The Political Economy of Scale and the Construction of Cross-Border Micro-Regions

Abstract

The construction of cross-border regions (CBRs) as an example of microregionalism is best related to the more general rescaling of economic, political, and social processes. For CBRs both respond and contribute to the ‘relativization of scale’ associated since the early 1980s with the decline in the relative structured coherence among national economy, national state, and national society that had characterized the heyday of the post-war boom. The crisis of the post-war mode of economic growth in the advanced capitalist economies, the end of the ‘Second Cold War’, the rise of global neoliberalism, the breakup of the Soviet Bloc, China’s ‘opening’ to foreign capital, and the growing number of so-called failed states have all contributed to this relativization of scale. This is reflected in a proliferation of scales on which attempts occur to restructure economic, political, and social relations — ranging from policies to promote economic globalization, global governance, and global culture through various forms of mega-, macro-, and meso-regionalism to concerns with micro-regional economies, local community empowerment, and ‘tribal’ identities. This chapter explores some of the processes and strategies linked to the emergence and consolidation of CBRs and comments on their significance for economic and political restructuring.

This chapter is a revised version of Jessop (2002). It has benefited from comments provided by Neil Brenner, Martin Jones, Markus Perkmann, Ngai-Ling Sum, and Fredrik Söderbaum.