14
PAR ADIPLOM AC Y IN ACTION
REGIONS AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
[5
Paradiplomacy, while for the most part unspectacular, does represent an important and new dimension both to regionalism and to international relations, further evidence of the breakdown of the distinction between domestic and international affairs and between national and regional matters. As political leaders and publics are able increasingly to adopt multiple identities and roles in different contexts, they are more able to span the old state-international divide. Policy making is increasingly a matter of complex networks that cannot be contained neatly within political institutions, spanning both the public and private divide and international borders. It becomes more important, therefore, for politicians and officials to be able to operate in different arenas, and to link up powers, resources and opportunities found among them. This does not in itself imply that regions will become more important. There are many territorial and sectoral interests seeking expression in the international arena. The very forces of globalization that are drawing regions into the international arena may serve to disarticulate the region as a system of action, as different elements are drawn differentially into distinct global networks. Links between sectoral and territorial lobbies may be broken. Even local business interests may, as they are drawn into the global market, lose their territorial identity, while the neo-corporatist connections that underlie, for example, the Quebec model of development, may be under strain in the global market place. Regions will only be important to the extent that they have institutions and leadership capable of arriving at a definition of the regional interest, articulating this and devising policies to pursue it. This capacity varies, so that in some cases we find powerful regional governments pursuing a defined interest; in others there are competing versions of the territorial interest, often pitching a development coalition based on the region against one focused on a big city or metropolitan area;8 in other cases again, there is no articulated territorial interest. So, for all the functionalist determinism of observers like Ohmae (1995), it is politics that ultimately counts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This paper was written while I was visiting scholar the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center at Bellagio, Italy, in August 1997.
NOTES
I do not refer here to the 'Westphalian state' since I do not share the view that the present state system dates from 1648. The only European state to retain its Westphalian borders in 1997 is Portugal. The state system as we know is it largely the product of the second half of the nineteenth century and of the Versailles settlement of 1919. For a historical critique of the Westphalian fallacy, see Osiander (1994). The reason for emphasizing this point is to stress that state borders have long been permeable in many respects, and remained so until
the First World War and the collapse of the international trading system in the 1930s.
2. I use this term rather loosely to avoid entering the scholastic debate on the existence or meaning of 'international regimes.'
3. This type of ignorance is not confined to large states. Many Catalans and Basques, including nationalists, are insensitive to the multinational nature of the United Kingdom, referring to it as 'England.'
4. Effectively this means minority nations, but this terminology is not used. The concept also includes independent states which are small nations, such as Ireland and Denmark.
5. Each claims to be the most advanced region within its own state but, on a European scale, there are big differences between Baden-WUrttemberg and Catalonia.
6. Information is an important power resource here. In one set of interviews, French local officials revealed that, deprived of information by Paris, they went to their Flemish colleagues, who are in a more powerful position, and obtained the data from them.
7. Jordi Pujol has said that Catalonia has 'una presencia internacionál, y no digo una politica exterior; me gustaria que quedara clara esta precision', El Pais, 15 Dec. 1993.
8. For example, the rivalry between the Generalität of Catalonia and the city of Barcelona (Morata, 1996).
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