ABSTRACT
As political-economic globalization and cultural pluralization decrease the power of states as frames for political identification, the question emerges how territorial institutions provide a collective realm for governing diverse networks across multiple spatial levels. European integration, particularly the EU, provides a supranational frame complementing as well as challenging states on the national as well as on the sub-national level of government (Hooghe and Marks, 2001). In addition to introducing an institutional dynamic to intergovernmental politics, European integration provides also a structural opportunity for new political actors on the search for political power and interest representation (Keating, 1991; Le Galès, 2002). In this restructuring process, sub-national levels not only provide an alternative territorial basis for the functionalist regulation of increasingly flexible political economies, but such spatial identifications also provide cultural resources of political mobilization challenging the exclusiveness of national identity. Spatial restructurings such as global, European, or regional integration provide the context of a plural political process reconstructing the cultural legitimacy base of the state ‘from below’. Culminating in diverse cultural and functional constellations of political space, the reflexive and plural nature of this political transformation process leaves the outcome open-ended (Paasi, 2001).
