Organizing european space

Description

This book combines perspectives from political science, history and geography to provide a comprehensive introduction to Europe or European space as we understand it today. Central to the book is the phenomenon of the sovereign state and the question of alternative ways of organizing Europe politically and economically. The book explores four different ways of organizing space: state, union, region and network. By tracing the origins of the sovereign state in Europe, the book first reviews the resilience and adaptability of the sovereign state historically, and then looks at the implications of the contradictory processes of integration and fragmentation, or globalization and regionalization, present today. A key concept developed throughout the book is that of networks, especially with respect to the European Union, and the relationship between regions, networks and cities, a relationship long traditional to Europes political organization.The authors review critically popular notions of a Europe of regions