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Re-scaling 'EU'rope: EU macro-regional fantasies in the Mediterranean
Bialasiewicz, L.; Giaccaria, P.; Jones, A.; Minca, C.
DOI
10.1177/0969776412463372
Publication date
2013
Document Version
Final published version
Published in
European Urban and Regional Studies
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Citation for published version (APA):
Bialasiewicz, L., Giaccaria, P., Jones, A., & Minca, C. (2013). Re-scaling 'EU'rope: EU macro-
regional fantasies in the Mediterranean.
European Urban and Regional Studies
,
20
(1), 59-76.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0969776412463372
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Introduction
The spatial imaginations of the European Union’s
policy makers have commanded the attention of
political and urban geographers for quite some time
now (see, among others, Bialasiewicz, 2011a; Böhme
et al., 2004; Böhme and Waterhout, 2008; Casas-
Cortes et al, 2013; Clark and Jones, 2008; Jones,
2006; Jones and Clark, 2010; Moisio, 2011; Paasi,
2005). Geographers have long argued for a critical
engagement with such imaginations as a key to under-
standing the multiple processes of ‘EU’ropeanization,
463372EUR
20110.1177/0969776412463372European Urban and Regional StudiesBialasiewicz et al.
2012
Corresponding author:
Luiza Bialasiewicz, Department of European Studies, University
of Amsterdam, Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The
Netherlands.
Email: L.A.Bialasiewicz@uva.nl
Re-scaling ‘EU’rope: EU
macro-regional fantasies in the
Mediterranean
Luiza Bialasiewicz
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Paolo Giaccaria
University of Torino, Italy
Alun Jones
University College Dublin, Ireland
Claudio Minca
Wageningen University, The Netherlands
Abstract
This article engages with the most recent spatial fantasy for the making of ‘EU’ropean space: the idea of trans-European
macro-regions, currently in vogue in the policy literature. In particular, we focus on the imaginings of a Mediterranean
macro-region as the latest incarnation of the macro-regional fad, but also as a useful prism for reflecting on some of
the underlying conceptual as well as political and geopolitical challenges of the on-going remaking and rescaling of
‘EU’ropean space. We argue that, although there exists by now a vast literature by geographers and other scholars
that engages with the production of ‘EU’ropean spaces through regionalization, the policy literature generated by
EU ‘macro-regional experts’ appears to entirely ignore these debates, professing an understanding of regions that is
a conceptual pastiche at best, and that entirely occludes the political and geopolitical implications of region-making
within, at, and beyond ‘EU’rope’s borders
Keywords
Borders, Europe, European Union, Mediterranean, regions
Article
60 European Urban and Regional Studies 20(1)
for, as Jensen and Richardson (2004) note, these are
a fundamental part of the EU’s attempts to (re)terri-
torialize both ‘European’ spaces and those at their
borders. Indeed, over a decade’s worth of critical geo-
graphical work has elucidated the ways in which
‘EU’ropean space making is explicitly about the
political production of ‘European spaces’, rather
than simply the deployment of ‘European’ policies
in already existing political space (see, among oth-
ers, Brenner, 1999; Hudson, 2004; Jones and Clark,
2008; MacLeod, 1999; Painter, 2002).
1
Recent years
have witnessed new momentum in the elaboration of
EU policies aimed at remaking both ‘EU’ropean
and extra-‘EU’ropean spaces, as part of the EU’s
wider refashioning of its real and imagined role in
the world and, especially, in what it considers its
immediate Neighbourhoods. One important aspect of
this new momentum is the current vogue of European
‘macro-regions’ as a novel policy fix for the making
of ‘EU’ropean spaces. It is on this new geographical
fad that we wish to focus our attention here, inspired
in particular by the most recent proposals for a
‘Mediterranean Macro-Region’ promoted by the
EU-funded MEDGOVERNANCE Project.
2
We choose to focus on this particular initiative
not because it is unique (for, as we shall argue in the
pages to follow, it is just the latest spatial creature
spawned by the macro-regional fad) but because we
believe it highlights some of the underlying concep-
tual as well as political and geopolitical implications
of the on-going regionalization of ‘EU’ropean space.
At the same time, we will suggest that the projec-
tion of the macro-regional template upon the
Mediterranean in particular raises a whole host of
additional questions – questions seemingly ignored
by the developing policy and think-tank literature
(which we in part examine here), but that deserve the
critical attention of geographers and other scholars
concerned with the making and the ‘scaling’ of
‘EU’ropean space (for a discussion of this notion see
Brenner, 2003; Leitner, 2004; Moisio, 2011).
The idea of European ‘macro-regions’ was first for-
mally enshrined within the European Commission’s
EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region, published in
June 2009. Although originating in the specific
context of Nordic/Baltic cooperation strategies
(Galbreath and Lamoreaux, 2007; Moisio, 2003), the
macro-regional perspective has, nonetheless, been
recently projected by the Commission onto other
European spaces too: a Danube Macro-region has
been instituted, and other initiatives aimed at macro-
regionalization have been envisaged, from the
Adriatic to the Alps, to the western Mediterranean,
the English Channel and the North Sea (for a review,
see Adriatic Euroregion, 2009; Ágh et al., 2010;
Medeiros, 2011a, 2011b). The conceptualization and
planning of such macro-regional strategies have also
mobilized particular communities of geographical
expertise, drawing into the macro-regionalizing
project some of the most prestigious European
think-tanks (see Lagendijk, 2005). In recent
years, political geographers have fruitfully scruti-
nized the formation and operation of a variety of
forms of expertise within EU institutions and associ-
ated European policy networks (see, for example,
Kuus, 2011a, 2011b; Prince, 2012). We would like
to build upon such work here, analysing specifi-
cally some of the forms and sites of geographical
knowledge production implicit in the current and
on-going ‘making’ of the macro-regional concept
in the Mediterranean and elsewhere.
In particular, we contend that the MED
GOVERNANCE project is illustrative of what Moisio
(2011: 30) describes as the ‘re-scaling of European [spa-
tial] expertise’. Commenting on the horizontal net-
works that helped sustain the Baltic Sea macro-
regional(izing) project, he illustrates how such net-
works ‘bring together policy-makers and profession-
als in the name of Europe’ (Moisio, 2011: 30,
emphasis in original). Moisio also notes, however,
that, while such experts’ involvement in EU-
sponsored projects ‘can be considered a practice
whereby [existing] ideas of European spatial plan-
ning are implemented in interpersonal interaction,
and become subjectified in the ways of being or
identities of those involved’ (2011: 30), such
‘(macro) region-makers’ are, at the same time, quite
aware of ‘playing [spatial] games in the name of
the EU’ (2011: 31). This also appears to be the
case in the MEDGOVERNANCE project, which
brings together the representatives of a number of
European regions
3
with experts drawn from a vari-
ety of local and regional think-tanks,
4
all in the name
of a common, ‘European’, goal. The project was
Bialasiewicz et al. 61
originally conceived and received funding from
the ERDF, through the European Union’s MED
Programme in 2009, with the aim of ‘analyzing
the governance framework for the preparation
and implementation of major policies affecting the
Mediterranean region’, and in particular ‘the issue of
multilevel governance’ and ‘new regional strategies’
(MEDGOVERNANCE, 2010).
The MEDGOVERNANCE project’s promotion
of the macro-regional concept as a privileged spatial
formation for governing and administering
Mediterranean space is worthy of attention also
because it exposes some of the key ways in which
such local and regional policy and practitioner net-
works ‘play spatial games’ with a concept that has a
long history in the geographical tradition. We iden-
tify this (seemingly forgotten) history, highlighting
the distinct genealogy of today’s macro-regional
understandings, and locating these most recent
attempts at the remaking of ‘EU’ropean space within
a much longer trajectory of European spatial ideolo-
gies, projected both upon EU spaces as well as on
those beyond its borders. The external(izing) func-
tion of the current EU macro-regional initiatives is
indeed crucial, for the transnational regions being
imagined (and, in some cases such as the Baltic,
already practised) have also as their aim the making
of a ‘Wider Europe’, extending forms of European
territoriality beyond and across the EU’s current bor-
ders. We elaborate upon this in subsequent sections,
for the at once ‘internal’ and ‘external’ intent of
macro-regionalization is, we suggest, key to its allure.
As Andreas Faludi (2011: 83) has argued in a recent
article commenting on EU regional policy, this lat-
ter, while a flagship ‘internal’ policy of the Union,
‘at the same time […] bears witness to its ambiva-
lence apparent also in foreign, energy and defence
policy’. For Faludi, this ambivalence is about the
EU’s territoriality – or, more precisely, the tension
between the ‘hard’ and ‘aspirational’ notions of ter-
ritoriality that mark the European project (see
Bialasiewicz et al., 2005); between the bordered
space of the now EU27 and ‘EU’rope’s wider
spaces of action and (inter)action, whether defined
through notions of ‘European values’ or ‘European
responsibility’ (the term adopted by Espon (2006),
cited by Bachmann, 2011 in mapping the ‘greater’
spaces of the EU’s influence in the world – see the
discussion in Bachmann, 2011).
Such ambivalence derives from multiple and
often contradictory understandings of what regions
are or may become. In popular understandings (but
also in much of the EU policy literature), regions are
envisioned as both a scale lower than the nation-
state (for example Tuscany or Provence, to use two
Mediterranean examples) and a supra-national one
(for example the Middle East or the Mediterranean
itself). In the first case, the region is conceived as a
territorial container of functional, or cultural, or his-
torical, or administrative, or physical attributes, or at
times all of these things together. This kind of region
is also often presented as a sort of spontaneous,
‘organic’ container, fashioned by the workings of
local communities, their histories and mundane
geographies. In the second case, on the other hand,
the regional scale is seen as a flexible grouping of
states brought together by some common features
(religion, culture, past, etc.). Such ‘macro’ (although
the prefix is not necessarily always – or even pre-
dominantly – applied) regional mappings also con-
tain echoes, however, of a long-standing tradition
of pan-regionalist ideologies dating back to not only
the theorizations of political geographers such as
Friedrich Ratzel, Halford Mackinder, Karl Haushofer,
Nicolas Spykman and many others (see Heffernan,
1998; Kearns, 2009; O’Loughlin and Van der
Wusten, 1990) but also the geopolitical fantasies of
statesmen from US President Woodrow Wilson to
the Nazi ideologue Heinrich Himmler. Although the
parallel may appear extreme, these are echoes that
we should not forget when considering region mak-
ing in and beyond ‘EU’rope, for, as Bachmann and
Sidaway (2009: 106) remind us, current projections
of ‘EU’ropean influence all too frequently ‘simulta-
neously internalise and occlude prior visions of
Europe and European world roles’.
What is problematic is that most existing EU pol-
icy documents dealing with the macro-regional
question seem to adopt a gallimaufry of such under-
standings, frequently opting for the rather loose defi-
nition of macro-region as ‘an area including territory
from a number of different countries or regions asso-
ciated with one or more common features or chal-
lenges’ (INTERACT, 2009: 1).
5
Indeed, what is most
62 European Urban and Regional Studies 20(1)
striking to a geographer about the EU’s renewed
policy emphasis on macro-regions is that these
appear to be, conceptually as well as practically, the
product of a mix of both scales, with all that such
mixing may imply. The macro-regions envisaged
by the contemporary ‘EU’ropean policy literature
are thus presented as curious aggregates of already
existing regions belonging to more than one country,
bound by some assumed common spatialities; in
other words, macro-regions intended as agglomera-
tions of (micro)regions.
This conceptual pastiche becomes even more
problematic when forcible macro-regionalization is
applied to the Mediterranean, a space that can be
defined as an endless (and un-mappable) ‘field of
tensions’ at best (Giaccaria and Minca, 2011); that
resists any attempt at regionalization (that is to say,
at spatial reification and homogenization); and that,
as Iain Chambers (2008) has argued, can be described
only with metaphors of ‘pluriversality’. Paradoxically,
however, the Mediterranean has long been presented
as a unified ‘sea-region’, and has inspired compara-
tive work on other ‘regional seas’, including the
Baltic (Wójcik, 2008). Also, in the most recent macro-
regionalizing projects, comparisons (or ‘lessons’,
the term usually adopted in the policy literature) are
frequently drawn between these two sea-regions;
in our discussion we will highlight some of these
assumed parallels.
The imagination of the Mediterranean as a sea-
region par excellence draws, of course, on the influ-
ential geo-ecological accounts of Fernand Braudel
and the wider body of work (in history as well as
geography) in the Braudelian tradition. We should
recognize, nonetheless, that Braudel himself was
influenced and inspired, in turn, by longer-standing
regional imaginations and, in particular, by the work
of the doyen of French geography, Paul Vidal de la
Blache, and key Vidalian concepts such as genre de
vie, genius loci and personnalité (Claval, 1988), con-
cepts that are deeply organicistic (Archer, 1993). It is
crucial to acknowledge such organicistic echoes in
Braudelian (and Braudelian-inspired) accounts of the
Mediterranean. Vidal de la Blache’s description of
the Mediterranean as a ‘unique coming together’ of
natural conditions and human settlements, of nature
and culture, is revealing in this regard: ‘ces genres
de vie subsistent, non comme survivance, mais
comme l’expression d’harmonies naturelles qui ont
favorisé la multiplication des hommes’ (1918: 179).
Paradoxically, both Vidal de la Blache and Braudel
wrote about the Mediterranean whilst ignoring its
marine and maritime features, establishing a tradition
of regionalization of the Mediterranean space that, as
we shall discuss in the next pages, still influences the
European geographical imagination (Horden, 2005).
Inspired as they were by Vidalian understandings,
hence, such imaginations of a Mediterranean
‘region’ were directly linked to the birth of the
European regional idea/ideal itself, and the first
projects for the modern regionalization of space (see
Clout, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Raffestin, 1984; Vidal
de la Blache, 1979). Critically, then as now, region-
building projects are fundamentally about the (power-
full) making of spaces for political action.
In the next section of the article, we attempt to
disentangle some of the implicit and not-so-implicit
spatial imaginations/spatial ideologies that lie ‘behind’
(in both a genealogical and conceptual sense) the
recent EU macro-regional approach, highlighting
their frequently contradictory nature. Following this
we then focus upon ‘on the ground’ histories of
regionalization of the Mediterranean, examining the
evolution of Euro-Mediterranean policies and their
understanding of the Mediterranean space. We sub-
sequently reflect on some key geopolitical implica-
tions of contemporary macro-regionalization of the
Mediterranean, highlighting in particular the explicit
tensions between the macro-regional narrative of
partnership and a ‘shared’ Mediterranean space and
the increasingly ‘hard’ attempts at the bordering and
ordering of this very space. We conclude by briefly
addressing the broader implications of such macro-
regional projects, while calling attention to the inher-
ently political nature of all ‘EU’ropean space-making,
within, at, and beyond the EU borders.
Macro-regionalization and the
ghost(s) of the region
EU macro-regional policy has a complex, twofold
genealogy. On the one hand, it derives directly from
the regionalization of ‘EU’ropean space and its