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The ‘World-Cultural’ Constitution of Regions: Sub-national Regional Mobilization from a World Society Perspective

Processes of regionalization are mainly conceived as bottom-up processes of political and economic mobilization—often even as counter-movements to alienating forces of globalization. In marked contrast to this conventional view, this paper argues that sub-national regions are constitutively shaped by and embedded in a wider social context. This external institutional context encourages the ‘reflexive resurgence’ and ‘staging’ of regional identities in terms of most contemporary notions of development, such as innovation, cohesion, competitiveness, sustainability, and so forth. Starting from a macro-phenomenological research perspective (in the tradition of the world society theory proposed by John W. Meyer and colleagues) this paper sketches six major analytical perspectives to account for the massive ‘world-cultural’ regional mobilization currently seen in Europe. It is emphasized that relatively universal (‘world-cultural’) models and practices of regional mobilization are crucial in determining the current shape of European regions. This has particularly been encouraged by the EU Cohesion Policy, which specifies, reinforces and accelerates the diffusion of highly rationalized models of regional development throughout EU territory.