Henrik Halkier - Regionalism Contested: Institution, Society and Governance

The last decade of the 20th century saw regional issues rise to prominence, both in society at large and on the agenda of academic analysts. Regions were seen as the emerging tier of governance, gaining prominence either because central government wanted to decentralise public activities and/or in response the pressure of sub-national actors, and discursively highlighted through the coining of the expression Europe of the Regions (Marks, 1996; Keating, 1997, 1998; Anderson, 1994). Regions were heralded as a new repository of identification in an age where the traditional position of the nation state was challenged by transnational actors and processes (Paasi, 1996; Keating, 1997; Raagma, 2002). And in a world of increasingly global competition some regions became household names because of their perceived capacity to cope with competitive pressures on the basis of untradeable dependencies and tacit knowledge, and the success of e.g. Silicon Valley, Emilia-Romagna and Baden-Wrttemberg gave rise to extensive research programmes and a policy industry which tried to emulate these exemplary intelligent regions (Veggeland, 1983; Sthr, 1989; Cooke and Morgan, 1993; Hallin and Malmberg, 1996).

In the first decade of the 21st century the prominence of regions can no longer be taken for granted to the extent it tended to be in the 1990s. In terms of political governance the continued role of states as regulators of economic activity and providers of many key aspects of the institutional framework for sub-national actors within the emerging system of multilevel governance has been highlighted (Borras et al., 1994; Keating, 1998; le Gals, 1998). The strength of the regional level as an emerging point of identification has been questioned both by the return of the national issue to the European political agenda and by the continued prominence of local identities, often cultivated systematically through the increasing use of place branding to position localities vis--vis other localities (Allen et al., 1998; Tewdwr-Jones, 2003; Therkelsen and Halkier, 2004). And from an economic perspective the transferability of the successful bottom-up experience of strong regions to peripheral localities has been called into question, as have the fuzziness of some of the theoretical underpinnings of the new paradigm in regional development with e.g. clusters having, in the words of Michael Steiner, the discrete charm of hard-to-define objects of desire (quoted by Lagendijk and Cornford, 2000, p. 215; cf. Markusen, 1999; Lovering, 1999; MacLeod, 2001).