A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times

Abstract

EUROPE, SO WE READ WITH INCREASING FREQUENCY, has always been and remains very much a continent of identities.' This notion has insinuated itself into a wide range of debates on future of Whether context is an analysis of final crisis of nation-state or a description of structure of committees in European Community, recognition of significant role that regions and regionalism play in Europe today has quietly, undramatically taken hold. In 1992, Tom Nairn wrote in New Statesman that regions had become a key part of discussion about European union.2 Two years later, Rolf Lindner argued, in a collection devoted to return of regional that quite obviously we are now confronted with a regionalism.3 And in 1997, John Newhouse stated in Foreign Affairs that regionalism, whether within or across national borders, is Europe's current and future dynamic.4 Moreover, far from being a product of post-Communist, post-Maastricht Treaty era in European affairs, this attention to a resurgent or a renewed or a reinvented or a rediscovered regionality in fact stretches back through several decades of Euro-punditry. In 1984, Hans Mommsen wrote, with somewhat more drama than is usual to these discussions, that the nation is dead, long live region. In 1981, Rainer Elkar asked whether restlessness might not be new specter haunting Europe. And in 1980, responding to a decade or more of unrest, Jochen Blaschke published a handbook of European movements, designed to guide confused through a thicket of Basques, Slovenes, Sorbs, Serbs, Scots, Lapps, Walloons, Flemish, Bretons, Croats, Magyars, Cypriots, South Tiroleans, Madeiran Islanders, Catalans, Occitans, and others.5