Abstract
Mattheis, Raineri and Russo interrogate the main international studies approaches to borderlands and regionalisms. In this chapter, they argue that the field suffers from a theoretical and empirical bias that prevents scholars from explaining the role that borderlands are playing in terms of region-building. Their chapter identifies the relevant theoretical shortcomings in concepts of borders, space and regions in the main currents of international studies literature. These shortcomings have led to a preoccupation with regionalism, characterised by states as its main driver, by regional organisations as its main locus, and by formal projects as its embodiment.
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Notes
- 1.
For a more extensive discussion, cf. Behr 2010.
- 2.
For a more detailed version of the analysis of knowledge production related to regionalism, cf. Mattheis 2014.
- 3.
Realism proclaimed the understanding that power was the dominant national interest of states as it was necessary to ensure security and the survival in the anarchical system.
- 4.
Actorness refers to the capacity to actively take part in international politics and be recognised as such by others (cf. Mattheis and Wunderlich 2017).
- 5.
This issue has been thoroughly argued by Niemann (2000).
- 6.
Even during the blossoming of integration studies, Ernst Haas had referred to federalism, neofunctionalism and transaction analysis as “pretheories” (1970).
- 7.
While regional projects in the development world, such as Mercosur, were particularly acclaimed, notable efforts also occurred in other regions, such as the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA).
- 8.
These terms were not necessarily new. For instance, regionalism had already been applied in previous works (Nye 1968). However, it is from the early 1990s onwards that it is became widely used and an extended debate broke out around its definition.
- 9.
For theories explaining regional integration with reference to internal structures and actors, the ontological turn was only limited to the expansion of cases. Unlike most other theories, the qualitative division between past and present regional projects was less relevant from this perspective.
- 10.
Material on regional organisations is indeed much easier to access than data on informal networks. In addition, the edited series and journals in this field are oriented towards research on well-known and easily identifiable organisations.
- 11.
Hettne (2005) has critiqued the increasing fuzziness of the term and called for scholars to move beyond it.
- 12.
Although from the perspective of our arguments there are clear common elements shared among these terms, this fact should not be taken as a negation of the definitional distinction between them. For instance, Bach has underlined the difference between “trans-state regionalism” and “shadow regionalism”: the latter is “associated with violence and emergence of entrepreneurs of insecurity”, while the former does not necessarily imply the criminalisation of cross-border transactions or the presence of regional “ungoverned spaces” (Bach 2016: 74).
- 13.
“Regionhood” has been defined as what distinguishes a region from a non-region, while “regionality” can be interpreted as the specific texture of a region, what distinguishes one region from anther, and “regionness” seeks to measure the density of that texture (Van Langenhove 2003).
- 14.
- 15.
According to a common understanding of regional organisations, their task “is not to protect their member’s sovereignty, but to overcome it, to transform the members into a more unified whole in which nation-statehood is left behind in the interest of creating a new and larger political entity” (Haas 1990: 157).
- 16.
For Niemann (2000), the global system is conceivable as a mille-feuille characterised by the combination of many inseparable, individual layers forming a larger entity.
- 17.
For a discussion of this point, see for example Mezzadra and Neilson 2013.
- 18.
Bicchi (2018) has recently attempted a reconstruction of the diverse conceptualisations of the Mediterranean “region”, conceding that across time the Mediterranean Sea has been seen as preforming the opposite functions of connectors or insulator depending on changing circumstances.
- 19.
Leaving aside caricatural dichotomies, however, we must acknowledge that the constructivist understanding of space clarifies and radicalises an insight which is not completely unprecedented in the history of geopolitics. Despite allegations of determinism, academic geopolitical thinking as developed after the second world war proved itself aware of the significance of the human and social features – such as representations, perceptions, imaginations, memories and (albeit to a lesser extent) practices – that contribute to defining places and spaces beyond their mere material endowment or geographical position. Cohen (2003), deemed to have pioneered the re-birth of the discipline in the post-war period, explicitly attempted to eschew this criticism. Even Colin Gray (1999) has recognised that imagined spatial features count at least as much as physical ones in the geopolitical equation. Ultimately, the French School definition of geopolitics typically stresses the same point: “In order to understand a geopolitical conflict or rivalry, it is insufficient merely to determine and map what is at stake, instead it is necessary to understand the reasons and the ideas of the main actors” (Lacoste 1993: 4).
- 20.
This attempt provides an empirical grounding to a hypothesis of political thinking which posits the linkage and relative identification between the desert and the sea. This thread extends from Kant (1991 [1795]: 106: “the community of men is divided by uninhabitable parts of the earth’s surfaces such as oceans and deserts”) to Hegel (2011 [1837]: the “Sahara is a dried ocean”), to Braudel (1979: 171 “the Sahara is the second face of the Mediterranean”).
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Mattheis, F., Raineri, L., Russo, A. (2019). Producing Regional Spaces from the Margins: Fringe Regionalism: A Conceptual Proposal to Recalibrate the Study of Regions. In: Fringe Regionalism. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97409-5_2
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