European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History ed. by Diana Mishkova and Balàzs Trencsényi (review)

This book reveals how historical regions in Europe "have been, and are being, conceptualized and delimitated over time" (2). As Stefan Berger makes clear in the first chapter, however, it is inevitably about the establishment of borders, and the struggle to define inclusion and exclusion for various purposes.

Borders have acquired a variety of definitions, from those that emphasize identity and culture to those that focus on social cooperation or territorial control. None of these definitions is mutually exclusive, but as Berezin has written, "territory is inescapable," primarily because politics and authoritative political decision making is tied to physically bounded space. "Territories and borders are coterminous," she argues, and "the consolidation of power always requires the closing of frontiers."¹ But which frontiers must close, how permeable are they, and who (or what) decides where they are?

Scholars have usefully differentiated between territorial, organizational, and conceptual borders. Territorial borders formally separate states, regions, and localities politically. Organizational borders differentiate access to the labor market, as well as welfare and citizenship rights, and distinguish between residents within the territorial borders based on various functions. Conceptual borders separate populations by class, culture, identity, and claims to entitlements, also within the territorial boundaries.² These borders, however, are often sanctioned by state power. Finally, although borders are generally understood in terms of exclusion and inclusion, a variable range of harder and softer borders may be possible, to the extent that states give priority to inclusion, equal standing, democratic accountability, and the effectiveness of meeting needs.³

Therefore, this conceptual history is not just about development; it is also about the use of space and geography to define power, ideas, and identity. In this context, geography has not just been a dependent variable, a result of other factors, but an independent variable, a weapon used to mobilize certain kinds of support and political action and to delegitimize others—a point made conspicuously in the first part of the book that deals with "European Mesoregions."

The strongest analysis of region as destiny was forged in the early years of the twentieth century. The British geographer Halford Mackinder argued that regional control of Eastern Europe was key to the control of the Eurasian heartland, and ultimately of the world (214–215). Although geopolitics, as causal analysis, has been largely discredited as ideology (258–279), the importance of control over space remains analytically interesting, as the chapters in this book demonstrate.

All the European regions discussed in this volume have witnessed considerable debate about how they should be defined and justified, but this "discussion" has not always been academic and gentile. These regions have been areas of struggle within which identities have been forged, but the definition of these identities has been a source cultural ambiguity (the Mediterranean), armed struggle (the Baltic), political struggle (Iberia), academic contention (Southern Europe), cold war (Eastern Europe), and hot war (the Balkans). Furthermore, the idea of Central Europe, having been delegitimized after World War I, and generally abandoned during the Cold War, has since been resuscitated on the basis of a region built on multicultural compromise (166–187).

The second part of this collection deals with issues of theory that are important for conceptualizing regions. The chapters about European history and political geography (Chapters 11 and 12) review the scholarly debates about how we should conceptualize Europe. They underestimate, as the first section makes clear, how much these debates were also concerned with weaponizing scholarship. These chapters overlap to some extent with those in the first part, but they make no reference to them. The same is true for the otherwise excellent three chapters about economics, historical demography, and linguistics, which are interesting descriptively but weak analytically regarding the dynamics of change. Finally, the chapter about literary history makes a good case for understanding European regions as developing seedbeds of creativity.

For the most part...