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The international activities of regions have attracted considerable political
and scholarly attention in recent years. This has perhaps been most notable
in Europe, where the protagonism of regions within the EU and the alliances
among regions have generated a substantial literature, but the phenomenon
has also marked federal states such as the USA, Australia and Canada. The
motives, strategies and resources of substate governments in the
international arena differ considerably, as the contributions to this volume
show. So do the responses of sovereign states to what many of them still
regard as an intrusion into their exclusive domain.
This activity is not new, as several of the contributions show, yet its
resurgence in the late twentieth century is normally attributed to the effects
of globalization and the rise of continental trading regimes such as the
European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFfA). These have served to erode the old distinction between domestic
and international affairs and focused attention on the need for regions and
cities to position themselves for global competition. From this perspective,
there is a strong functional logic in regions' external projection, which is
related to economic needs, to the spillover of their domestic competences
into the international arena and in some cases to the need to manage ethnic
or nationalist conflicts at their borders, with the security issues that these
pose. Yet functionalism itself does not explain everything and we need to
add political explanations derived from the goals and strategies of substate
elites, building or promoting their region or, in some cases, preparing the
way for national independence.
Responses on the part of national states also differ. In general it would be
reasonable to say that states do not welcome the intrusion of subs tate actors
into an area which is traditionally their reserved domain. Some see any
external representation of regions as a threat to national sovereignty and
integrity. On the other hand, state foreign policy has itself been transformed
away from classical diplomacy and foreign ministries have themselves lost
their monopoly of external action as large areas of domestic policy have been
internationalized. States are therefore learning to live with a new dispensation
in which they share roles with their regions and need to co-operate abroad. In
some cases, matters are more sensitive than others, and a variety of patterns
of conflict and co-operation emerge from the contributions. |