Building a Transnational Space for Action

Abstract

While the field of international relations has evolved from its positivist premises—from a single means of understanding world politics towards a more nuanced and holistic approach—it still remains insufficient to understand the big picture. Despite recent efforts to broaden the field, it remains tied to great power politics and its basic unit of analysis remains the state. Independently, it is incapable of explaining the multilevelled and multiscalar processes that take place today. In the EU context, the national territory has been deterritorialized, whereby culture, politics and economies have become more transnational. While the operational preconditions of civil society remain linked with the operations of broader society surrounding it, there is no reason to assume that this should always be understood in the frame of a nation-state. Based on the experience from the Finnish–Russian border, this article argues that while the territorial sovereignty of the nation-states continues to form one of the leading principles upon which international relations are based, transnational relations are run increasingly by actors and organizations whose ability to function do not stop at the political borders. Owing to the changes in the governance modes, the state is no longer the primary actor, nor is the nation-state the only conception of space to be applied in explaining human interactions. The time has come to approach interactions in post-national terms and conceptualize a cross-border space, through civil society actor linkages.