Re-scaling ‘EU’rope: EU macro-regional fantasies in the Mediterranean

• DOI: 10.1177/0969776412463372
• Publication Date: 2013-01-07T09:17:35Z
• Authors: Luiza Bialasiewicz; Paolo Giaccaria; Alun Jones; Claudio Minca
• Keywords: political geographies; 05 social sciences; 0507 social and economic geography; geopolitics; Borders; Europe; European Union; Mediterranean; regions; borders; 320; power; europeanization; governance; union; neighborhood policy; commission; europeanisation

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