Abstract
Reviewed by: Caitlin E. Murdock, California State University, Long Beach, USA
Regions and regionalism have received substantial attention from scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe since the 1990s. Whereas regional identification was once dismissed as a pre-modern holdover, work in the last two decades tends to see it as a modern phenomenon akin to, or even part of, nationalization and nationalism. Joost Augusteijn and Eric Storm’s edited volume aims to do two things: first to provide an overview of recent research on regionalism and regional separatism; and second, to use a comparative approach in order to challenge existing (mis)conceptions and introduce new approaches to the study of regions and regionalism.
Scholars of regions and regionalism have defined their subject in a variety of ways – including everything from sub-state territories, to cross-border communities, to ‘regions’ that stretch across Europe. For this volume, the editors focus their attention on sub-state regions and on Southern, Western and Central Europe where, in contrast to Eastern Europe, ‘presumably the creation of strong unitary nation-states prevented the emergence of strong regional movements’ (2). They embrace Xosé-Manoel Núñez’s distinction between nations and nationalism that seek territorial sovereignty, and regions and regionalism that make fewer historical and political claims. And, in keeping with Eric Storm’s essay in the volume, the editors suggest that regionalism should be seen as a modern transnational phenomenon, which blossomed between 1890 and 1914.
The focus on sub-state regions helps define the volume’s concentration on the relationships of regions to their larger states. Essays by Timothy Baycroft, Stefano Cavazza, Siegfried Weichlein and Peter Haslinger, about France, Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary respectively, show that state political and administrative structures were critical to shaping regional identities in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, Peter Haslinger’s study of Austria-Hungary and Maarten Van Ginderachter’s study of Belgium show that central governments did not necessarily produce a single kind of regional or national movement in their peripheries. Further, although the book, like the historiography generally, tends to be most interested in how regions relate to nation-states, several essays explore regionalism in Imperial contexts. For example, in his essay on nineteenth-century Spain, Josep Fradera argues that a failed liberal project to integrate both Iberian regions and overseas territories into a unified Spanish national idea had the unintended consequence of spurring regional identity in Spain.
The volume is strongest in providing a sample of recent work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sub-state regions and regionalism. Although the book defines multinational Eastern Europe as outside its purview, it includes chapters on Austria-Hungary and Prussian Silesia, giving readers a glimpse of a historiography in which studies of regionalism have been especially innovative and influential. It also highlights the ways in which writing about regionalism often differ by national case – showing, for instance, that French and Italian studies have engaged in debates about decentralization, whereas scholars of Germany have concentrated on the importance of federalism and of regional identity formation.
The book’s attempt to draw a clear distinction between regional and national movements is somewhat less successful. Since the 1990s, historians have contested old assumptions that national identities replaced regional ones, showing in the process that the two were often interconnected. But although Celia Applegate has argued that we should examine regions in their own right, rather than in reference to nations, this volume does not offer a clear model for doing so. Further, several of the contributors resist the distinction the volume draws between regions and nations. Maarten Van Ginderachter, writing about Belgium and Goffe Jensma, writing about Dutch and Frisian identity, both argue that the distinction between regional and national identity is blurry at best. Further, some of the case studies seem to contradict the distinction outright. Joost Augusteijn argues that Irish identity should be understood as regionalism rather than nationalism. But although he makes a reasonable argument that demands for Home Rule were about political modernization rather than nationalism, the question remains of how to distinguish regionalism and nationalism if regionalists make apparently nationalist demands. Conversely, Andrew Newby argues that although Scotland (in contrast to Ireland) did not demand political sovereignty in the nineteenth century, Scottish identity should be seen as regionalized nationalism because the Scots entered the Union voluntarily and were well on their way to fulfilling Miroslav Hroch’s stages of national development.
Overall, this volume offers a useful introduction to the range of approaches that historians of modern Europe take to sub-state regionalism, as well as to the different roles that modern regional identities have played in European states and Empires. It makes clear that modernizing states and economies produced regionalism in a variety of ways and in a diversity of places. Regionalism may, as the editors argue, have been a transnational phenomenon. But the consequences varied dramatically – contributing to state and national integration in some places, while producing separatism in others.