Progress in Human Geography27,4 (2003) PP

Progress in Human Geography27,4 (2003) PP. 475—485

Progress reports

Region and place: regional identity

in question

Anssi Paasi

Department ot Geography, Box 3000, 90014, University ot Oulu, Fin land

I Introduction

Identity, a term that was not yet included in Williams‘ important Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1976), has become a major watchword since the 1980s. Traditional territorialized battles over democracy, political status/citizenship and wealth have been complicated by the struggle over ‘race‘, ethnicity, multiculturalism, gender, sexuality, recognition and a new symbolic economy characterized by the production/marketing of images (Isin and Wood, 1999; du Gay et al., 2000; Lash and Featherstone, 2002). The identity discourse has emerged concomitantly with such arguments that the world, particularly the western world, is moving towards a ‘forced‘ individualization: people‘s lives are increasingly being left as their own responsibility. so that people shape their lives and environments through personal identities rather than through categorizations such as nationality, class, occupation or home region (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Contrary to previous arguments, however, people‘s awareness of being part of the global space of flows seems to have generated a search for new points of orientation, efforts to strengthen old boundaries and to create new ones, often based on identities of resistance (Castells, 1997; Meyer and Geschiere, 1999; Kellner, 2002). It is argued that collective action cannot occur without a distinction between ‘us‘ and the ‘other‘ (Della Porta and Diani, 1999) but identity movements do not always base their activities on difference as it may be strategically beneficial to stress similarities (Bernstein, 1997).

This report will review one specific part of the complicated identity discourse, the question of regional identity. Along with the tendencies depicted above, this old idea has gained new importance not only in geography but also in such fields as culturalIeconomic history, literature, anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology and musicology. I will first reflect the premises that geographers and others have associated with this mushrooming but rarely analytically discussed category, then map the conceptual gaps, and, finally, suggest some possible avenues for further research.

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476 Region and place

II Geography and the question of identity

The idea of regional identity has been implicit in geography for a long time, since traditional approaches to regions and regionalism often celebrated the primordial nature of regions, accentuating their ‘personality‘ and the harmony/unity between a region and its inhabitants. Regional narratives were typically accompanied by idyils and conservatism (Gilbert and Litt, 1960; Winks, 1983; Harvie, 1994). Regionai geographers were deeply involved in power-knowledge relations when creating bounded ‘orders‘ on the earth, fixed in apparently neutral maps and teXts that identified separate regions. While traditional exclusive, homogenizing regionai geography narratives have lost their validity in academic research (but not in geographical education), the respective ideological contexts of their production are now being scrutinized by the historians of geographicai ideas (Entrikin, 1991; 2002; Livingstone, 1992; Claval, 1998).

Regional and place identity and their meanings for peopie were important for humanistic geographers, and Relph (1976; see aiso Regional identitet, 1978) still provides one of the best analytical accounts of place identity, even though current views on region/place regard these as contested social constructs and processes (Paasi, 2002a). Critical and feminist geographers have reflected spatiaiity as part of identity formation: the politics of place are seen as crucial for class, gender, religious and ethnic relations and sexuality (Keith and Pile, 1993; Rose, 1995; Watts, 1996; Pile and Keith, 1997; McDowell, 1999), implying that people may have many contested identities — not as separate spheres of identity politics but constitutive of each other. For politicai geographers/IR scholars, identity is one key to understanding (ethno-)regionalism, nationalism and citizenship (Herb and Kaplan, 1999; McSweeney, 1999; Albert et al., 2001; Storey, 2001; Agnew, 2002; Painter, 2002).

Identities and differences are actualized in many ways on several (spatial) scales — not just as neat divisions — so that one site of the construction of difference can act as the unmarked background for another (Brah, 1996; Bell, 1999). Harvey (1993) suggests that localized identities, especially when conflated with race, gender, religious and class differentiation, are among the most dynamic bases for both progressive political mobilization and reactionary, exclusionary politics (cf. Pratt, 1999; Hamer, 2001; Mackenzie, 2002; Graham and Shirlow, 2002). Not only are places/place-based identities contested but aiso current views on what place or identity mean (Casey, 2001; Schatzki, 2001; Entrikin, 2001; Hooper, 2001; Staeheli, 2003).

Identity is a social process. Della Porta and Diani (1999) suggest that the notions that actors develop of themselves are continuously being confronted with images which other social actors (institutions, sympathetic/hostile groupings, public opinion and the media) produce of them. As Hall (1993: 135) states, ‘identity is formed at the unstabie point where the “unspeakable“ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture‘. The key question in understanding regionai identity is not how the individual and the social are integrated in space, but how can the sociospatial be conceptualized in the ‘production‘ of the individuai/collective and vice versa (cf. Michael, 1996). This ‘diaiectics‘ introduces action that stems from two intertwined contexts: ‘from above‘ in the form of territorial control/governance and ‘from below‘ in the form of territorial identification and resistance.

Anssi Paasi 477

III Re-invention of regional identity

EXpressions of regional identity are currently found au around the world. Whether or not regional ties motivate people into conflict with their respective state (often intersecting their affiliation to ‘nations‘), belonging to a region may raise a sense of identity that challenges the hegemonic identity narratives (cf. Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996:

109). Regional identity has been recognized as a key element in the making of regions as social/political spaces, but it is difficult to elucidate what this identity consists of and how it affects collective action/politics (Keating, 1998a; 1998b; 2001). The crucial question is how political passions are regionalized, and here institutions constitutive of region-building (economy, governance, language, media, literature) and inherent power relations are significant.

The burgeoning literature, academic coiiferences and thousands of web pages testify to the fact that regional identity is on the agenda in many ways. It can be a constitutive element of localized resistance to globalization (Castells, 1997) but the view of regional identities as constitutive/productive forces of economic and cultural/political practices and discourses is becoming increasingly typical all around the world. Politics, economics, culture and power come together in complicated ways, particularly in regionalist practices/discourses (Giordano, 2000; Tomaney and Ward, 2001; Keating, 2001). Regional identity has become particularly visible in the rhetoric on the Europe of Regions (Le Galés, 1998; Keating, 2001). Diverging regional development agencies and chambers of commerce have adopted this idea as a self-evident positive. The ‘Europe of Regions‘ refers to several NUTS levels and to cross-border regions, to the extent that ‘regional identity‘ seems not to be confined to any specific regional scale (Paasi, 2002b). ‘Region‘ means many things in this connection, varying from the deeply historical contexts of ethno-nationalism to the operation of economic institutions and administration and the regionalization of ad hoc spatial units for the purposes of governance (Gren, 2002). it is the task of critical research to reveal in each instance whether or not a narrative of ‘regional identity‘ means a conservative, fetished view of the ‘power of regions‘ as surpassing other forms of power in a regional context.

Narratives of regional identity lean on miscellaneous elements: ideas on nature, landscape, the built environment, culture/ethnicity, dialects, economic success/ recession, periphery/centre relations, marginalization, stereotypic images of a people/community, both of ‘us‘ and ‘them‘, actual/invented histories, utopias and diverging arguments on the identification of people. These elements are used conteXtually in practices, rituals and discourses to construct narratives of more or less closed, imagined identities. Scholars have recently referred to regional identities e.g. in folklore studies (Allen and Schlereth, 1990; Wrobel and Steiner, 2001; Robbins, 2001), in the analysis of political and/or goveriimental rhetoric (Tägil, 1999; Paasi, 2002b; Gren, 2002; Painter, 2002), and in the memory and place promotion/heritage business (Crang, 1999; Bialasiewicz, 2002; 2003). While many studies map the internal processes of regional identity building, some have also analysed the ‘stretching‘ of identities to several spatial scales in response to the forces of globalization (Nijman, 1999; Sletto, 2002; Cuayton, 2002; Cartier, 2001). The contexts of narratives of identity thus vary from the regimes of power and ideologies that come ‘from above‘ to local actions of citizens and forms of resistance. The role of regional identity has been noted as a precondition for multilevel citizenship (Painter, 2002; Entrikin, 2002). Regional identity has also been

478 Region and place

seen as an important tool — laden with social and productive magic — in regional

planning and development (Amdam, 2002; Haartsen et al., 2000; Raagmaa, 2002).

IV Regional identity — the identity of a region: conceptual clarification

‘Regional identity‘ is, in a way, an interpretation of the process through which a region

becomes institutionalized, a process consisting of the production of territorial

boundaries, symbolism and institutions. This process concomitantly gives rise to, and

is conditioned by, the discourses/practices/rituals that draw on boundaries, symbols

and institutional practices. While practice and discourse are the media by which the

structural and experiental dimensions of the process are brought together, it is useful to

distinguish analytically between the identity of a region and the regional identity (or

regional consciousness) of the people living in it or outside of it (Paasi, 1991). The

former points to those features of nature, culture and people that are used in the

discourses and classifications of science, politics, cultural activism, regional marketing,

governance and political or religious regionalization to distinguish one region from

others. These classifications are always acts of power performed in order to delimit,

name and symbolize space and groups of people. Regional consciousness points to the

multiscalar identification of people with those institutional practices, discourses and

symbolisms that are eXpressive of the ‘structures of eXpectations‘ that become institu-

tionalized as parts of the process that we call a ‘region‘.

Regional consciousness is an old idea (Morgan, 1939; Dickinson, 1970) that gained

new ground in the 1980s in German geography, drawing on both the rich German social

theory and conventional survey-based approaches (Pohl, 1993). Some German scholars

regarded it as an archaic, irrelevant phenomenon and noted that these studies would

only provide politicians with instruments for the manipulation of the citizenry (see the

review by Jordan, 1996). In fact, the latter comment reveals why it is crucial to study

critically the narratives of regional identity and their presuppositions with regard to

‘regional consciousness‘, especially as this theme is currently gaining importance all

over the world.

The question of regional identification implies two intertwined contexts: cultural-

historical and political-economic. Political ideologies and regionalism/nationalism do

not themselves produce identification, for the latter comes — and here culture and

history enter the stage — only if ‘it interprets and provides an appropriate attitude for

an experienced reality‘ (Bloom, 1990: 52). This eXperience, Bloom notes, may be

politically manipulated but any symbol/ideology without a relevant eXperience is

meaningless and impotent in terms of evoking identification. Social psychologists in

particular have emphasized the motivational dimensions of identity processes (Hogg,

2000). One basis for (regional) identities is that they eXist as forms of social and cultural

practice, discourse and action, not as abstract slogans.

Regional identity as the ‘identity of a region‘ or as a supposed combination of this

identity and ‘regional consciousness‘ has become a very popular, clearly international

topic in cultural, political and economic geography. Scholars have traced cultural-

historical processes in specific regions (Brace, 1999; Crang, 1999; Oakes, 2000; Yorgason,

2002; Alvarez, 2002) and have at times been eXplicitly interested in the globalizing

economy and the regional ‘responses‘ to it (Cartier, 2001; Sletto, 2002). Research has aiso

Anssi Paasi 479

been carried out in urban and rurai conteXts (Haartsen et al., 2000; Van Houtum and Lagendijk, 2001; van Langevelde and Pellenbarg, 2001). Studies on regional identity have been rare in the UK (Brace, 1999; MacLeod and Jones, 2001) but, following the devolution of power to the regionai level, geographers have taken to studying regionalism (Casey, 2002; Regional Studies, 2002), aithough predominantiy from an economic perspective. Hudson (2001) nevertheless shows how a territorial basis and spatial identities are cruciai for the organization of production, work and spatiai divisions of labour: not only are places provided with identities but they can aiso provide a basis through which peopie form their own identities (cf. Allen et al., 1998). Recent studies carried out in Scotland (Clayton, 2002) and Wales (Jones, 2000; 2001; Harvey et al., 2002) have paid more attention to culture and to mapping combined regional and national identities.

Martin (2000: 79) notes that, whiie institutionalist approaches are important in economic geography, concepts such as institution, institutional thickness, social embeddedness or governance are still ‘under construction‘ (cf. Mackinnon et al., 2002). Regional identity is doubtless part of this conceptual apparatus. All these categories are constitutive/eXpressive of what Bourdieu (1998) labeis as the economy of symbolic exchange, which implies a specific deference, a relation that converts power relations into moral ones as it is through this transformation that power relations become reproduced as systems of trust. Regional identity may also be used in the rhetoric/activities of the business coalitions that constitute new governance frameworks crossing politicai jurisdictions, even national borders (Kanter, 2000). Representations of regional identity may also be used as symbolic/material commodities for the purposes of regional marketing (Crang, 1999; Bialasiewicz, 2002).

V Who needs regional identity? Methodological problems

Collective identity is not out there, waiting to be discovered. What is dout there‘ is identity discourse on the part of political leaders, intellectuals and countless others, who engage In the process of constructing, negotiating, manipulating or affirming a response to the demand — at times urgent, mostly absent — for a collective image. (McSweeney, 1999: 77—78)

At a personal level regional identity/consciousness provides an answer to the question ‘where do I belong?‘. This answer is based on a personal/family spatial history, which is rarely bound to one specific region (Paasi, 2002b). The answer to the question of where ‘we‘ belong raises the problem depicted by McSweeney: classification and power. As Bourdieu (1991: 221) has suggested: ‘Struggles over ethnic or regional identity. . . are a particular case of different struggles over ciassifications, struggles over the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world . . . to make and unmake groups.‘

It is no surprise if politicians, entrepreneurs or journalists using regional identity for their own purposes do not provide any systematic analysis of the political-ideologicai or other meanings of the idea. Some geographers have conceptualized the dimensions of regional identity (Weichhart, 1990; Dirven et al., 1993; Werlen, 1993; Wollersheim et al., 1998; Le Bosse, 1999; Paasi, 2002b), but, to sum up much of recent work, region, regional identity and the links between the two are rareiy problematized in research.

480 Region and place

One major difficulty is that writing and talking about regional identity creates concomitantiy a content and an agenda for understanding it: narratives on regional/‘our‘ identity become constituents of the interpretations of what identity is and what it means. Bourdieu (1999: 31) aptly notes how ‘words produce things, create fancies, fears, phobias or simply wrong images‘, and ‘naming is showing, creating, bringing into existence‘. This emerges from the fact that human knowledge is based on classification, and identification is basic to classification (Jenkins, 2000). Claims that one has defined an identity are aiso ciaims that one has suggested a classification, established a set of values and even made a moral judgment (Bourdieu, 1991). No wonder that language and dialects are often key discursive ‘battiefields‘ in national and regional identity narratives and identities of resistance (Knox, 2001; Harvey et al., 2002). This means that, as forms of classification, interpretations of ‘regions‘ and regional identities are deeply political categories.

Another problem is the often implicit supposition that regional identity is ultimately an empirically existing phenomenon in a given region that can be adequately analysed by using a specific body of research material, possibly survey data on identification (as Euro-barometers do — but not on a regional or local scale; cf. Painter, 2002) or material such as regional novels, paintings, poems, folklore, media texts, films, advertisements or various elements of material or symbolic landscapes that ‘represent‘ a region — either separately or together. The result is often a narrow empirical analysis that becomes equivalent to regional identity itself, and may even essentialize it.

One more problem is that regional identity, when understood as idenhfication, often implies the assumption of homology between a portion of space, a group of people and a ‘culture‘ to form a homogeneous conintunity covering a particular bounded territory. This harks back to the tendency to associate geographical concepts with a primordial ethnos rather than a more cosmopolitan demos (Entrikin, 2002). The notion of demos claims to reflect the ‘regional‘ in a broader constellation of identifications and raises the question of boundaries, since identity is often associated with boundaries and narratives that imply an opposition to the Other. Claims to ‘anti-essentialize‘ the assumption regarding bounded identity spaces have been put forward (Pratt, 1999; Rose, 1995; Massey, 1995; Entrikin, 2002), since identities are often imagined in terms of boundedness and containment (Morley and Robbins, 1995), and this is a questionable matter in the mobile world (Paasi, 2002a).

The idea of ‘borderlands‘ has emerged in debates on identities that do not fit neatly into the master narratives Of ethnicity, ‘race‘ or nation (Isin and Wood, 1999), particularly in the case of the US-Mexican border (Andreas, 2000; Herzog, 2000; Vila, 2000), but aiso in relation to European borderlands (Dürrschmidt, 2002; Kaplan and Häkli, 2002; Space and Polity, 2002). Current cross-border regions are often units that have emerged rapidly from the desks of planners, politicians and business coalitions (Kanter, 2000; Gren, 2002), not from long historical regionalization processes and the daily struggles of citizens. A fitting illustration is Midt-Norden, a ‘region‘ extending from Norway to Sweden and Finland, fairly unknown to ordinary people, and which does not have any real political, cultural or economic meaning. A more realistic case is Oresund, a cross- border area based on the ‘open space‘ that emerged along with the new bridge between Sweden and Denmark. Both ‘regions‘ have raised the question of the future and rescaling of regional identities (Lysgrd, 2001; Bucken-Knapp, 2002; Berg et al., 2002; Ek, 2003).