Abstract

The ‘Europe of the Regions’ is a malleable phrase shaped by political-geographical concepts of territory, identity and power. It refers to everyday sub-national processes of identity formation across Europe; attempts to define regions by nation-states and latterly the European Union (EU); and to the hypothetical idea of a European political order based on regions, rather than nation-states. This chapter charts how geographical work on the ‘Europe of the Regions’ changed from conceptualisation as bounded territorial entities within nation-states, to understanding regions as collective sociospatial evolutionary constructions. We show how the rationales and meanings attached to the concept have been subject to shifting power relations between sub-national, national, and supranational scales, and how these relations are conditioned increasingly by neoliberalism. These changing power relations will ensure that the 'Europe of the Regions' persists into the future, albeit in new geohistorical forms.