European macro-regions, Euroregions and other forms of inter-regional, cross-border cooperation have helped to shape new scenarios and new relational spaces which may generate opportunities for economic development, while redefining the political and economic meaning of national borders. This book is based on a number of key case studies which are crucial to understanding the complex web of political, economic and cultural factors that shape the heterogeneous picture of Europe’s new geography. This book provides a fresh view on this phenomenon, with a realistic approach shedding light on its complexity as well as on its ambiguities. The new macro-regions are interpreted with an approach recognizing the importance of institutionalization, but also their flexible configuration and "blurred" borders. The book also raises the issue of credibility and legitimacy, arguing that inter-regional cooperation has to be removed from the foggy realm of the exchanges between local political and bureaucratic elites in order to be clearly and concretely motivated, and functional to key strategic objectives of the regions. Finally, the authors suggest a complementarity between relations based on proximity and wider (possibly global) networks where some territories, and especially metropolises, find opportunities based on "virtual" proximity. Europe's Changing Geography provides a substantial re-appraisal of a key phenomenon in the process of European integration today. It will be of interest both to scholars of the political economy of European regionalism and to practitioners.

An examination of the changing internal and external borders of the EU as a means of illuminating the forces which serve to sustain, undermine and redefine national sovereignty in the New Europe. Based on comparative reserach, the book informs a central debate on the status of the nation state.

How regions and cities adapt to a Network Society and a globalized environment, the policies they pursue and how structures of governance are transformed in the pursuit of those policies are major themes in this volume. These issues are addressed with specific reference to the Nordic regions of Europe. Covering the four Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden plus the Faroe Islands, this volume charts the changes in networking activities and related development initiatives that have taken place over the last ten years. This means analysing regions in their pursuit of new policies, partnerships and styles of representation. Through this process regions are becoming partners and players in European integration and a movement of integrative regionalism is taking shape which is different from inward looking identity regionalism or self-centred competitive regionalism and takes regions beyond lobbying in Brussels.

Regions. How they emerge and how they are dramatically changing the appearance of the present 'world of states' and its related forms of governance from local to global levels is analysed in this monograph. But what are regions? Regions can be small or huge. They can be part of a single state, be composed out of different states or stretched out across borders. They can be important recognized economic, social or cultural entities or they can be largely ignored by the people who live on a region's territory. They can be well-defined with clear cut boundaries as is the case in so-called 'constitutional regions' or they can be fuzzy as for instance in cross-border regions. In sum, they are not a natural kind and defining regions is not a simple task. Luk Van Langenhove advances the concept of region building as an alternative to the construction of regions with three issues of region building being explored: - Why are regions built in a world of states? - How do region building processes take place? - How are regions transforming the present world order? Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book is an exercise in theorizing regions and brings together under one conceptual framework, different processes and concepts such as regional integration, devolution, federalism, and separatism and refines the social constructionist view on regions

Europe's space is in a flux. Earlier cores and peripheries in Europe are experiencing a profound transformation. The driving forces include, amongst others, Western European economic and political integration, and Eastern European transition. We are also witnessing fundamental technological and organisational restructuring of industrial systems. Information technology and telecommunications are rapidly altering the requisites for comparative advantage. Peripherality is being determined more by access to networks than by geographical location. Economies of scale can be attained in distributed networks of production with good access to markets as well as in large agglomerations. Clearly, these changes also call for new perspectives in regional analysis. This book derives its impetus from an Advanced Summer institute in Regional Science which was arranged in Joensuu, Finland, in 1993 under the auspices of the European Regional Science Association. Some of the papers, which were discussed at the institute, were thoroughly revised for the present purpose. In addition, chapters on specific topics were specially written for the volume. In most contributions, the focus is on the Nordic countries and their internal peripheries. They form a particularly interesting case in assessing prospects for the multi-faceted centre-periphery confrontation in Europe.