Place, politics and 'scale dependence': Exploring the structuration of Euro-regionalism

In analyzing the contemporary 'recomposition of political space' some resea rchers are drawing an inference between a putative 'hollowing out' of the s tate or 'multi-level' governance, and the growth of integrated economic dev elopment programmes enacted through closer articulation between local and r egional political coalitions and the European Commission. This coupling of urban and regional analysis with state restructuring and re-scaling represe nts a welcome direction. There is, nevertheless, a real danger that such an alysis simply 'reads off' emergent associationalist trends between EU insti tutions and regional alliances, or Euro-regionalism, as some inevitable out come of a hastening trajectory towards a globalizing and Europeanizing econ omy and 'hollowed out' national states. Such an approach would fail to unco ver the key social processes and 'constituent relationships' (Sayer, 1989) that activate these trends in particular places. This paper argues for added sensitivity towards the 'politics of place', an d towards the contingent and the contextual when analyzing the recompositio n and re-scaling of European urban and regional governance. Not that this i s to advocate the drift towards a morass of descriptive and empirical 'mapp ing' of Euro-regional partnerships. Rather, the author argues for appropria ting suitable middle-range concepts with which to abstract from empirical f orms and engage in explanation. He draws variously on Jessop's regulation-t heoretic approach to state restructuring, Lipietz's work on the social rela tions of space, and Cox and Mair's writings on 'local dependence' and the p olitics of scale, to analyze the political structuration of one particular instance of Euro-regionalism in the Objective 2 region of West Central Scot land. Here, a general appetite on the part of the European Commission to pr omote integrated, programmed regional initiatives met with the embedded sca le dependencies and structurally situated strategic endeavor of a political alliance operating within a declining industrial space. The paper conclude s with a call for European urban and regional analysis to increasingly unco ver these 'meeting places' of the general and the particular.