ABSTRACT
European integration is creating new territorial boundaries for various policy fields
whereby nation-states are losing their old monopolies on some areas of policy-making.
However, this does not mean that powers are simply shifting to the European level:
Europe is not so much suppressing state borders as changing their meaning and impact for
different social, economic and political systems (Bartolini, 2005; Keating, 2009). Euro-
pean integration has not only been accompanied by changes in powers across existing
layers of decision-making, but also by new scales of intervention, new actor constellations
and variable geometries of governance-diversity, variation and even asymmetries in how
territories are governed within nation-states (Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2005; Lidstro¨m,
2007). These changes are all part of the general process of spatial rescaling (or territorial
rescaling), which McCann defines in terms of
the process in which policies and politics that formerly took place at one scale are
shifted to others in ways that reshape the practices themselves, redefine the scales
to and from which they are shifted, and reorganise interactions between scales.
