2 - Imagined Communities and Socially Constructed Regions

Summary

Defining Regionness

What are regions? What and who make them? How do they emerge and perish? These questions remain heavily contested in the literature on international relations. There are a variety of ways in which the concept of region has been studied. But no single attempt has proven, or is likely to prove, definitive and universally acceptable.

What is clear, however, is that the study of regions has evolved considerably in the scholarly literature on international relations. Regions are no longer viewed as “natural” or “physical constants”. Traditional conceptions of regions focus on relatively fixed variables, such as geographic proximity, shared cultural and linguistic features, and a common heritage. They seek to determine what is common among the peoples and political units that inhabit a given geographical and geopolitical space. In the 1960s, there emerged behavioural perspectives in which regions were “not to be identified by the traditional geopolitical criteria, but to be discovered by inductive, quantitative methods”. A classic study published in 1970 by Cantori and Spiegel on “regional sub-systems” (a code word for regions among international relations scholars of that period) identified geographical proximity, international interaction, common bonds (including ethnic, cultural, social and historical) and a sense of regional identity that may be enhanced by attitude and the role of external actors. Another wellknown study by Russett suggested five criteria: social and cultural homogeneity, political attitudes or external behaviour, political institutions, economic interdependence, and geographical proximity. A survey of the work of twenty-two scholars on regions by William Thompson found three clusters of necessary and sufficient attributes of “regional sub-systems”: general geographical proximity, regularity and intensity of interactions, and shared perceptions of the regional subsystem as a distinct theatre of operations. But none of these studies laid to rest the ambiguities surrounding the concept of region. Nor did they resolve tensions between the geographical and the perceptual, the fixed and the dynamic, and the rationalistic and the discursive elements that shape regionness.