by Marco Stella
Final paper for the course "Seabound Imagination. Histories, mental mapping and region building" that took place in Venice in 2012, coordinated by professors Rolf Petri (University Ca' Foscari of Venice) and Norbert Gotz (Sodertons Univeristy of Stockholm)
It is not exaggerated to support the idea according to which in the contemporary world (at least in
the western... more
It is not exaggerated to support the idea according to which in the contemporary world (at least in
the western developed) the concept of nation-state and national sovereignty has lowered its primary
importance. More precisely, we can say that it has been gradually lowering in the last fifty years,
giving space in the international system to other entities able to overcome national borders. Those
entities were in a first moment mostly projects of state-led integration and/or cooperation in some
specific areas (especially economic or security), but since the lowering of tensions that followed the
end of the Cold War we had a real boom of non institutional actors that don't identify themselves
with a single nation and are not directly controlled by the sovereign. With this statement, we don't
intend to assert that nations are no more the most influential actor in international politics (because
they still are), but they are no more the only one who can act in an international surrounding. Let's
think, for example, about the exponential growth of NGOs in the last fifty years, but also about
transnational terrorist groups that can't be identified with a single state (such as Al-Qaeda). As a
consequence, cooperation and teamwork are nowadays the most important framework for a national
entity in order to survive and improve its living conditions. It's no more only a matter of the oldfashioned
“balance of power” and tactical alliances, but of continuous and mutual exchange of
material and non-material goods. Where these exchanges and collaborations have been built and
have come into effect (from both state and non-state actors) we can clearly identify the presence of
a different and quasi-autonomous actor: the region.
With my paper, my aim is to adopt a political science approach to the study of this entity, whose
importance is in my opinion primary (for the reasons I said before). In the first part, I will try to
give an exhaustive definition of what we intend while talking about regions and why is it important
to study them. I will then concentrate on what are the key-elements that characterize the presence of
a region by adopting the two approaches that are predominant in literature (the outside-in and the
inside-out). At the same time, my intention is to make a comparison (where possible) with the two
most influential theories of political science, the Realist and the Liberal ones, adopting the Northern
European process of regionalisation as a practical case of study. The last part of my paper will take
into consideration a different approach to the study of regions which is the region-building approach
and by doing so I will help myself with the most recent theories of Constructivism.
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