The stated priority of the European Union is to "re-establish the economic unity of artificially divided geographical entities" (Directorate General for Regional Policy, Europe 2000: Outlook for the Development of the Community's Territory, 1991, p. 34). This makes the region and not the state the target of EU equalization grants (the European Regional Development Funds). For instance, Ireland (both North and South) is considered one region for EU planning purposes because other approaches do not make geographic or economic sense. Ireland is a single island whose basins, forests, lakes, fisheries, lines of communication, and even tourist attractions do not fall neatly on either side of the imposed political border that divides the Republic from the North. Thus, EU funds are being used to improve north to south communications, transport links, telecommunications, and energy distribution facilities. One EU funded project is uniting the transborder lakes of the Shannon-Erne basin by a series of canals.

State political boundaries are more often the product of treaties in the aftermath of war than the logical units of economic life. In a wider Europe without state boundaries, the logic of geographical economics would have Cornwall directly involved in Atlantic trade, rather than economically marginalized by shipping raw materials by train to London-based manufacturers. Similarly, hegemony rather than logical geography dictates that Skäneland should abandon its natural trade routes direct to adjacent Denmark and Germany, in order to service an ill-situated manufacturing center hundreds of miles to the north at Stockholm. EU-facilitated cross-frontier cooperation often corresponds with past geographies that were prosperous for old nations before they became tied to hegemonic cores that disrupted trade patterns. Two examples of this geography are found in the Atlantic and Mediterranean Arcs that connect nations like Cornwall, Brittany, Aquitaine, and Galicia or Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Provence (see map above).

Europe's Fourth World has other allies besides Brussels. First, a 1992 Eurobarometer survey carried out by the European Commission found that eighty-seven percent of the European people surveyed in 12-member states felt either strongly or fairly strongly attached to their regions. Furthermore, 76% of those surveyed thought that regions should be actively represented in Community decision making. Second, the Europe of Regions also wins the support of powerful business interests. International capital is increasingly less concerned with state boundaries. Businesses seldom base their investment decisions on the attributes of "Belgium," but rather of Wallonia or Flanders; not "Germany" but rather Baden-Wurttemberg; and not "Spain" but rather Catalunya.

State officials are naturally resistant to any trends or organized activity that might usurp state powers. For this reason, most unitary states reject a deeper, more federal Europe and support a wider, looser arrangement (a club of states). This kind of vision for Europe leaves small nations and regions stagnated politically and economically by centralist states, and their cultures smothered by the same Jacobin tendencies that built the present system.

Arguably, unitary states could win this geopolitical struggle. This would result in a Brussels bureaucracy without teeth and continuous petty squabbling between sovereign states. There has already been a collapse of attempts at monetary union and the watering down of nearly all substantial agreements to allow "opt outs" for states protecting their sovereignty. It was within such conditions that Denmark was admitted to the European Union in 1993.

The geopolitics of Europe has returned to a period of decentralization, after two centures or more of state-building, because attempts to deliberately foster a state consciousness within the entire populace have usually backfired (the example of Yugoslavia is only the most egregious). The violence associated with genocide, ethnocide, forced removal and colonization resides in the cultural memory of surviving nation peoples. Children learn from their parents about their proud heritage, and thus nations endure. The sheer persistence of old nations presents a geopolitical challenge to state policies of assimilation.

States will tend to break down (to federate) or to break up (as two or more nations emerge from one state) before nations will assimilate. Slovenia, for example, became independent in 1993, after 1247 years of occupation by various states that no longer exist, including the Empire of the Franks, Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and finally Yugoslavia. The idea of a united federal Europe is partly a response to the hope for a stable political structure in which more tragedies like Yugoslavia need not unfold.

European Union is also a response to the challenges posed by a world economy, global communications, the illegal drug and arms trade, transborder pollution, and a common defense. States are simply too small to handle such big problems, and their sovereignty has become perforated by modern technology. Thus, the demand for local control has equal footing with the demand for European levels of organization, and each foot awkwardly straddles an anachronism: the state form of organization. Old nations long suffering from accusations of "atavistic nationalism" have turned the tables on their accusers. Fourth World nations are organized around a theme of European unity, while states attempt to maintain old political boundaries that are being challenged by global forces.

These strains on the state structure could result in the gradual "withering" of the modern state as the dominant form of political organization, just as the development of the state resulted in the decline of feudalism. This is a transgenerational project, however. The more predictable short term result of this entanglement of geopolitical forces will be a messy overlapping of authority between nations, states, and the European Union. Competing interpretations of subsidiarity will cause some power to fall to the regions through the EU framework. If too many decisions fall to individual states, there is no guarantee that EU policies based on the region will be effective. On the other hand, a replicated middle tier of government (the state) will mire the EU in layers of bureaucracy and hamper its efforts to revitalize the European economy through opening borders to eliminate obstructions to trade.

In the environment that will be created by the international norms embodied in the Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the regions and nations of Europe will find their aspirations reflected globally. Similarly, for indigenous peoples and nations struggling for recognition and protection in other parts of the world, the developments of the Europe of Regions offer a clear example of what ought to be considered a rational solution to state-nation conflict.

Fourth World Bulletin • July 1994

Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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