ABSTRACT
Introduction There is a strong geographical essentialism in social science, especially in research fields which focus exclusively on particular geographical areas, such as area or regional studies. Accordingly, contemporary European studies is mainly concerned with social transformations within the confined spatial boundaries of the European continent or even just the territory of the European Union (EU). The wider global context, or rather social developments and impacts from outside Europe, are rarely taken into account systematically. Moreover, European studies is still very much influenced by multi-layer perspectives, where social conditions and preferences are equated with concrete geographical entities and spatial scales of society at the ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘European’ levels. From this perspective, distinctions among the various scales of society are
overemphasized, while interrelations between different layers and more universal social dynamics transcending the various spatial layers are undervalued or completely disregarded. While this approach might be suitable for analysing politics and some features of
policy-making, where preferences and norms are still strongly determined and articulated territorially, in times of intensifying trans-national connectivity European studies requires less spatially bounded conceptions of society and social change. As Delanty and Rumford (2005, 136) put it in Rethinking Europe, ‘Ideas associated with discrete “levels” need to be replaced by a notion of spaces interpenetrated by the global, local and national, in the context of which the conventional idea of inside and outside, domestic and international, no longer holds’. Instead of reifying clear-cut distinctions between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘above’ and ‘below’, Delanty and Rumford suggest that we need an idea of the extent to which ‘global’ processes interact with more static territorial arrangements. This is the major concern of this paper, which aims to shed light on the ‘global’ make-up
of sub-national spaces in contemporary Europe and the particular social context within which regionalism is mainly expressed in today’s Europe. Building upon analytical premises of neo-institutionalist world society theory, contemporary attempts and strategies of regional development are interpreted as expressions of more general and global discourses of regional development, rather than distinctly ‘local’ or ‘European’ responses to globalization. Thus, European regions are-crucially-structured according to relatively universal (‘world-cultural’) models and practices of regional mobilization, which strongly influence the development of sub-national spaces and the practices of actors in charge of planning and implementing regional development policies. From the perspective of world society theory, this is interpreted here as a highly rationalized, expertdriven project of regional mobilization-at least technically and rhetorically-which widely transcends both the territory of contemporary EU and the confined realms of policy-making. Hence, in reference to Max Weber’s classical theory of ‘rationalization’, regional mobilization in today’s Europe is an enormous wave of ‘rationalization’ which is shaped by both EU policy-making and more global trends of knowledge diffusion. This paper starts with a short overview of further current trends of regionalization in
contemporary Europe. The major analytical premises of the world society perspective are then introduced to pave the way for a global perspective on regionalism and regional mobilization, which accounts for the huge homology of regional mobilization practices and strategies across European regions. The third part of the paper outlines six major developments of ‘world-cultural’ regional mobilization. These six analytical hints display key analytical perspectives and major empirical insights, which we can gain from an analysis of regional mobilization from a world society perspective.
