes between will and culture as two conceptually distinct bases of national identity, and it seems obvious that you cannot deliberately choose your cultural background or mother tongue. If you accept will as the basis of national identity, however, you do have to make a choice as to whether or not you actually want to be part of the nation, or of the imagined community in Anderson’s (1991) sense.

This is not necessarily to say that people consciously choose whether or not to identify with their region, or that this choice is based on rational calculations. Nor can people freely choose which region they want to identify with. For instance, a person born in Germany of German parents and who continues to live in Germany cannot easily identify himself as French. Similarly, a person who is born and bred in Bavaria does not suddenly develop a strong identification with Thuringia, unless he has some sort of connection to that region. The individual choice is restricted by a group consensus within the regional community on the criteria for membership (Henderson 2007:54).

Regionalism

While one may identify more with some people than others, these differences do not always translate into political action. A group identity is politicized only when it affects our judgements on political issues and our decisions about how to act politically (for whom to vote, for instance). This can be used to define regionalism: it is the politicization of regional identity. Regionalists frame political issues with a basis in their regional identity, deeming the regional population to have certain common interests that they should advance as a group. This usually falls into one of two categories: promoting the economic development of the region, or preserving a cultural identity that has become threatened by cultural standardization (Rokkan and Urwin 1982:4).

The idea that the regional population has a set of common interests leads in many cases to the conclusion that these interests could be more effectively advanced if the region were allowed more autonomy on internal matters. Regionalists therefore want to strengthen the regional layer of government by increasing the political and/or economic autonomy of the region within the national constitutional framework. They also tend to focus on the distribution of wealth and public expenditure between territories rather than between functional groups. The distribution between socio-economic groups within the region, for instance, is subordinated to the good of the region as a whole, as the various groups are considered to be cooperating for the common good.

If you may or may not be able to choose whether to have a regional identity, you do have to choose whether or not to be a regionalist. Working to promote a region entails action, and any action is the result of choice. You can, indeed you must, choose whether or not you will work to promote your region. Because it is a matter of choice, any explanation of regionalism must take into account the reasons for that choice. A cause of regionalism can be a cause only in so far as it affects the choice of whether or not to be a regionalist. It is therefore not only relevant, but completely necessary to consider the incentives for taking political action on behalf of a particular region.

Theoretical framework

Having established the definitions of the main terms, the next question is what makes regionalism and regional identities occur. Indeed, that is the main topic of this book. Several theories on why regionalism grows and declines across time, and why some regions are more regionalist than others, are presented in the next chapter. However, this section discusses the broader theoretical framework into which these theories all fit, portraying how the political mechanisms of regionalism work.

Centres and peripheries

Writing in 1377, Ibn Khaldûn (1967:128ff.) presented an early version of the centre–periphery model. He described the asabiyah cycle, in which new rulers usually emerge in the peripheries of existing empires, where levels of group identity are higher than in the centre. The centre–periphery model later became one of the cornerstones of the modernization theory paradigm in the 1960s. Here, the centre was often seen as the modernizing force, bringing liberal values, democracy and capitalism to the traditional, backward societies in the periphery (Randall and Theobald 1998:45). In the model, state-builders in the centre occupy surrounding territories and gain military control over them. These peripheries are then integrated into the administrative and economic system of the centre, as the states try to extract resources through taxation and to control trading patterns, limiting external trade and encouraging internal trade. Finally, the population in the peripheries becomes loyal to the centre through a process of cultural assimilation during the nation-building phase. This view can be found in Deutsch (1966) and in Almond and Powell (1966), for instance.

Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) ideas represent a modification of this picture, ascribing a greater role to the periphery. In their model, the centre still attempts to gain control over the periphery in the political, economic and cultural spheres through the processes of state- and nation-building. However, the peripheries try to fight this colonization by the centre and defend their own economic and cultural interests. Protests from the peripheries can focus on economic, political or cultural issues, and the structure of these protests is what shapes the cleavage structures and party systems of the states. In Lipset and Rokkan’s view, the peripheries are not reactionary opponents of modernity. On the contrary, these authors see democratizatio...

Table of contents

• Routledge research in comparative politics
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Regions and regionalism
• 2 Causes of regionalism
• 3 Regionalism in Western Europe
• 4 Why some regions are more regionalist than others
• 5 Territorial mobilization in Scotland and Rogaland
• 6 Scotland
• 7 Rogaland
• 8 Petro-regions and other prosperous peripheries
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index