The utopia of cross-border regions : territorial transformation and cross-border governance on Espace Mont-Blanc

Abstract

The theories on globalisation, internationalisation, post-nationalism or trans-nationalism dismiss the concept of 'territoriality' within the paradigm of the beyond the 'nation-state' sovereignty. In this work, a diverse idea is sustained: borders and territoriality are not just lost terms within the post-national state prospective. Europeanization offers the occasion for an inquiry on the institutional transformation in territorial policy-making towards the change of the public action 'at' and 'across' the nation-state borders. Cross-border cooperation policies are devices of this alteration. Contemporary processes of modernisation include cross-border regionalism within the innovation of the European territorial policy-making. Espace Mont-Blanc (EMB) case study consists in an informal attempt in cross-border regionalism between Switzerland, Italy and France and on the slopes of Mont-Blanc Mountain (MB). EMB is an alternative to a policy planned by the central governmental settings for the introduction of an inter-national Park. EMB opens a diverse way of interaction between separated existing settings at the MB nation-state border as a 'local' and 'territorial' alternative form of governance in face at more centralised motions. EMB reproduces outcomes in a path of institutionalisation in cross-border regionalism linking discursively policies, urgencies and necessities in problem solving - environment/transportations- that occur time to time within a contingency of events. Spheres of consequential 'public' in cross-border governance perspectives conclude that the MB nation-state border is an open visual for a discursive domain where space is like a continue phase of 'politicising'. This suggests the main hypothesis of this work: cross-border regionalism results as change in public action at nation-state borders towards relational democratic patterns of governance. Transgressing the state-centric territorial domain in decision-making, cross-border regionalism entails a kind of 'territoriality', which no longer corresponds to exclusive accounts of well-nested power hierarchies. In the context of the European trans-national policy, networked forms of governance represent a cultural turn in modernisation of social space reproduction. Cross-border regionalism is a form of democratic deliberation and a 'territorial' utopia. It concerns a critical model of our modernity, which urges to be investigated according to a different nexus in the modern continuity between political space and territoriality