Cross‐border regionalisation in the ‘New Europe’ ‐ theoretical reflection with two illustrative examples

Regionalisation has recently become a catchword both in political practice and academic discourse. Even if the idea of the ‘Europe of the Regions’ is no longer uncritically accepted, regional imagination still frequently informs the analysis of the European political order. This article seeks to chart alternative ways of understanding political change in Europe. It first outlines the current understanding of the role of regions in Europe, and seeks to put contemporary ideas into historical perspective. The article then examines the standard way of analysing regionalism, the ‘top‐down, bottom‐up’ metaphor. By looking at the scales of politics from a social constructionist perspective the article shows that this widely‐used metaphor does not adequately capture much of the political history of region building, nor is it able to identify the relations of power involved in regionalisation in the era of expanding trans‐boundary linkages and networks across state borders. By illustrating cross‐border regionalisation with examples from Karelia and Catalonia, the article seeks to assess some of the tensions that arise between the new deterritorialised forms of trans‐regional governance and the traditional democratic practice, which is still tightly connected to areal political spaces both institutionally and in terms of the inhabitants’ collective identity. The article argues for a heightened awareness of the relational social power characteristic of network governance and potential leaks in the ‘territorial containers’ of democracy.